Zanski: Blog

I have just now submitted De Dos Del Nortes - Of Two Del Nortes, the fourth book in the Seneca Series.

This is my first submission under the current posting format and I may have made a hash of it. If so, I'll fix it.

Error and typo advisories welcome.

I have, this very hour, completed the fourth book of the Seneca series De Dos Del Nortes / Of Two Del Nortes.

Of the two Del Nortes in question, one is El Paso del Norte, the Mexican portion of a town divided by the Rio Grande but referred to simply as Del Norte by the first American residents of El Paso, Texas simply to avoid confusion. Later it was renamed Ciudad Juarez.

The other is a late 19th Century mining-supply boom town that was once under consideration for state capital, Del Norte, Colorado. It is still the county seat, though Rio Grande County has shrunk some.

Both towns are on the Rio Grande, though the former is 500 miles downstream from the latter. They each serve as settings for, well, portions of my story.

It remains only for me to go through the book, page by page, inserting devious typos and insidious sequence anomalies that will challenge my readers and keep them amused. So, a couple-three weeks yet, but no promises.

I have added new, original cover art to my posted works.

As you might guess, I had a heavy assist from AI. But what I learned is that describing and defining what you want the AI to produce in an image is its own art form. And I'm almost as bad at writing graphic "prompts" as I am at creating graphics personally. So, naturally, I sought AI assistance in writing the prompts for the graphics AI.

And NO, I do mot let AI write my stories. I tried that once, a few years back, just a couple paragraphs to see what would come of it. The product was laughably over-embellished and yet was still simplistic and shallow, like a nine-year old writing an amicus brief for the Supreme Court. Besides, I write for fun, and it's not like you can appoint someone else to have fun for you.

But for writing graphics prompts? You betcha I had help. I ended up telling one AI what I wanted, that AI wrote the prompt in the precise descriptive diction that the graphics AI understood. But even then it can come out wrong — over and over again.

Consider the cover for Game Trail. I could not get the AI to place the pond and the water tower on the far side of the train. When it did move the water tower, it placed it in the far background, nowhere near the train. When it finally, after a literal dozen images, moved the water tower on the other side of the train, I decided to fix the other issues myself.

I used MS Paint to move the pond from the foreground to the other side of the train. The figure standing on the tender by the water tower was originally standing next to the tender and was as tall as the locomotive. I shrunk him and moved him. Every hilltop in the background was capped with a clump of tall rocks, looking like a collection of breasts with turgid nipples. The headlamp on the locomotive was enormous. And the fill-pipe on the water tower came off the side and appeared to be dumping a heavy stream of water onto the ground. Paint is not the most advanced app, but it does allow pixel-by-pixel work and I've learned a few tricks over the years. In any event, I've made heavy modifications to every cover graphic; it was all tedious fun.

I just finished writing possibly the most complex chapter I've ever tackled. The characters, motivations, logistics, and settings had me buffaloed for literal months as I slowly resolved problem after problem. But I think I finally have it tucked away and I think it will serve as the denouement, if not the literal climax, for the younger Seneca timeline.

My next chapter for the older Seneca feels as if it might do the same, but that would likely mean a somewhat shorter book than I'd intended. I'd been thinking something north of 120K words, but I'm only at 109K and things are moving faster than I expected. Quien sabe?

I feel like I've just brought my boat out of the icepack. I finally cleared the lost data section and the rewrite jam that was plaguing me and have once again moved into new territory. Not that I'm moving all that quickly.

Plus, I've allowed myself to become distracted by attempts at legitimate cover art for my various stories, using several AI assistants. My own graphics skills don't rate being called skills. One nice thing about AI: it is never annoyed by my ineptitude nor does it run out of patience explaining things to me---over and over again. And it doesn't get all huffy if I just blow things off so I can watch a movie. If I'd had teachers like that in college, I'd have probably become a rocket surgeon.