Category: Art

State of the Author, 4Q2024

Posted on Posted in Art, Cool Books, Fantasy, Gladiator, Jaiya, Jane Austen, LLMs, Mel Dunay, Myth, Oldblood Series, Paranormal Romance, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

-First off, I think my books are all in Kindle Unlimited now, free to anyone with a subscription to KU. If you see any sign that they are not in KU, please let me know in the comments.

–Undead Flight (Hunter Healer King Book 2) is now in the hands of my proofreaders. Barring complications, should be ready to publish by Christmas time. Ebook cover is done; blurb is done with AI help (stay tuned, my post on the blurbing process will be out tomorrow. Print cover is dependent on my final cleanup of the manuscript to determine page length.

-Also started Hunter Healer King Book 3 by writing a fairly dark and distressing scene from the last third of the book. This is kind of suboptimal, because stitching together scenes written out of order tends to add (wo)manhours to the first draft process, but I hadn’t figured out the opening scene at that point. I don’t know when it will be released but I know that I am aiming for Christmas of 2025.

-I have had a sci-fi Pride and Prejudice retelling in development for a long time; finally got the first scene down. No projected completion date at this time. My main inspiration for this concept was, weirdly enough, Star Wars: A New Hope. If you dig deep enough into the filmographies of the supporting cast, you will find one with a Pride and Prejudice connection in his earlier career. Regrettably, the catchy working title explicitly references Star Wars, so the official title will probably be something rather sedate of the “Pride and…” format.

-New ebook covers using AI art for Shadow Captain and Spider Star are done; still need to do new paperback covers for them, and ebook/hardcover for the 2 in 1 volume for the duology. Projected release date for the 2 in 1 is first/second quarter of 2025.

-Early stages of AI art covers for the Jaiya Series and Ancestors of Jaiya series. No text layout yet. A four in one of Ancestors might come out in third quarter of 2025; a seven in one of the full metaseries might be sometime in 2026 but a lot could go sideways between now and then.

Weird Wednesday Meets Midjourney Monday

Posted on Posted in Art, Midjourney, Space Opera3 Comments

I did a Midj thing based on a joke about Elon Musk, Techlord of Mars, and an internet friend with a twitter account very kindly decided to circulate it. Thank you Foxfier!

My friend Caroline Furlong also played with the same idea in some other AI art engines on Night Cafe, with even beefier and more outrageous results.

Thoughts About LLMs, aka “AIs”

Posted on Posted in Art, Editing, Marketing, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , 1 Comment

(Note: in this piece, I link to a lot of websites that I’ve played with at different times. This is to allow the reader to make up their own minds about these things. No endorsement is intended, except of course when I am linking to my own books. If I didn’t like them, I wouldn’t publish them.)

First off, what we see today is not truly artificial intelligence, in the sense of “artificial sapient beings capable of exercising judgment and choice.” ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and their many cousins and descendants are Large Learning Models (LLMs), software that has been programmed to extrapolate statistical information from the dataset it is given and offer randomized responses to human commands based on the dataset and the extrapolations. The results are only as good as the initial programming, and the dataset. And in terms of output, they’re only vastly more complicated versions of the random generators available at Seventh Sanctum and similar websites for more than a decade. Here are the situations in which I personally have used LLMs:

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State of the Author, End of October 2023

Posted on Posted in Art, Editing, Fantasy, Marketing, Mel Dunay, Midjourney, NaNoWriMo, WritingLeave a comment

-Wolf’s Trail, Hunter Healer King, Book 1 is in the hands of my proofreaders as I speak.

-When I get it back, I will be editing it instead of writing for NaNoWriMo.

-I am also trying to write a prequel short story for an anthology.

-I have a draft ebook cover, and raw materials for the paperback cover.

-I have vague ideas for Hunter Healer King, Book 2.

Midjourney Monday: Fan Casting for Pride and Prejudice

Posted on Posted in Art, Jane Austen, Midjourney3 Comments

Today we have a bunch of contemporary actors in Regency dress, as generated by Midjourney and cleaned up by me. I will invite you to guess who I was casting in which Pride and Prejudice role. Yes, some of them are not very good likenesses, and no I am not going to reroll in Midjourney again. Yes, very few of them are in the age bracket now that the characters were in the story. No, I don’t really care. Yes, a couple of them have been in Pride and Prejudice before, and no, I am not casting them in the same roles.

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Midjourney Monday: Elves of the Silmarillion

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I wasn’t actually trying for Silmarillion characters when I started playing with the AI prompts (mostly involving niji 5 mode, Alphonse Mucha, and Harry Clarke and sometimes Frank Frazetta) which led to these Midjourney-generated pictures. But, somehow or other, that’s what I ended up with. Minor tweaks were made to hide or fix distorted hands, and add pointed ears to the Felagund character (the original prompt had been for a human D&D style cleric.)

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