The Author

I’m Roselle, creator of Jade’s Notebook of Spells. I grew up in the ‘90s and early 2000s, and I’m a bit nostalgic for them. This quirky and whimsical creation of mine was inspired by Amelia’s Notebook and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I just couldn’t stop myself from making something that combines both.

Jade isn’t just an intangible person in my head, though. She’s also a custom American Girl doll!

Originally, her story was supposed to be in novel form, but novel-writing is a thing of the past for me. I don’t care about what’s currently marketable, and I don’t want to turn a fun little hobby into a job I hate. Plus, I prefer to do more than just write.

The plot didn’t really change, however: Jade’s ultimate goal is to finish her deceased father’s work that entails giving magic to (deserving) mortals, starting with her best friend.

I also write fairy tales and fanfiction. Not that either will make you think I’m any less weird. (No, really. You have been warned.)

Credits & Disclosure

The moment I saw this layout, I was compelled to stay up all night tweaking it to fit Jade’s whimsigothic vision. For the collages, I mostly use Canva and sometimes Bing Image Creator (and locally run Stable Diffusion will be used in future entries). I make edits with Canva’s Magic Eraser tool and Krita. On the rare occasion I will draw from scratch, as I prefer working with pre-existing and generated images for this project.

My views on generative AI are nuanced. I believe spam, deepfakes, algorithmic bias, corporate greed, and autonomous weapons are far more pressing issues than IP theft, shortcutting, laziness, and “soul.” Microsoft has a ton of guardrails on its image generator and allows living artists to opt out, and the effects of AI on the environment are not what you think.

The AI images used were not just made out of convenience. Jade has the magic to conjure pictures and she enjoys collaging them. Collage is a recognized medium that doesn’t always require crediting sources. Except in cases of overfitting or Img2Img, AI images have no traceable sources, and the models do not make collages. Without significant human input, AI-generated media is automatically public domain.

Left is unedited, right is edited with a mix of inpainting and manual painting.

Copyright is not a moral matter to me and I am, in fact, a copyright minimalist-almost-abolitionist and non-discriminately pro-piracy, so keep this in mind.

Additionally, there is a lesson to be learned in this story about using corporate tools instead of free, open-source options. AI is a small yet necessary part of the storytelling method.