AI Conundrum

At some point I'm going to finish another book. At that point, I'll need editing, cover art, possibly interior graphics. I am rethinking the latter slightly and may use a different layout for the next "Fox" books, but anyhow.

How can I tell that I'm not getting AI back?

Okay, already there was a big problem with editors and art and similar labor-intensive book services, and that was vendors geared towards providing a product. Their business model is not based on them understanding the needs of your book, but instead doing something of sufficient quality that you will pay them for it.

Can you get SEO advice from someone who actually knows the SF field? Can you get editing from someone who understands the peculiarities of historical fiction?

I pushed a little with my cover and interior artists; instead of sending them a reference image, I'd describe it in art-student terms; "...like a Toulouse-Lautrec cabaret poster."

On places like Reedsy and Fiverrrrrr, you don't even know if you are talking to the artist, or if you don't share a language and they are shoving your order into Google Translate. That makes revisions awkward, and rarely productive, as well.

Well, AI has made this distinctly worse. Even if there is a human hand holding the pen, you know that the person handling orders at the Art "R" Us you are contracting with just fed whatever you said into ChatGPT and asked it to spit out whatever it is they could do in an afternoon with a stock image site.

Not only do they not know anything about theory, history, or tradition of art, they've a business model that makes it so these things do not matter. They can get a result that gets them paid. Bottom line.

Which by the by over just the years since I published the last book have been so overrun with AI generated "stock" they barely even bother to identify it anymore. All of their efforts are to cash in by offering their own AI implementation for your needs.

Well, actually, most of them are going out of business. It has become much more difficult to get the typical stock that was used in so many book covers over the last few decades.

But there is still a moral and possible a legal ground as well. KDP stops you at several points during upload for a self-published manuscript for you to declare if you have used AI. As of the moment, this doesn't matter. But it could change in a moment, and every trend in the market suggests it will not change in a way that is good for those who declared.

The best outcome is that Amazon unveils their own AI engines, and declares their legal department has determined you must pay the extra charges to have their AI used on your work instead. Which contract by the by will also require permission to use your work for training data. No, I haven't heard any rumors of this. But KDP is so far from hurting for more books, they could easily dump all of the self-published works that used AI, probably without hurting their bottom line in the slightest.

How can I find these editors and artists now? What protection do I have that even a well-meaning person who I have contracted with before isn't feeling the crunch as real artists are being crushed under cheap AI crap, and is forced to sign with that devil in order to pay their own bills?

None.

Bad Kitty

The reason to write a history-themed book, whether history, alternate history, or "archaeological thriller" (which seems to be the only common catch-all term for "things from history impact a story set in the present") is to enjoy history. Both the well-known, but also the lesser know. Or, at least, lesser-known aspects of the well-known.

And sometimes that involves changing the history, because real history is too messy and hard to cram into a plot that has the right story arc to it with dramatic payoff and proper resolution, or is just has some inconvenient date or location.

My feeling is it is better to change it than to lose it entirely. As long as your changes are to the letter of it (June instead of July) and don't change the underlying meaning (it had to be July because that's when the monsoon season begins).

In July of 2014 an explosion occurred at the Waste Isolation Plant Prototype in the southeast corner of New Mexico. It released radioactive materials and caused the complete shut-down of all operations for a number of years. The barrel of waste at fault began at LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratories) during their own trouble years (specifically called out in some reports as between 2008 and 2016), and was the fault of the use (by apparently a subcontractor) of the wrong brand of kitty litter.

I really want this incident to be mentioned in my New Mexico murder mystery, set in early 2019. I want to (will) use as a clue, a silly little logo of kitty litter in the circle with a line through it, used as a jokey promotional item by a rival waste clean-up contractor.

That contractor, who is currently going by "EvilKitty" in my notes, (pretty sure I'm going for something like "Patriot Compliance Solutions" as the company got big at the tail end of Reagan's presidency), may be all over Penny's little mystery. And is the element that ties both plots together; the victims of the nuclear industry, and the Cold War secret that someone is willing to murder to keep. Oh, and also make a neater way of getting Lon Davis, the Atlas F site outside Roswell, and Penny's investigation of the dead body at White Sands into one single whole.

The timing is bad, though.

There was an earlier incident at LANL with some plutonium rods. That one was in 2011 and really kicked off the Los Alamos exodus that all but crippled their plutonium work for several years.

2011 is also closer to the ballpark for another important clue. Sand. The White Sands Footprints were discovered in 2009 and may have been because an unusual amount of sand had dried out and been lifted by the wind (a typical cyclic event of the dunes) following the drought of 2006-2008.

I decided I very much still want The Thrice-Dug Grave (which would have been a lovely title if I was doing straight mystery stories and not a series that was supposed to be archaeological thriller). For that grave to work it needed to have someone digging the body back up around ten years before the date of the story. Chose a zone around 2011 and this is pretty close to the sweet spot when Freeman would have left LANL, Juan Baca's body was dug up in search of The Source (aka the McGuffin), the refilled grave would be about eight years old when Penny dug it again during the Bell-Bleekman excavations just outside Holloman AFB, and enough white gypsum sands would have been in the backfill to provide an important clue.

But I really wanted this to happen at the same time the Test Bed (nearby in WSMR) got a final clean-up, and it would be really, really handy if someone could drop a matchbook...err, a cheap little pin with the cat piss logo on it at that site.

But not only is this jumping the gun on the shut-downs at LANL and WIPP, it almost makes more sense with the timeline and politics that much of this clean-up happened within a smaller number of years following the redirection of Star Wars from brilliant pebbles...and a ambitiously wunderwaffen-type effort to pull Project Pluto out of mothballs as yet another proposal Reagan might have been willing to pay for.

I know you are busy saving the world, but...

Side quests. 

It's a mechanism seen in so many games because it achieves the goals of lengthening play, letting the player put their stamp on their character through choices outside of the main campaign, and with chances to personalize (and improve) their gear, and of course to explore the world and the lore.

Like James Bond Plotting, it seems like a natural fit for novels as well.

Really, most of a plot is this already. There's two major forms going on; first is actually plot-related, but takes form as various odd errands that seem to be necessary just to get the clue or the part for the magic demon-defeating weapon or whatever. Second is stuff that builds character, builds world. The biggest difference is that even in games with a Reputation or Morality meter, non-game stories can build all sorts of important character growth into these side stories.

I had already intended the plot for The Early Fox to be heavily on having to do a thing for a person to get the thing to give to some other person so they would tell Penny the next clue. But now I'm thinking about the second kind.

C plots.

But it might just be that I manage to get a chest cold and spent a week out of work with a nasty cough and no energy and no brain. I'm slowly coming back to the book, and staring at my plot wondering what the hell it was that I was thinking -- something that must have felt so clear then I didn't put it in my notes, but now that fever has burned out more of the remaining brain cells, can't remember now.

But I got a lot of HZD done. And watching another Let's Play.

Aloy -- gets a lot of side quests. By Forbidden West she's got not just main quests, quests which grant weapons or armor, and collectibles, the new upgrade system requires so many specialized parts those become a quest form in and of themselves.

At least it has broken slightly with the "go here and kill everything you see" of Skyrim. Instead, it is "go here and shoot these specific parts off some of these machines." Which makes combat a lot more complicated and strategic as you are trying to balance getting all that useful loot against, well, surviving the encounter as well.

Aloy even lampshades this at least once in dialogue. "I get it; you want me to go there, shoot some machines, bring you back some parts."

At least the game has more excuse for the quests which are doing errands for random people. As opposed to people walking up to the full kitted-out assassin in black armor and a really bad reputation and asking him if he'd mind making a run down to the chemist for some sticking plaster.

Aloy, on the other hand, has a huge reputation for helping people. As of the start of Forbidden West she is the Savior of Meridian and Anointed of the Nora (she hates both titles. And don't bow, either. The Anointed doesn't like it). Plus Seeker, Thrush of the Lodge, and Chieftain of the Werak.

Well before the second game is over, she's also Savior of Plainsong, Champion of the Tenakt, and Ancestor Reborn. Take the last just as one example; the Quen worship the Legacy of the Ancestors, those figures of mostly-lost history who showed the way for their tribe to grow and prosper. Aloy is one of them returned in flesh. Yeah, maybe not exactly the person you'd turn to to pick up your laundry, but absolutely a person to do the impossible and save some lives doing it.

All of the titles above are basically titles of "wandering do-gooder." Seriously, though, she could be getting a lot of "help us out" quests just with her Focus alone.

Which does happen more than a little in the first game, as people come to her as "the Nora who can see the unseen." Yeah, welcome to being the only person after the apocalypse with a fully functional Google Glass.

Also one of the greatest diagetic excuses for a HUD that I know of -- because even as there are some clever ones out there, going back to at least Half-Life where the HEV suit contains the display unit that shows you that game data, the Focus is also a key part of the story. Not just a tool, but the way discovery of the Focus changes Aloy's life, and also as it turned out changed Sylens' as well and led to the awakening of HADES (and thus the plot), and of course quite a lot of plot-related "who has a focus, who can listen in to another focus" stuff.

By about an hour into the game, Aloy has the only gliding wing (sure, Gruda had one, but she killed him...and took it), and also (unusually for any tech left within eyeball range of the Oseram) the only grappling hook.

So they really should be coming to her all the time with "Hey, my cat got stuck in a tree. Could you grapple gun your way up there and glide back down with it? Only take you a moment."

But, no. They'd rather ask her to beat up a few machines.

The dangers of au vis

Au vis openings are always tempting.  It is nice to have something that makes a good hook, especially over a transition; a linking element, a match cut, even a Gilligan cut.

The problem comes when you need to backfill. And it starts with the backfill being almost necessarily in past perfect tense.

I have a new rule. "Any part of a story in past perfect should either be long enough to allow it to be dropped into simple past, or so short the question never comes up."

That is, either it should be a brief recap, or it should be a full flashback. Because what falls between ends up taking things that should be in a proper scene; that is, should be dramatized with full five-senses writing, and turning them into explanation instead. Basically, unless you work to fix this problem, the recap ends up being all telling, no showing.

I had two of them in the Roswell sequence. I had a hook opening with her driving a pickup truck, and I had a fake-out opening for the Roswell museum scene.

And I didn't even realize this was a problem. It wasn't like I had anything I needed to say about Roswell other than the way that one sketchy incident is heavily leveraged as the big tourist draw. Practically the town identity.

No, the problem is that I'm not letting the reader enjoy the experience of visiting the place. I don't need to give more information about the town. I need to have Penny experience it in real time, not in a rushed recap (rushed because otherwise I'd be either stuck in past perfect so long it would get uncomfortable, or I'd have to do the "slip" in and out of full flashback mode.

The driving is actually worse. There's a bunch of character beats here. Really, that's one of the three things the drive is doing; scene-setting, a little philosophical conceit, and a chance for Penny to do some stuff in character.

That was my big accomplishment of today. Realizing I needed to toss two more chapters and rewrite those.

(The real project today was looking over the outline and trying to figure out what actual scenes that make it into an actual novel. It probably needs more stuff happening. But not exactly plot. Maybe C plots; maybe some fetch quests.)

The Other Guys

I've been archive-binging at Mythcreants again (they have a lot of archive).  

Had a scary realization; I don't have a supporting cast.

Okay, this is understandable. For the New Mexico adventure, I'm consciously not letting Penny have anyone she can talk freely to -- partly to get a whole "Desert Solitudes" thing going (and concentrate on descriptions instead of dialog), but also to try to head off the damned info-dumps.

Even if both Dylan and now Luke keep angling for more screen time, so much so I'm already making jokes about love triangles.

And the original model was largely Tomb Raider, who in the first go-round pretty much only had Werner Von Croy as a returning character. The Legend trilogy gave her a support team, but they only barely appeared in game play (and were sharply reduced in number during Underworld).

Not to mention returning adversary Natla.

Setting a precedent for the Survivor trilogy, which admittedly started so grimdark it made sense most of the cast didn't make it to the end of the first game. Not sure why they kept Jonah but lost Sam. Probably too lemony for EA (that bridal carry after the big battle...ho-yay!)

Anyhow, what is scary is that not only have I never noticed before that I didn't give Penny a solid supporting cast -- I mean fully fleshed-out characters with their own arcs, not people who sometimes pick up the phone -- I don't even know how I could write these people.

This is when I'm four scenes into Part II and my not-really-an-outline is telling me I'm short of material. In fact, it feels like there's not enough story for the story, period.

Add that to the ongoing stuff at work, and...all I want to do is turn out the lights, put on headphones, and play Horizon Zero Dawn. I might not even leave the Sacred Lands.

The Name of the Cow

I got there. And before the weekend was out I pushed through almost 4K past where I'd stopped for rewrites, completing the "aftermath" scene that follows the body drop, and beginning Penny's sojourn down Blue Highways. In a rented Toyota Tacoma, though, not on a motorbike wearing a helmet painted with an American flag.

 I'm probably going to reconstruct that opener several times before I call it close enough. But I'm pushing on to Roswell. Again the difficulties of this approach are killing me; I don't want to go deep into conspiracy theories and I really want to avoid getting into any detail about Ancient Alien stuff. If for no other reason, than it inevitably drags in Penny's historical knowledge -- and her history with similar conspiracies.

And I'm trying for, not quite blank slate, and certainly not a reboot, but not having quite so much baggage.

And McDonald got his real name. That was always a placeholder, even if I was starting to take it seriously. But I like the idea of a very ordinary hispano name that leads many of the people Penny is interacting with to think of him as just a random old guy on public support, who died without accomplishment or legacy.

Which is also what motivates Mary Cartwright (who is also hispano, with strong links to Santa Clara Pueblo, but doesn't get a revealing name. So I guess she's taking over the "yes, intermarriage is a thing" point from MacDonald).

Juan Baca.

No, not "baka"

Or "bacta"

But one of the family names of original Spanish settlers which are still extremely common in New Mexico. So a direct link to idea of heritage and identity...all the way back to who exactly was walking along that ancient Lake Otero (and when!)

Sometimes still spelled "Vaca," shortened from "de Vaca," and, yes, probably has a direct connection to that famous explorer of the southwest, Cabeza de Vaca himself.

A Secret Test of Character

I got most of the draft re-written. If I push through tonight, I might be back up where I left off and be free to spend the weekend seeing how many chapters of the next part of the book I can push out.

The beats are better. Clearer, at least. Tom Bell is still turning ally too quickly, and Julian Bleekman isn't getting enough love, even when I gave him a whole scene to use. Also, pushing Dylan out just caused Luke to take over his slot as good-looking, sympathetic friend. At this point it would take far too little to tip it over into a full YA Love Triangle. And Miguel and Jesus can't for the life of them get any screen time.

But then, I only had 8K to work with. So I'm not entirely unhappy with all that.

No, the problem is, I've realized I don't like Penny.

I don't mean as a person. I don't entirely mean the difficulty of writing her. I mean that she may not be a good character to hang a book on. Or a good character at all, but that's part of the problem; I can't say if she is believable or nuanced because she seems so very unfocused to me.

She wasn't, after all, designed.

Penny is the result of multiple unplanned, on-the-fly decisions made to allow the plot of the first book to work. And others that were meant to aim her at where I had originally intended to go; to evolve quickly into a fairly typical confident, wise-cracking hero.

Instead I got a motormouth neurotic, bouncing between overconfidence and ruthlessly tearing herself down; both born of an extreme lack of confidence. And yet I keep writing her into situations where she needs to be brave one moment and paralyzed the next, physically competent but without the applicable training, deeply informed on nuances of history and culture yet with huge and surprising gaps in her understanding of even the basics.

I set out, in the current book, to roll back a few things I didn't like. A big one was getting rid of all the lectures and a necessary corollary was to make her less educated in the subjects at hand (because when you've got a motor-mouthed First Person protagonist, if they know anything about a subject, they are bound to blurt it out.)

I wanted to put her back in danger and make it relatable, which meant downplaying her history of (unlikely) successes and her hard-won skills.

But I don't like what I'm getting. She's sounding, well, childish. She's so out of her depth she feels like the damsel character the real hero will be rescuing when he shows up.

And as usual when Penny plays things close to the chest, it is hard showing the reader what is actually going behind that plucky cheerful more-than-a-little-ditzy mask.

And yet this is still closer to where I want to be. The Tomb Raider-archetype 200-casualty firefight in the streets of Cairo got dumped pretty much as soon as I tried to actually write anything like that. Like it or not, I need that world where a ten-minute training montage doesn't give you the ability to beat up ninja warriors, where snarky dialogue filled with pop-culture references doesn't impress the bad guys, where the minions have names and few problems can be solved by punching them in the face.

And yet, and yet, a book where these pleasures are still represented, even in mutated form. Where there still are those beats of adventure and heroism and wish-fulfillment. 

So I don't really know where I need Penny to be, much less how I would go about getting her there now that there are so many books already down. On the latter, however, I will say I am flirting more than a little with the idea of making a three or four book "America" cycle, part Jessica Fletcher, part Bill Bixby, as Penny wanders the blue highways being an amateur sleuth in various strange parts of rural Americana.