There is a particular pleasure in giving something that exists only in your imagination a place in the world.
An idea becomes a character.
The character begins with a few recognizable qualities, perhaps a name, an appearance or some peculiar behaviour that makes them interesting.
Then they acquire a history.
They develop relationships, habits, opinions and ways of approaching the unfamiliar.
Eventually, I find myself considering what they might do in situations I had never imagined when I first created them.
I enjoy that process enormously.
I can return to the character, discover something new and give that discovery a form I can explore again.
Sometimes what I discover is that the original idea was terrible.
That is part of the pleasure too, although I may be less enthusiastic about it while attempting to repair several chapters.
Long before the books
I have been creating things for much of my life.
When I was younger, I enjoyed inventing worlds and situations as a Dungeon Master. I experimented with fantasy, imagined games, developed software and entertained ideas for interactive experiences that might one day exist beyond my own thoughts.
Some of those ideas became real projects.
Others remained unfinished.
A few were probably considerably better as ideas.
I rarely needed to decide whether what I was doing was art.
The experience of creating was enough to make me want to continue.
Max Aura Dungeon eventually became my first published work of fiction, but publishing did not create that interest.
It gave one part of it a form that other people could encounter.
The most enjoyable part had already been happening for years.
When an idea becomes something else
An imagined world is wonderfully accommodating before I begin giving it details.
Everything can remain possible.
A character can be interesting without ever having to do anything. A strange location can seem mysterious without possessing a single explanation. An ambitious story can remain perfectly coherent while it exists as a collection of impressions inside my head.
Writing changes that.
The moment I begin deciding what actually happens, possibilities start interfering with one another.
A character’s behaviour may contradict something I established earlier.
A wonderful revelation may destroy the significance of a scene I wanted to preserve.
Something I imagined as a minor detail may turn out to be more interesting than the direction I originally planned.
I can spend a considerable amount of time following an idea, only to discover that the work becomes better when I remove it.
Those moments can be frustrating.
They can also be deeply satisfying.
I enjoy discovering what an idea becomes when it is forced to exist alongside everything else I have created.
The process allows me to move back and forth between imagination and something more concrete.
I can return to the words, challenge them, change them and see whether the result brings me closer to the experience I want.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes it takes me somewhere unexpected.
The freedom to explore
Fiction gives me room to explore things I find interesting, troubling, amusing or difficult to understand.
I can invent a person whose choices make perfect sense to them and seem appalling to everyone around them.
I can create situations in which nobody has a comfortable solution.
I can let a ridiculous idea develop consequences that gradually make the original joke less funny.
I particularly enjoy the friction that appears when different people confront the same circumstances through different experiences, values and expectations.
The choices they make can reveal things that a description of their personalities never could.
These are possibilities I can explore through fiction without requiring every character to represent something I believe.
An imagined person can disagree with me.
They can be mistaken, selfish, generous, frightened, cruel or unexpectedly kind.
Their choices can remain uncomfortable after the scene ends.
There is freedom in allowing a story to explore those tensions without turning every encounter into a lesson.
Sometimes I discover that I have stronger feelings about a situation than I expected.
Sometimes I become less certain about something I thought I understood.
And sometimes the entire experience is entertaining because a character has made a truly spectacular mistake.
That is enough reason to explore it.
Creating with AI
Artificial intelligence became part of how I developed Max Aura Dungeon.
It allowed me to turn ideas into scenes, explore alternatives and reconsider possibilities in ways that were previously much harder to pursue.
I could encounter a draft, recognize something worth developing and begin changing it.
I could also discover that a passage had completely misunderstood the character or the situation.
I have spent a great deal of time working through those differences.
A scene may be technically polished and still fail to convey what I wanted. Dialogue may sound natural while making the person speaking feel like someone else.
At other times, the generated material reveals a possibility that changes my own understanding of the story.
That has been one of the interesting parts of the experience.
I can begin with a fairly clear intention and discover, while working, that there is another direction I would rather pursue.
The process involves imagination, choices, reconsideration, rejection and discovery.
AI has contributed to producing the words, and I see no reason to conceal that.
But the technology is only one part of the experience I have had while developing the books.
Much of what matters to me takes place when I am considering what those words might become.
Everything I have encountered
I have been shaped by other people’s creations throughout my life.
Stories, music, games, films and conversations have introduced me to possibilities I might never have imagined independently.
Some experiences stayed with me for years.
Others were simply enjoyable for the time I spent with them.
Many have probably influenced me without leaving a memory I could identify.
I have encountered imagined worlds that gave me somewhere extraordinary to spend an evening.
I have met fictional characters who helped me understand unfamiliar perspectives.
And I have experienced things through stories that became part of how I think about the world, even though the events themselves never happened.
That accumulation matters.
I am, among many other things, a result of the experiences I have had and the stories I have encountered.
What I create grows from that.
The influences become mixed with my own memories, interests, humour, questions and imagination.
Some remain recognizable. Others have changed so much that I could never trace them back to their origins.
I enjoy thinking about the enormous number of people who have contributed something to that process.
Most of them have never known me.
They simply made something available, and at some point it became part of my experience of being alive.
Why share?
The pleasure of creating does not depend on somebody else enjoying the result.
I would still want to explore these worlds if the books remained entirely private.
But making them available gives the work another possibility.
I can contribute something to the vast collection of stories, ideas and experiences that people share with one another.
So much of what I carry with me began in someone else’s imagination.
By sharing Max Aura Dungeon, I offer something of my own in return.
The books are a condensation of selected parts of my imagination, experiences, curiosities and uncertainties.
They are personal without being a direct account of my life.
They contain things that interest me, things I find ridiculous, questions I have not resolved and possibilities I enjoy exploring.
Another person may encounter something meaningful in them.
They might laugh at a character, reconsider a situation or recognize an emotion in a place they never expected to find it.
They may enjoy the adventure and forget most of it afterward.
They might find nothing they wish to keep.
All of those possibilities belong to the person reading.
I am offering an experience, not assigning one.
There is something wonderful about the possibility that a small part of what I have imagined could become one of the countless things another person has encountered during their own life.
Whether it influences them is entirely up to them.
And I need never know.
Art from me, for me, and to me
Over the course of writing these essays, I have considered several different ways of understanding art.
Some emphasize skill and intention. Others place greater weight on expression, experience, cultural context or the relationship between a work and the people who encounter it.
They have challenged different parts of how I think about creativity.
I have found that useful.
But the reason I call Max Aura Dungeon art remains closely connected to what I experience while creating it.
I am giving form to imagined worlds, thoughts, feelings and possibilities.
I am arranging parts of my inner life into something that can exist beyond the moment in which I imagined it.
The work changes as I develop it, and sometimes it changes how I understand the original idea.
I consider that an artistic process.
The word matters to me because it expresses something about the nature of the activity, not because I expect it to confer prestige on the result.
People are free to disagree about the classification, the literary quality and the methods involved in creating the books.
Those conversations can be interesting in their own right.
But they do not determine whether I find the process meaningful.
These stories are art from me, for me, and to me.
And with genuine pleasure, I make them available to anyone who would like to encounter them.
A small part of my imagination, carefully given form and placed among the many things people have shared with the world.
The book is there.
What happens when someone opens it belongs to them.