Zanski: Blog

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 on the subject of anime copyright. 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, save for the Coldwater County series. Other than adding the title text, the most I did was crop the Coldwater Keys image.

All just part of the 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.

I had been wrestling with a complex scenario for some weeks; the main issue was in trying to keep it all realistic. Solving the problem in one part would lead to a problem in another. Finally, I thought I had it all buttoned down, when I came to realize that even the lead-in would have to be revised. Resigned to the fact that it was all my own doing, I set to work, spending all of March on the re-write. Then, on April 1st, of all days, my re-write disappeared. Well, it didn't disappear so much as revert to the same draft I had saved on March 4th. So I figured I'd just open the backup copy, the one I keep on an external hard drive. But it, too, had reverted to the March 4th document. Have I elicited your sympathy yet?

So I took the problem to Google AI. After some poking around under the AI's tutelage, I was able to find the glitch in my LibreOffice Writer word processing app: a crashed auto-save process. I was able to reboot the process, but not able to recover the month's work. I was discouraged and decided to step away for a few days.

Even so, I began to feel guilty for delaying the completion of the promised story. And then I realized that a guilt trip had no place in the fun I normally enjoyed from writing. And, as I've said many times, I write for fun. Even this blog entry is written out of guilt.

So, here I sit, on the horns of a dilemma. I do want the fun of continuing to write this story, but resent the feeling of obligation to do so, which drains it of fun. Go figure.

I just killed one of the major characters in my fourth Seneca book. Knowing that was coming, it's been bothering me for a few days. Those characters seem to assume a lie of their own. I can hear their voice, see their smile, watch them at work, and interacting with the other characters. Of course, it's all a creation of my own mind. Nonetheless, it's an investment of imagination, consistency, and thousands of words. But people die in real life, and I try to keep my stories realistic. Even writing for fun isn't always fun.

This book is at 86K words. Can I bring it in with another 30 or 40K? Maybe.