I have to tell you about the rabbit hole I've been living in.
But before we get to that, some backstory. I've always loved words. Playing with language, finding the right phrase, the sentence that lands exactly right? The best. At the same time, you all know I'm visual. Embarrassingly visual. And there's always been this gap between what's in my imagination and what I could actually show anyone, and that gap has always been called "Paige can't draw to save her life."
Writing has never been the hard thing. What felt hard, for a long time, was the leap into writing fiction. There's something about the blank page and an invented world that was just... daunting. I kept not starting.
What AI image generation did for me — and I want to be precise about this — wasn't make me want to write. I already wanted to write. What it did was make starting feel possible. I could imagine something, generate it, see it, and then write toward a thing that already existed rather than conjuring it from nothing. The images gave me a handhold. One day, about a year ago, I just... started, and here we are.
A year later I'm confident enough to write first and illustrate after, which feels like genuine progress. But when I'm stuck, when the words aren't coming and the well feels dry, I still retreat to generating images, letting my brain find something to chase. It works most of the time. Annoyingly well, honestly.
Which brings me to the current situation, which is that about a week ago Gemini rolled out Nano Banana 2 and I have now lost countless hours playing with it.
Character consistency across multiple generations — the same face, same presence, same person further along their transformation journey — has always been the most difficult part of using images in my stories. But with this new model, it's suddenly working in a way it never quite has before. For this genre, that's not a minor thing. The arc of a gradually changing a body while retaining the same person underneath is the whole point.
So I've been exploring these new tools and consistency is suddenly... actually working? I generated the same character across a sequence and she stayed herself. I may have made an undignified noise.
And I've been making comics, which I did not see coming. I will never be an artist, and I don't pretend that what I'm making is up there with what the best human artists can do. But with these tools I can generate whatever I can see in my head, and lately what I've been seeing is little narrative strips.
Here's one I'm calling The Life of a Showgirl. (click to enlarge!)
The final panel makes me happy every single time.
The new novel is a little behind, for reasons that should now be obvious. I'm filing this under "process" and choosing not to feel guilty about it (she said, a little guiltily).
More soon. There's a lot cooking.
xoxo, Paige