From a certain point of view

Mystery may not be the best genre for discovery writing.

Especially discovery writing a narrative in first person. I've been delivering information as my protagonist discovers it. She doesn't know what the full plot is. This isn't Columbo, where the identification of the murderer is given in the opening.

The problem is that I don't know it either. I mean, I know more than my protagonist does. But I don't know the details, because I didn't need to know the details before I got to the equivalent of the "I imagine you are all wondering why I have gathered you here today" scene.

Of course the other big difficulty in First Person is that even if someone confesses (and given how people are, even when), the motivations and knowledge remain murky. The writer doesn't have the option to cut away to the villain monologuing to themselves what they've done or what they know. 

(Makes it both convenient and frustrating when you've got the proverbial man coming through the door with a gun. How did he know she would be there? Um...she'll never know, so the reader probably never finds out either.)

***

In any case, my current exploration of what all these people actually did or know was touched off by the scene in which Penny goes to the 46th Medical on-post to get a blood draw.

And I really don't know how you would go screen someone for potential radiological contamination. Usually, this would start with a swab. But this is all happening several days following the incident. There's also an informational problem; this was touched off by her visit to Site Theta (that's what she calls it -- she thought Site Tango was silly. And the guy who called it that, Jackson, admitted he'd made up the name as a place-holder).

Site Theta is something "they" are trying to sweep under the rug. So they aren't going to go around telling anyone, including Penny, that they suspect she's been in contact with hot material that was there.

So instead this is probably a signal. Either a paternalistic warn-off; "There's dangerous stuff there, honey. You shouldn't poke at it." Or it is more of a Silkwood warning; "We're going to haul you in for more and more tests if you keep messing with it."

(A little harder to make happen if she isn't your employee.)

At the end of all of this, the only thing I am relatively sure about with Colonel Flowers is that he probably wasn't in his current posting at the time Evil Kitty cleaned up Site Theta. But I'm still not sure what he knows. And what he wants to do about it.

And my protagonist, point-of-view character, and narrator knows less than that.

***

The first Reacher novel is in first person. The second and third are in third. Apparently Lee Child goes back and forth. Having also watched the Prime series, I feel as I do about Holmes, or The Doctor; this is a character that works better at a remove. Not that his inner life isn't interesting, but his process is better when you don't really know what he is thinking. Or if he is actually bluffing.

I've gotten tired of First-Person. I've gotten tired of writing in Penny's voice, both the voice itself and the restrictions of the particular flavor of First Person I picked.

And I thought of something.

So the story that opens with an amnesiac Penny waking up in a strange town, into a Jack Vance situation: that is, she doesn't know where she is or what is going on, but everyone knows who she is -- and half of them are trying to kill her.

Except don't do that. Open in a hospital bed as she wakens from a life-saving surgery that also wiped out her last couple of weeks of memory. And again, surrounded by people who know her. Or, rather, who know this girl with her name that did things that Penny finds hard to believe.

And they have material. They have police reports, and new articles. Enough for her to piece together what happened, but there's a catch. The continuity of human consciousness is an illusion. You really can't step in the same river twice. We change all the time, and we can't always understand the "I" that existed even a week earlier.

Especially if that "I" had gotten involved in a murder, taken down a gang, learned to play trumpet, and fallen deeply in love.

So the rest of the story, everything after this framing scene, is told in third person.

***

Could be fun. But I have a different book to finish. And after that, I really should switch gears. Work on a bit of SF....with a twist.

Sixteen Tons

 I'm not finished with The Early Fox but already have shiny new idea syndrome. Except it isn't that; it is more that I'm thinking about where I'd go with this series assuming I continue with it. Really, I am hoping to switch gears and do the Tiki book next. And I have two other SF ideas.

Well, SF-adjacent. Been thinking about that too. The old idea, the Galaxy back cover idea, is that SF is about ideas. And none of my three SF books in progress are really about ideas of science, technology, how they change human culture, any of that. They are more about mood. Crossing pulp SF with the strange world of Tiki. Doing a steampunk vibe in an unusual environment. Bringing the Universal monsters into a transhumanist post-singularity setting.

More or less.

Anyhow, I looked at a map of the US and if Penny goes full Bill Bixby (or Jack Reacher with different musical tastes) and boards a random bus, there's a cluster of interesting cities she could end up at. Colorado was the most attractive of the adjoining states, though. So I looked to see what kind of interesting archaeology they had going on besides pueblo and paleoindian.

There was a relatively recent project at the camp in Ludlow. That is to say; the Ludlow Massacre, a turning point of the Colorado Coalfield War.

But I have to admit by being as intrigued by Penny waking up drugged and missing her recent memories somewhere in New Orleans. Doesn't have to involve zombies, but I would definitely want to talk about the diaspora. And the jazz.

Plus I really am wanting to do some kind of Kensington Runestone, Renn Faire, and "Viking" musical group.

Anyhow.

The "Asshole Apache" scene went simply enough. Then I started an interesting nonfiction book and that threw me back a little on something I'd chosen for that scene. Fortunately, it was a quick edit. I'm struggling my way through the following scene because while I've had Mary Cartwright, the NAGPRA liaison for Holloman AFB in a bunch of scenes already, I hadn't gotten into the relationship between her and Penny. So that's taken a few tries.

And I'm not...quite...stalled after that. Penny is going to keep looking for the reason why a radioactive body showed up on her archaeological dig. Mary is looking into contamination incidents that have been a problem for the native population for generations. At some point enough comes together for Penny to be able to make a horse trade with the new safety officer at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in the southeast corner of the state.

But it requires her finding where "Evil Kitty" (as I call them in my notes) was doing illegal dumping of hot waste. And I don't really have the connection to Juan Baca. (Plus, Evil Kitty is not the reason Penny tunes into the news to learn a man has been murdered by a giant pistachio.)

Where I am at the moment is she picks up a tail at the clinic, which turns out to be a company car for one of the subcontractors (they were only trying to frighten her off, and they thought she knew more than she did anyhow).

What clinic? Well, I want to do the Silkwood routine. In this case, it is someone in DOD who is trying to underline that she shouldn't be prying into mysterious decaying structures somewhere out on White Sands, so they suggest very strongly a nice little round of blood draws and whatever other samples to make sure she's not carrying around any new friends with a bad tendency to emit alpha particles.

Which all I know damn all about. The closest I've been there personally was the other way around, when the introduced me to the Molly Cow so I could get injected with some nice fresh technetium.

With any luck, though, by the time I've written those scenes, I'll have figured out a good excuse for Penny to discover the "Sheep Ranch," as I've been calling the illegal dump (again, for no particular reason.)

And I still haven't figured out why there is a clue at the bottom of that Atlas F silo somewhere outside of Roswell. 

Watching Wicked now. The sets and costumes are gorgeous.

The Times They Are a Changing

The world has changed. This came up again on a writing subreddit. Charlie talked about it on his blog, particularly post-BREXIT. The world has changed and writers have to react.

The world always changes, but much of it is in cycles; the worst pendulum swings usually reverse. Things settle into a new status quo in which the names of the empires may have shifted around but the basic pattern of life is still the same.

And most fiction isn’t that topical.

But that’s the thing. It doesn’t have to be topical. Cellphones are ubiquitous and you have to plot around them now. This isn’t like changing the word “taxi” to “uber,” this change in the world means your characters (unless you specifically do something to stop them) are always in contact, always able to call the cops, and always know where they are.

And have a flashlight and a compass.

That’s the thing about a contemporary setting; it needs to reflect the world of the reader. The reason you do a contemporary setting instead of a historical one or an alien planet or whatever is so you can get on with the story without having to order a pizza like David Weber.

If you change or omit key aspects of that modern world (like pretending cell phones aren’t a thing), you’ve put the reader back into those speculative fiction shoes where they have to keep asking how things work here.

And why your heroine can’t just call “one to beam up,” when trouble starts.

https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-david-weber-orders-a-pizza/606473

I set out to write archaeological thrillers. When I eased into the globe-trotting with a slow character origin story, it morphed the series into more like a travel adventure.

Already, in the first book, I was noting the overcrowding, the damage tourists were doing to old monuments, and the reaction in places like Venice (there were two characters and even a song about the problem of the “big boats" in that book.)

I started a year or two before COVID. That was bad enough. Now, this year, there's a world-wide reaction to tourists (and particularly the plague of Instagrammers, which is more-or-less how my protagonist is depicted making a living between stealing Golden Idols).

And for an American in Paris (or elsewhere in the world of 2025) the combination of tariffs, new VISA requirements, our already hostile TSA and ICE on top of that, has made not only America a less popular tourist destination, but Americans in particular less popular tourists elsewhere.

Sure, the option is on the table to just pretend none of this is going on, or somehow hasn't happened yet in the world of the story. That line can get a little fuzzy; do you pretend that certain wars aren’t happening?

But there’s another problem. As I’ve been thinking about what I want to do with the next book, or the series, and as I’ve been reading discussions on Reddit and other places, I realize that this is the very stuff I want to write about.

It was never going to be jungle adventures and golden idols without context. It was always going to occur within the framing of our real world. Real history, real places. Even real archaeological practices. The London book was about how a city changes in war and under economic pressures. The Paris book was about how history has made its mark on the city. The Japan book was about how changes in economics and society affect people and the way they view themselves. Okay, those were just some of the themes out there, but since the first book, ideas about the actual currents swirling about us and the way they change our lives was there.

The current book has the archaeological plot really revolving around NAGPRA and the associated issues. A true Indiana Jones type wouldn’t be worrying about the proper disposition of that mouldering corpse that just fell out of the spike trap.

So that leaves me with a fork.

I can continue as what is increasingly a period piece. How I would be showing world travel is both in a sense of what we’ve (currently) lost and, honestly, some of the things we did to fuck it up. 

The other advantage is that since nobody is going to go to those restaurants (they closed them during COVID) or see those exhibits (they’ve already remodeled) I can let go of a lot of accuracy. Which is good, because it is increasingly difficult to get at detailed data for a period so near in the past.

The downside, besides the text becoming increasingly dated, is that there is so much cool stuff happening right now I’d love to talk about.

The other choice is to move the story. Let time pass. Or invoke magic. Or go to comic book time where it stops being specifically moored to a chronology (Tony Stark was always injured in a war zone, but the particular war has changed multiple times).

Oh, yeah. I’ve closed my order with 100 Covers. The result was rote. Both it and the communication was very literal, delivering exactly what was in the spec with no creativity and no joy.

I won’t be using it.

At this point I’m too dispirited to deal with cover people again. Plus I don’t like what the market is doing at the moment. I know the advantages in following the trends, but sometimes fashion goes down a dead end.

Last year, the prime look for “Archaeological Thrillers” (history-adjacent adventure and mystery) was low panorama of city or other story-appropriate environment, with a small figure in silhouette, back to the camera.

That didn’t seem to work with many people, and this year seems to have already moved to the same general idea (and still dark and crowded) but the back-to-the-camera figure moved closer and the lighting shifted for better modeling.

Really, I would be happier if the Urban Fantasy stalwart had stayed; same dark city, same dark figure, but in a much closer crop, the dark colors were mostly in the obligatory leather jacker, and the back-to-the-camera pose had an over-the-shoulder element to it.

In any case I’m thinking more of a Regional Mystery (apparently, not a category Amazon supports as a search term), with some rural setting in the same low panorama, and NO prominent human figure.

New Mexico desert, footprints in sand (superimposed on the sky if that works), the test tower of the Trinity explosion.

If I was going Full Hillerman I might be temped by using the NM flag instead of a sun…but since that is a well-known bit of cultural appropriation in the first place (Zia Pueblo did NOT give permission to use it)...

Chatter

So here's the big thing that is wrong with using AI to write your book.

The book is the writing.

This works for visual imagination, too. Hell, in that case we can go right down to models of the human visual system. Know the blind spot? Yes, but you can't see it. That's because vision is an illusion. You aren't seeing this 3D world in high detail, straight lines and everything. That's constructed for you in your mind.

Or, rather, the illusion of it is. You think you see the world in high detail because anything that catches your attention, your eyes flick to it in that ceaseless motion they are always making. Your mind is maintaining this sense of the rest of what is in the visual field and giving you this emotional impression of it all being there, even though the reality is that it is in lower detail outside the center of your vision and your moment's attention.

It is like a dream. When you experience it, you think it is all there in detail. You also think the story makes sense and that's what I am winding back to.

Because anyone who actually crafts an art realizes that while the basic shapes and that impression of it all making sense is there at the outermost level of detail, at the most zoomed-out level of perceiving it, the experience of the book or movie or artwork is the encountering of details that agree with and support that impression.

And these details aren't in the writer's head. They aren't in the artist's visual imagination, no matter how good. Because the human brain isn't big enough to hold it all.

 That artist above had a concept of the character that informs every stage. She didn't have to draw the shoes before she knew what kind of shoes that character would wear. But at the same time, she didn't know how those socks folded or how many laces or any of that because those details didn't matter.

In many cases they unfold from the underlying conceptions in a logical way. Or can be reconstructed from basic principles. They don't need to invent the concept of "shoe" just to finish a drawing. They can also start that drawing knowing that shoes exist, that they as an artist have drawn shoes before, that they know how to look up a reference if that fails. It is, to borrow the math joke, a problem for which "a solution exists."

But the specifics of that shoe supports that original idea of the character, and the execution of it is unique to that artist in many ways, and the combination is that which makes this her drawing.

At the very best, if you ask ChatGPT to write your novel for you, it is only using that first gestural drawing. None of that input the artist makes is there.

And that's best case. The AI operates not with a deductive logic but statistically; it will add the kind of shoes that are more likely to be added in similar circumstances. This is a place where an artist could say, "ah, but he might have penny loafers with tassels, and that could add a little flair that isn't otherwise visible in his dress." The AI can't make those kinds of decisions.

It can give the illusion of making them, because it will make some decisions and some of those will be low probability. But even outside the "death of the artist" argument, since there's no connectivity here, the details won't support each other.

More artist talk. See that gestural drawing that's first in the series, and how that captures how the character is standing? Now look closer. The drape of the clothing follows how that clothing would have to move from that person assuming that position. The line-work points and subtly accents the underlying line of action.

Look at an AI image and the line is broken. Because there never was a line; any of the parts that remain are borrowed chunks from similar poses and similar choices made by similar artists that may or may not resemble each other in this specific aspect.

Every single line of dialogue in a novel is doing something. Every choice of a word in a description is doing something. It isn't a a "gaunt" stoney outcrop because that's a synonym for bare, it is because the writer wanted you to be thinking of sunken cheeks. Of hunger, perhaps, thus helping to establish that this is a place bare and inhospitable. Or it is "gaunt" because they'd used "barren" in the previous sentence and those two sound too much alike. Or it is "gaunt" because three paragraphs down there's going to be a little joke with it.

Again, the AI can do this. Not through intention, but because it is in the training data, and the patterns are familiar, and some other writer once made a similar choice even if for different reasons. So it can come up, and it can convince, create that illusion of mind, the way a dream can appear to have a rational plot at the moment you are dreaming it.

But none of this is the choice made by the person who asked AI to write their book.

No. You didn't find the cheat code to make art. You didn't find a way to skip the boring part -- because the part of it that is your book isn't there in the idea, in the outline, in the prompt.

It didn't exist. It never existed. You've got an illusion of this wonderful book that just needs someone to put the words down for you. No. You don't. That is the blind spot speaking, the dream speaking so compellingly. The book in your mind doesn't exist yet. And it will never exist.

Unless you write it.

Diffused Goals

Hit a stall on The Early Fox. Possibly due to the new meds — which are promising, at least.

I was reading up (well, mostly listening to a podcast series) on the Apache, and looking at videos of Cloudcroft, NM.  Sigh. Cloudcroft really doesn’t fit the vibe I was going for.

Took several days to figure out that this could be a good direction after all. And now the cast living inside my head has made adjustment to their new status and they’ve come to life again.

But they are no longer searching for Doc Noss’s lost treasure. That pulled the narrative too far off course. Pity, because I’d even worked out a clue they could enlist Penny into helping with. (See, an old letter was using bad schoolboy Greek, but Penny recognizes it is a paraphrase from Xenophon, because that’s the schoolboy lesson. And her Greek is equally bad and she’s making the same kinds of mistakes so she understood what she was looking at...)

Anyhow.

We’ve got this deeply ingrained instinct to learn shit. And once we learn a new thing, we get proprietary about it. We want to get better, and we want to boast. Yesterday at work I got into a conversation about 7400 series chip codes. It is hard not to remember once being good at a thing, and wanting to pick it up again and polish those old skills.

We get into Jeff Goldblum territory too easily, where we start pushing at a thing because we’ve gotten intrigued by the technical challenge. And we lose track of why (if there ever was a reason) we wanted to do it in the first place.

So, Stable Diffusion. AI image creation is moving with lightning speed. This is more of a tech bubble thing where the industry is visibly trying to excite people, and throwing a ton of money at it (which hides much of the true cost), but nobody has quite answered what it is they are actually trying to solve.

They’ve got a cool thing, and someone must be willing to pay money for it. Dot dot dot profit.

All of us down much lower on the tech pyramid are chasing around trying to learn about it, trying to figure out how it will affect us. And in some cases, playing with the thing. A project that started out as fun but is now increasingly just about the technical challenge.

I’m still on the aging Web UI based AUTOMATIC1111 front end. Mostly because I already know where everything is. And my hardware might not be able to take advantage of the modular structure of ComfyUI.

The WebUI SD implementation was originally built around the SD1 model, based on the LAION data set, a 512x512 pixel data set. The SD1.5 proved the most popular and long-lasting.

I’ve never been particularly lucky with AI upscaling. Probably because I’ve been generating with a variety of LoRAs with narrower and more specialized data sets and focus, and lacking those resources, the upscalers tend to try to turn everything into a variation of what it is they expect to see.

A basic and perennial problem with AI. Even the more recent data sets are mass data scrapes of largely copyright archives. Poses, for instance, are over-represented by advertising, fashion, news; meaning they default to the standard upright and facing (with a 20-something, good-looking, white model, too). The AI borks when asked to do fighting poses because that’s such a smaller part of its resources. Even if it starts with the right pose, it drifts off (or it fleshes out its equivalent of a gestural drawing with the wrong muscle groups and clothing details — all of them belonging on a model in a more familiar pose.)

And you may ask, how can you generate at a higher resolution in the first place? Because the source images weren’t all taken at the same distance. One might be a full-length person, one might be a close-up of hands. It uses the later to fill in when it is doing the later passes.

Theoretically. Since it is looking for any resemblance that fits the guidelines, you can (and sometimes do) find a clear kneecap instead of a knuckle. Because the dice have no memory; there is no underlying plan. At every sequential numbered step between the original gaussian blur and the final render, it is treating it as a new problem of “what is this blurred image and what in my training data might look like it?” Modified of course by prompt and other weighting such as ControlNet.

This relates to what is seen as the problem of hands but isn’t a problem itself; it is a diagnostic. But I’ll get back to that.

The next model was the SDXL, which used a 1024x1024 set of sources. With some curation towards representation et al (yet, still massive copyright violations). So with that as a base you can generate at 1024 native, and up to at least 2048 with a low level of artifacts.

For me personally, I couldn’t get XL to run correctly. There’s a fork called Pony which added a ton of anime images (2.5 million scrapes of anime, and furry -- or couldn’t you guess?) That biases that model, so there are some forks of Pony towards more realistic images.

I’m using one of those as the base model now.  Each model has its own peculiarities, both in the variety of training data, the weighting of parts of that data, and the prompts which are recognized. One model might completely ignore “Mazda,” another immediately spit out four-door compacts.

(Or ancient sun gods).

This is the basic and endemic problem of AI; it converges on the norm. More than that, it produces a convincing simulacrum of that norm.

Which is not to say people aren’t able to explore personal visions. But that convergence means, among other things, that the dice memory effect gets amplified. The AI does not understand it is supposed to be a steampunk dirigible. At every step of the render it will be attempting to relate what is in the image to what it finds familiar.

LoRA attempt to swamp this effect by having their own pool of training images which are heavily weighted. But since that is a smaller number of images, they can’t handle the variety that might appear in the final image. So it started to render a brass gear, but it ran out of reference material that matched what was currently in the render and swapped it out for a gold foil star.

But back to my current process.

Inpainting is the key. Inpainting is basically the img2img process with a mask.

When you are generating from scratch, the engine fills a block of the requested image size with gaussian noise. It then progressively looks for patterns in what is first noise, then a noisy image. In img2img mode the starting point is a different image. A selectable amount of noise is added; basically, the AI blurs the original, then tries to construct what it has been told (by prompt and other weighting) to expect to see.

Inpainting mode further restricts this with a mask, meaning only certain parts are corrected. In a typical render-from-scratch workflow, the area of a badly rendered hand is selected, then that part of the image re-rendered until a decent hand appears. (Not picking on hands here, regardless of how meme-able those have been. It just makes an easy example).

For my process, I select the dirigible (made-up example; not sure I’ve ever attempted a proper steampunk image) and load up a specific LoRA and rewrite the prompt to focus attention on what I need to see. Then I switch to the guy with the sword, inpainting again with a pirate LoRA and prompt, and so on until all the image elements of this hybrid idea are present.

I want to get back to this, but the idea of a dinosaur in Times Square is easy to achieve with any of the various AI implementations, but only casually. It will not be a good dinosaur, or a good Times Square, and the ideas will get contaminated. The dinosaur will get Art Deco architecture and the buildings will sprout vines. At a casual glance, it is fun, but this is why AI is and will probably remain unsatisfying.

When you drill at all deeply, it is getting it wrong. 

I just tried to do some desert landscape and at first glance, sure, it does all the desert things. Sand, rocks, wonderful sky. Except. I’m no geologist but look any longer than a second or two and the geology looks just really, really wrong. And there’s a reason for that besides lack of sufficient specific references that force it to repurpose more generalized resources.

That reason is that this is entirely built on casual resemblances. There’s nothing in the process resembling the rules that underly the appearance of almost all things. It doesn’t put two hands on a person because it is working through the denoising process in assembling a person of standard anatomy, it does this because most of the training examples present it with more than one and less than three hands.

It has no concept of hand. It finds hands in proximity to arms but, like a baby, there’s no object permanence. An arm that goes behind something else now no longer carries forward the assumption of a hand being involved.

That's why you will hear the AI bros shouting that hands are a solved issue. They aren't "solved"; the symptom was attacked brute-force style by giving it more reference images of hands until the statistical probability of looking like a normal hand rose sufficiently. The underlying problem remains.

If you look closely, and especially if you have any subject-matter competence, the details are always wrong. No matter what it is -- and the more out of the mainstream the subject, the more likely it will be wrong.

The big models were trained on a shitload of human beings and the average of that mass is a thing that looks to the casual eye like a human. We apes are trained to pay attention to apes so one of the ways AI images convince for a moment (before Uncanny Valley yawns wide) is a nice smile and a pair of eyes you can make contact with...and it is only with a longer glance that you see the scenery behind this particular Mona Lisa is a worse fantasy than whatever Leo was painting there.

That's the trick of AI. It has this glossy, convincing look that up until AI came along took a lot of labor and a lot of skill to achieve. Just like LLMs can convince us with four-dollar words and flawless grammar that the facts contained in that text are also correct. But there's no connection. The kinds of details that took a photograph or a really dedicated painted are achieved without effort, because these are just surface artifacts.

In a slightly different context, Hans Moravec talked about why we overestimated computer intelligence for so long: because we humans find math hard. Adding up large numbers is hard for us because we are general-purpose analog machines and the reality of the elaborate calculus we are doing just to catch a ball in on hand is hidden from us. So the machine, by adding big numbers, looks smart. And we can't understand intuitively why recognizing a face should, then, be so hard for it.

So AI images have this same apparent competence. It takes an artist’s eye, or an anatomist’s, to see the pose is fucked up, the muscle groups are wrong. The more you know what to look for, the more you fail to see the things that a Rodin was able to carve into clay and stone. How this finger flexed means this muscle is tensed. There’s reasons for things. There are underlying structures.

It’s not just a pile of rocks in the desert. It is the underlying rock partially covered by weathered material.

But back to the art process. I am well beyond inpainting the bad hand. I am doing this inpainting cycle right down to the basic composition, because what I am after lies too far outside any trained concepts or available references.

Part of that fault lies in my base model of choice. Especially the 2.5 million image Pony set is character art, so very presentational in a single large posed figure. It doesn't want to do a long camera view of three people having a conversation.

I usually start with another image. It might be a generated image — but one that might be using a different model entirely. And even that will be so far off, that image goes outside to be painted on with a tablet and digital brush.

Other times I've started with a photograph that is close in some way. Or a rough sketch. Or once (and it went so well I mean to continue the experiments!) a posed artist's mannequin.

Multiple passes at different levels of blur and different focuses of prompt are needed to get the thing to move in the direction I’m envisioning. For this, another useful dial to tweak is the “steps” dial. A low blur and a low steps means it doesn’t change much, but it changes it with very little resemblance to the original.

A high step count means it moves conservatively from the blurred image, refining a little bit at a time, and thus tends to preserve details in a way that low blur doesn’t do.

High blur, on the other hand, frees the engine to make radical changes in shape and color; changes that are not the same as the conceptual changes aimed at with low step count. 

Often, though, the AI needs a more direct hint. So back through an external paint application.

This part is peculiarly fascinating to me because, a bit like the Moravec example, it requires me to think in a very different way. For one very basic lesson, the AI responds to value, not lines. That's one of the tough things for many young artists to learn because from the first moment we pick up a pen we tend to think in terms of lines. Of outlines, of borders. Seeing things in shading planes is a further step. But seeing just raw tones, divorced from other clues; that's an unfamiliar way of looking.

That pride in learning a new skill? I have a certain pride in knowing the shortcuts that communicate to the AI. It isn't about realism, it is about certain tricks it recognizes. And on the flip side, avoiding things I have learned confuses it. This happens in prompting, too, have no doubt about that, but it is a particular joy in being able to use those skills of seeing and visualizing that I used back when I was designing for the stage. Or trying to learn how to draw comic books.

In any case, the last steps are performed on the whole image, using a more conservative LoRA and prompt, low blur and high step count. This emphasizes refining, cleaning up what is already there. The final pass is done with multiply on — my graphics card can handle up to 2.5x the working resolution without tiling (and I’ve gone 4x with).

I know the upscaler is supposed to use the prompt and LoRA from the image in question but this method gets much, much closer to conserving the details that are peculiar to that LoRA.

And at the end of it I look at it, say, “That looks cool” and then close the file. Because there’s really little purpose in it otherwise. The goal was learning something technical.

Singing the Blues

 

Part II is complete. I'm aiming for a shorter book this time so I have as little as 20K to go before the end game. That's 2-3 set-piece scenes, a couple of long drives, another desert wander if I can do it and a bunch of conversations. For what was planned as a novel with mostly silences I'm ending up with a hell of a lot of conversations.

Have decided to eschew continuing the outline, and just see how the story unfolds. Maybe I should plan more. I am really, really looking forward to switching gears to a couple of SF novels where I can ration the world-building. This series is largely about showing off a region and a culture and there's an additional constraint that the real world isn't tidy. I can't have a single planet, war, piece of tech that sums up a theme or idea I'm trying to put across. Instead I just have to deal with the mess of nineteen different tribes in New Mexico alone. Even when you go back to the Ancestral Pueblo (who we used to call Anasazi) they aren't the only or dominant culture in the area.

So I got Freeman singing some blues and a song that might be too on the nose. And I felt obligated to at least mention the Mound Builder Myth -- it is part of the themes I'm developing but I can't spare pages to go into it properly. And I really need Jackson and Sanchez back for another scene before the ending so I'm dreaming of a sequence now where they get in the way of a truck that's trying to run her off the road, a la Silkwood.

The only episode I've got at all planned out is I'm gonna go to Cloudcroft. That's gonna be the big fix of western history, Indian Wars, treasure hunters standing in for prospectors, and a group I'm calling the Asshole Apache in my notes (that's how the NAGPRA rep at White Sands referred to them). Another bunch of retired guys in a bar, but instead of playing the blues (and old protest songs) they are talking up past exploits and plotting how to get at the Victorio Peak treasure.

The whole thing might be too on-the-nose to feel right. Too much easy stereotype there. But they've been living in my head long enough the scenes and settings and conversations have all grown around them and at this point all I have to do is write them down.

Oh, and do some research on Cloudcroft, Lozen (and the Apache generally), plus I've found some good stuff on the early days of Los Alamos. (The Netflix series is...a Netflix series. Too much history is changed because the story they wanted to tell is sex and suspicion under the tensions of building the first atomic bomb.)

And listen to some more of that Delta Blues.

My opinion of the moment is that AI was pretty much the inevitable next step in what was already happening in publishing. And in the pop music industry, for that matter. Amazon Kindle is the literary equivalent of streaming music services, and when you build a business model on quantity, the pinch point is how much you pay for processed creative product.

People have been exploring that with low-content books and short books. They'd already reached a point where writers going into the eBook market couldn't afford editing or boutique cover services. In fact, the pressures of that algorithm running the firehose of "more books but cheaper, please" means even spending longer than four months to write the damned things is a luxury unaffordable for the self-published writer.

I am writing faster. I feel I've finally made a breakthrough where it really is starting to come easier. But, as with so many things, I seem to have arrived too late. I fixed some of my outstanding health issues maybe four months too late to jump on a new position I really, really wanted (and I'm still dealing with the fallout from that). I put money in the stock market just before one of the big crashes. Joined the Maker Movement and a hackerspace when that was imploding under the weight of commercialism. Doctorow had only the corner of it; enshittification is happening everywhere (and has been happening for a long time, will always happen).

The landscape of fiction is changing so rapidly I don't even recognize it now.

Of course, here I am writing a travel adventure series where we finally crawled out of COVID to hit world-wide revolt against the growing problems of mass tourism (something I did indeed write about in my first book, with the horrendous problems suffered by Venice). And as of this month it has become increasingly difficult to Fly While American. We've managed to piss off so much of the world that even (unfairly) pretending to be Canadian doesn't return travel to where it was even ten years ago.

Hell, I had story lines planned both in Moscow and in Tel Aviv. Not really stories you want to be trying to tell at the moment. Everything is changing so rapidly. I struggled enough dealing with the ubiquity of GPS and translation software and Google (although, oddly, that enshittification is actually helping there. It has reached the point where "I'll just Google up this obscure historical fact that will solve the mystery" is no longer the panacea for the problems faced by an Archaeologist-Adventurer.)

Oh, yeah, and my latest mass-produced cover is so...meh...I don't even have the heart to get back to 101 Covers and see if it can be rescued. I'm close to just writing off that hundred bucks and doing something different.

Not AI, though. I'm not desperate. Or stupid.

(We didn't need a university-level study -- there's at least two I've read on pdf -- to show this idea that the original training data is so finely ground it would be impossible to return the original images from it. Well...poke around enough, and I'm pretty sure you could identify that artist's signature that the AI put in there without even being asked for it!)

Whiskers on Kittens

Finally did the first Jackson and Sanchez scene. I have a feeling I'm going to revise a few times before I am happy with it. There's a hell of a lot happening in these last chapters of Part II.

I got a few hundred words down over breakfast. And second breakfast. Was glad I had a computer available for the next few (text is up to 30K now).

Glad because these are a few things I had to look up. Animal life (and tracks) at White Sands. Colors of various "warning, radiation" signs. The street address of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. The dates of the kitty litter incident at WIPP, and the safety officer exodus at LANL.

The correct term for the Air Force field uniform. Oh, that was fun. Turns out the same year as my story, they are phasing out one style and bringing in another. Only, not across the whole service at once. Some of them are still back in a third!

Air Force slang. The correct branch of the Air Force for my pair (not that they are telling Penny). Ranks addresses and saluting protocol (I may have saluted a lot, but I was never an officer). What is a HEMI (that was a thing ten years ago, as of this story. Oh, well. Penny has already stated she doesn't do cars. Or Chrysler trucks). The contents of an abo knapping kit, shapes of Clovis, Folsom, and Western Stemmed Tradition points. Burlington (Missouri) chert. Genetics of the Solutreans. Kulkulkan. 

There was probably more but that's all I remember.

And, no, Spock is totally wrong here. Unless things really are different in the Star Trek universe...after all, didn't we already have the Eugenics Wars? Khaaaaaaaan!

The Trouble with Research

...is that it is volatile. I spent three days (well, I was doing other things, too). But three days just to track down a particular piece of art.

See, I'd seen it. I made a note to myself that I might want to use it. But that was when I was early in the development of The Early Fox and didn't know quite where it was going to go. So I read three or four books on nuclear New Mexico, on Navajo miners and Downwinders, as well as on ranchers and eminent domain in White Sands and on the hill that became Los Alamos.

No matter how much I take notes, and highlight passages, I just can't remember the stuff I end up wanting to use. So I try, these days, to parcel my research efforts out. I read just enough to make sure the plot points are plausible.

And I wait until I'm actually writing the scene before I read any further.

One downside to this is it is almost like cramming for an exam. In this current book, the geology of the playa plays a crucial part in the plot. But I already wrote the scenes that are heavily about that geology. I risk having forgotten too much when I come back to it for the final clue.

Another downside is a lack of front-loading. My new Nuke Museum sequence is going to take some absorbing of Los Alamos in the Trinity Test days. Ideally, I'd stop and watch Oppenheimer and do some more academic research and I'd let that sort of cook until I could basically write a short historical-fiction excerpt.

And...oops; Manhattan just dropped on Prime free. Of course, the same book I discovered the Noel Marquez painting in, is SCATHING about the Manhattan mini-series...

I don't want to lose steam so I'm skipping over the museum to do Penny's meeting with Jackson and Sanchez, and the end of Part II. Which is what I'm doing with Egtved anyhow. But I do worry that the stack of plot changes is reaching critical mass. At some point I need to go back and rewrite before I forget that what a Christie Pit is got moved to Chapter 8 so needs to be taken out of Chapter 4...

Also research-wise, the desert stuff especially makes this a very visual book, and that makes it better to do at home on the dual-monitor setup. I really do love writing in a cafe over a long brunch, but the phone screen can only handle blocks of text. I can't have pictures of the rocks and sand spread out at the same time.

I only got five hundred out today, but I still have a little time after dinner and -- now that I'm about to hit the "Test Bed," it is going quickly.

Good thing, too, because I've got shiny new idea syndrome. Ran into another article and I want to do the boat one, and the viking one. But no vikings in boats. For how lightweight these damn Athena Fox stories really are (and for how low the sales are on them), I really should be punching them out on a four-month basis.

Oh, yeah. And started the home folder and dropped a 500-word proof-of-concept on my "words about writing" book.

Frybread

I've been fried all week. Strange week. Have a lot of energy at work but collapsing in the evenings and thus, no writing done.

One day into the weekend and there's 1,700 words down. The whole Pueblo Cultural Center thing written. But...reviewing that work (after I woke up again, damn this sickness), realized I'd completely forgotten the mural. So now need to open one of my Kindle books, track that thing down, and slot it in.

On top of the open tabs I've got on pueblos of New Mexico, language groups, blue corn, and the Three Sisters. And oh boy is frybread a rabbit hole. Not just a million varieties, but history legacy and identity and, yes, even controversy. That is a hell of a lot to load on to one pancake. No wonder the stuff is nearly flat.*

These driving scenes are killing me. I end up talking about all sorts of strange things in them. The intent was to just make them contemplative, just a landscape passing almost as if in a dream. But I am not Tolkien. I can't fill three pages on how dry the rocks are. I couldn't even do it with a nice fat tree to describe.

And I'm not ready for the nuke museum scene. I wish I had work week still on me because dreaming up this one is good stuff for the mental back-burner. I have the edge of something with Penny imagining herself a Los Alamos wife (and it was wartime, so yeah, a lot of them were working inside the gates, too. Some even had degrees!) And somehow carrying this on to some sort of bad blood between a surly teen or an influencer or someone who damaged an exhibit, and blames Penny for getting in trouble over it.

Because I really do want that chase through the missile yard. And doing it with Penny half-thinking spies at Los Alamos...

But I'm losing my focus, so I'm gonna go watch the Tenth Doctor play the Fifteenth... 

* Frybread, described by many as an indispensable ingredient of a powwow...is made with wheat. Think about it for a moment.

Crime Novel and Museum Guide

My outline revisions now have Penny visiting two museums in Albuquerque before doing her hike into the desert. It harms the pacing, but it is the best way to set up stuff I want her to know for the stuff that happens in the end of Part II.

And I don't actually have to info dump. She can be showing learning "things" basically off-stage, with the scenes about...scene stuff.

I have this idea of her somehow experiencing Los Alamos in the 1940's via some of the exhibits. Bringing that more to life. It isn't exactly the core historical period but, really, the historical thing for this book is largely the nuclear age.

BTW, I write this on the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test. 

I also, really really want to do a chase or fight scene around the rockets. It looks almost like a railyard out there, with these missiles on their sides lined up like detached strings of freight cars. I had thoughts while I was there of ducking in and out in one of those "chase through the railyard" scenes.

Only problem is, there's not anyone chasing Penny yet. There are at least two (possibly three) distinct things she does towards the end of Part II that changes that status and changes the game.

And I sort of want this to be real stakes. Not her imagination running away, not a confused Karen chasing after her because she thought Penny was a docent and is demanding she explain the Titan Missile Program to her bored kids. In the best of all possible worlds, this would be the fallout from some Good Samaritan act earlier.

I'm feeling a little better about the lack of side quests. I mean, I still don't have them, but she did do a few active things to earn clues, and wasn't just getting them handed to her. 

Anyhow.

I made another lovely trip to the ER. So understandable why I'm writing a bit slow. But it really does feel like I'm getting the hang of putting out a good 5K a week, and it is methods that can be expanded to more, perhaps significantly more.

Which is good, because I'm still having Shiny New Idea syndrome.

I still wish sometimes I was doing Actress Penny. Taking it even further; she actually did a bunch of movies of the sort of Asylum kind -- possibly mockbusters referencing more directly properties that I wouldn't be able to include in their original form.

So no skills in archaeology, or gunplay, or really much physical skill other than a rough-and-tumble physicality. But a skilled mimic with eidetic memory and original-Penny's gift of gab/CHAR 20 ability to convince other people. She'd be the kind of hero who could fake knowing guns well enough to bluff an enemy...but also able to somehow pull off firing the thing anyhow when things went sideways.

And the movies are a running gag, both for pop-cultural references that are entirely IP free, and as her version of the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook.

The more plausible/likely idea I had, though, is to take the idea of fiction becoming real, and two ordinary people getting forced by "the story" to take on roles of omni-disciplinary historian/linguist/archaeologist and companion good-at-everything-physical Action Girl archetype.

And make that the last chapter of the "Other Adventures of Athena Fox" idea I proposed earlier.

Those who can't do...

Made my 1200 over the end of the VP-8 scene, and then came back to the keyboard just before bed with a waterfall of notes that brings the plan all the way up to the end of Part II. Folding in that left turn to Albuquerque, a key revelation about Mary Cartwright (the Tewa-speaking NAGPRA representative who came out to the dig outside Holloman AFB), the fallout of Penny's unauthorized walk deeper into the missile range, the Demon Core, Clovis points...

But I realized today I've slipped again into a bad habit. I wanted to have clearer clues and have the plot change with each clue. I've done that, more or less. Even if there isn't a shooting at the giant pistachio until several chapters later.

But basically Penny is going around talking to people. She isn't having to struggle for these, not mostly. No disguises, no fights, no side quests ("Sure, I'll tell you all about the Christie Pit, but first can you take these corn muffins to a coffee shop in Taos for me?")

And I could have done something interesting at the Shroud Museum. Confront Penny with her faith (or lack of it), and at least give her some morally gray choices.

I haven't even done any plot-tangential delays to her "Go to the next location, pick up the next plot coupon" journeys. The best I got is I had her help a tourist family take pictures of their kids with the aliens.

I mean, sheesh, Michael Rennie could have asked her to help setting up the conference room.

The one that started as a side quest is now an integral part of the plot. "Dynel" (Penny doesn't know her yet, but was struck by the vivid color of the hair dye she is using) was just a thing Penny saw and maybe said something about. Now it is a crux moment for her emotionally, transitioning her from avenging Lon's death to being willing to listen and find a compromise with the new safety officer at WIPP.

I'm also getting increasingly uncomfortable on this one about all of these real people and places. The Shroud Museum is such a small (but earnest) little operation I really, really don't want to make fun of them or otherwise show them in a bad light. Hell, I sort of hate to be putting in print the word on the street; that the White Sands Mall is dying.

***

Anyhow, the Viking book (next part of Penny's Road Trip) is looking more and more likely. No ideas yet where else to put her on her cross-country journey in search of America. Very possibly Boston. Perhaps I can schedule another trip back to my own birth town.

Today's plot bunny, however, isn't a bunny. It is a turkey.

(image stolen from Poseidon's Scribe)

I want to make a writer's lexicon. Not a complete one, not one with all the APA-standard citations. Just what I am seeing in the field today, and what I've coined myself that seems to work (some of which are making minor traction outside my own notes).

And mostly just being cranky, clever, and talking about books and ideas and tropes and writing philosophy from a constructivist standpoint. The history of "Mary-Sue," what the evolving usage says culturally, how it may help or hinder a writer (particularly a beginning writer, against whom it often appears as a threat or even a weapon).

The downside is, well, having to do the work. Of doing the looking up of histories and usage and at least credit sources.

And that's the worse part. I can't just copy the Turkey City Lexicon, or five hundred pages from TVTropes, because those are copyright creations. Even if their CC status allows, it isn't right to do. I need to add value.

Which paradoxically means that a complete lexicon (itself quixotic) is morally questionable. Better to take selections and build upon them with original thoughts and writing.

Which does work because the original Turkey City, as with Diane Wyneth-Jones "Tough Guide" works, are the products of skilled writers. They are short precise stinging and to the point.

I...am not. Verbose, I can do.

(And I already have a cover concept).

Ode on a Grecian Mask

I got done with the VP-8 scene. Got through in one go. Okay, there's some parking lot conversation I want to fit in. There's just a little more business between Penny and Lon to get through.

So I've got the dig team, the NAGPRA liason, the conspiracy theorist, and the retired nuclear physicist all on the page now. Always exciting the first time you try out a character. Lon took three drafts to try to zero in how he worked on the page. And he is still too nice a guy.

Next chapter, I add Jackson and Sanchez and that's it for major recurring characters. I think "Michael Rennie" may come back for a brief scene and there's a docent at the Nuke museum in Albuquerque who has a big chapter, but I've almost got the whole cast in place.

Oh, yeah. The VP-8 was the thing they turned loose on the Shroud of Turin as one of the many ways people have argued over the authenticity of the thing. I may end up needing a sensitivity reader for Catholicism for the scene I just wrote as, funny thing, the people at the museum are believers.

But I referenced another of Schliemann's exploits. Might end up cutting that. I've really reduced Penny's rambles about Sir Historical Figure Not Appearing in This Story for this novel. All part of my distillation.

Distillation one way, decompression in another. My latest worry is I might have too many action beats going on. I've become too conscious of the way people in a conversation notice bits of body language and read nuances and assumptions into them. Sure, I came through theatre and TTPRG where that is always part of the dialog as experienced.

But I feel I might be overdoing it. Today, when I got to the cashier at my usual place to order brunch I saw the previous guy had forgotten to sign for his purchase. He was still getting water so I tried to catch the eye of the cashier so she could remind him, instead of a stranger shouting "Hey, you!" down the hall.

She hadn't looked at her side of the display, she just saw me trying to catch her attention so gave me a short "I will be with you in a moment, sir!"

But at that moment water guy stood up and saw me looking at him. So I caught his eye and made a scribbling motion in the air. He moved closer but figured it out on the way. Signed, left with a quiet thanks. And cashier lady turned around none the wiser and took my order.

Now, that's some fun stuff. All is grist for the writer's mill and swap out one of those items for a live grenade and you might have a story moment. But I am worried now that I am pinging on too much of this stuff now -- maybe I really am spectrum and it has taken me this much lifetime to finally start noticing all this stuff -- and I'm cramming more of it into the flow of my writing than I really should.

My dialogue is decompressed to all hell anyhow. Penny was never an efficient speaker, in dialog or narration, but now I have entire sequences of people going "Oh? Well, yes. You sure? Yes" at each other.

And for all my intent that this was going to be 90% lyrical descriptions of empty desert, there sure are a lot of conversations.

Is this just fantasy?

Placing your book in the right genre is getting harder and harder. More of that mighty algorithm, in which everything from YouTube recommendations on up is trying desperately to narrow down what specific niche it is that you like best so it can feed you nothing but that.

Being outside of popular genres harms your exposure and thus your sales. Falling outside of recognized genres...is the kiss of death.

Oh, guess what's leading right now? Fantasy. Romantasy may or may not be peaking. Cozy Fantasy might have managed to murder itself through over-tailoring. Urban Fantasy is heading in the direction of Steampunk, which still has life every now and then but the chatter on BookTok et al will only consider it if approached with ironic intent.

SF is not doing well at all. Nor is historical (outside of historical romance, which despite surging and ebbing through trends, seems likely to survive forever).

And YA dystopia? The punchline (my personal theory is that audience went off into k-drama to get the hit they were after). In any case, any publishing boom there could be fueled for decades on the backlog of manuscripts they've already seen.

There are readers hungering for something new, or at least something they aren't being offered enough of. There are strong fans of historical fiction. The problem is, this market is small enough in comparison to the big movers it can't really survive in isolation. It needs to be shared with the larger audience to gain enough additional sales in the "I don't usually read this sort of thing but..." that it makes back investment.

And that's not something the algorithm supports. Commodification of this sort leads to homogenization. Nobody wants to make the one cereal without sugar, the one orange juice with pulp. They want to be the same burger, the same hammer, but a few bucks cheaper than the other guy.

Anyhow. Writing is potentially less of a career than it has ever been. The boom of self-publishing is largely over as there is a glut of product and a buyer's market. (Most of the big successes were aggressive self-marketers, but even that has narrowed down to a very specific and rare set of skills -- not a route open to everyone.)

Oh, yeah. None of the projects on my table are fantasy. And one of them is arguably steampunk.

Boogie with a suitcase

Still sick. Three weeks now.

But still pushing, and put 1,500 words in the can today. I got a little slowed down with the first meeting with Lon Davis, as it took three tries to get where I was going with his character and what plot bites I was going to drop in that first scene, and what I wanted to save in reserve.

And I still need to go back and refactor Dylan a little. He has to be much more shy during the work scenes, and sillier in the off-work scenes. I need to keep taking lectures away from everyone, and I also want to firmly establish that he is in no way a love interest.

Yeah, so much for the love triangle.

But the first John Freeman scene went great. (I even nailed down his favorite guitar, which is a 1960s Greco in green).

The biggest problem I have at the moment, in fact, is that I've decompressed too well. I'm over 8K for Part II already and even though I'm moving the second body drop, I don't know if I have time for another clue before Penny has to go walk out into the desert -- and meet Jackson and Sanchez.

(Another side effect of the decompression is Penny has already managed to talk more about her family than she has in any other single book of the series. I know; I've been saving the bit about the Hofner Bass for two or three books now, but I really didn't expect to get to a very interesting bit about her big sister. Not until at least the Vikings book. Assuming I do that story.)

(Oh, and came up with another plot for the Adventures of Athena Fox idea. A golden plate with Mayan astronomical observations necessary to "do something" about a loose asteroid or something. Said plate, unfortunately, held in the high-tech penthouse of an eccentric collector with far too many well-armed bodyguards...)

So I'm now at 20K for the book and I might have it half-written before the cover creator I'm trying out even gets back to me (100 Covers is having a summer rush. Well, they shouldn't have given away those 50% off codes).

That's assuming I keep putting off Egtved, maybe forever. Because otherwise I'll have to stop and dive into the bronze age for a week or two.

Defending that which needs no defense

So there's this familiar hero's journey. That's the hero that basically wins because he is just so honest, earnest, believing in his cause and willing to fight for it, that he convinces those around him.

He brings hope back to the faltering rebellion. He wins friends and allies who support him. Sure, he is willing to take risks, he works hard, and he can fight, too, when the need comes (and surprisingly well) but really it is this power of personality that does the trick. It is like everyone else read the script and realizes he's the hero of the story.

That's what is underlying those White Savior narratives. The white part may be new, and problematic, but that goodness thing goes back way past Dick Wittington into Jason, Theseus, and Gilgamesh. (Of course they had, depending on the culture involved, the advantage of being really tough or really, really clever as a useful selling point. Yes, let's throw in with the guy who keeps winning.)

So I was pushing hard to get my word count last night and my playlist rolled through to the soundtrack of Barbarella.

Okay, it didn't hit me until the extended flight sequence; Pygar takes wing, and carries Barbarella into battle. Which she wins. And her good eye and her calmness under fire is a big part of it, but the whole thing wouldn't have happened if she hadn't brought Pygar's confidence back to him.

Because she believes in him. Take the sex out of it, and it is just like the typical male hero with their engaging grin and their, "This time we can win" speech.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote...

I'm a quarter of the way to my desired word count for the day. Now just waiting for the work day to be over so I can get back to it.

As always, the times I can't write -- due to being busy, or due to feeling blocked -- are the times I get the most ideas.

So here's the latest plot bunny of the first days of summer. The Athena Fox Chronicles.

I thought of this before when KDP had this great idea about serialized fiction. Which didn't work out. And I've been working this past couple of weeks to push the social media marketing.

Turns out KDP has turned off the feature that let you put a preview widget on your blog. Still works on Facebook, though, so perhaps I'll finally get around to sprucing up my Facebook page.

Explored options for what is sometimes called Pocket Book (a trademark which has gone generic now), or Mass Market Paperback; the 4.25" x 7" format that fit into those wire racks you still see at airports (if nowhere else). Since I was a little kid reading science fiction I wanted to see my name on one of those covers. The larger Trade Paperback just doesn't feel "real" in the same way.

IngramSpark has that as a trim option. Probably not worth it just yet but if I do manage to get The Tiki Stars finished I'll bring that out in that format first. Just for the effect.

Anyhow, thought about posting excerpts on FaceBook and whatever else works. This blog gets about 250 hits a page so even if those mostly human, not bots, it isn't going to do much for my sales. And pretty much nobody sees the author's webpage I set up. I do need to spruce up my Amazon Author page at some point, though.

And thinking about excerpts reminded me of the thought of doing a set of shorter stories. Which, since the serial outlets turned out not to work that well, would be packaged in a single omnibus.

Originally the thought was to do some of the germs that didn't feel like they'd expand into a full novel.

But the better thought could be that these are explicitly presented as written by Penny, back when she was putting out scripts for that college video she did.

Which is to say, license to grab on to all the crazy fun that comes with letting go of strict historical realism. Or realism, generally. And the sop to my conscious is the framing story where older-and-wiser Penny apologizes for her college-age self and lists a few of the more egregious errors.

But write them as straight-up serious adventure stories.

Honestly, I posted today because I thought I'd jot down a few ideas and I didn't feel like opening the Scrivener series home file to do it. But right now nothing is jumping out. I'd like it to be a mix of oldies-but-goodies, and bizarre stuff that might be hot in the news but in any case not as many people have heard of.

And take the chance to put Athena Fox (because this would be that character fully realized, not a student cosplaying her), into places and situations I don't think I could do a proper job on in any realistic story. Like crashed flying saucers at the South Pole, or undersea cities, or.... well, why not do some period pieces too, while I'm at it?

But since none of those ideas are coming to mind right at the moment, I'll go ahead and start a new Scrivener home file and...try not to dilute my excitement by writing too much down now.

***

And I've got the first one. "The Stone Tape." Someone invents a "psychometric amplifier" -- riffing off Tom Swift's "Electronic Retroscope" as well as Nigel Keane's scripted BBC production and similar ideas used in the same author's Quatermass, specifically "Quatermass and the Pit." And the particularly invasive haunting in what is considered the worst X-Files episode filmed (the "Face on Mars" one).

Which underlines that the problem with both casual writing and well-trodden paths is you end up with trite and often-done ideas. But still sounds like a fun situation to build an adventure around. The focus could be on the psychic activity itself, the haunting so to speak, or on historical mysteries unveiled in the process. Or in the excuse to unleash a particular past on the present day -- perhaps a psychically resurrected Pharaoh? Or...just to both get to play with Victorian London and the Penny Dreadfuls, but to bring back something a little more obscure, Spring-Heel Jack!

Zombie Invasion

...and of course I wake up wanting to work on The Tiki Stars (and not the book I'm supposed to be finishing, or the one I just decided to edit).

Should not have listened to all that Les Baxter while trying to wake up (still trying to kick that energy thing that hit two weeks ago).

I was just thinking about how I am free to be less detailed in the descriptions on this one, painting a much more Impressionistic picture with quick strokes. And an entire opening scene sprang into my mind. One that touches on the world-building and the way I intend to present that world to the reader, the character of my protagonist (rough-and-tumble with a heart of gold, in this example), and lays groundwork for character and story arcs to come.

Trouble is, when I feel like this, it is usually just before I fail utterly to get more than three words written. Then take really ill.

At this point, I'm struggling enough with work I might need to retire early to get any writing done. Plus, I'm really missing theatre. If I could find some contract design work I think I'd rather like that.

Anyhow. Turns out I did start an edit on The Fox Knows Many Things, even if with what I know -- and what I think -- now, those notes would only get in the way. It really is the kind of work I do quickly, though. As opposed to charting my way into new territory: The Early Fox has just reached the edge of the clearing where I'm not revising old scenes but instead hacking into the jungle of completely new scenes.

My biggest plan right now is to explore an alternate to writing over brunch. Not because eggs cost so much these days, but because there's a natural slump when I leave the bottomless coffee cup behind (and start digesting), and it too-often lasts the rest of the day. At least when it comes to following up on the progress of the morning.

Maybe a Scottish breakfast (oatmeal) makes more sense. Ah, but I'm really wanting that big breakfast right now...

***

I hate being right. I still haven't kicked that thing and it's been three weeks now.

The Scottish Experiment was a failure. I ate at home, and...I didn't write. Not until far too late in the evening, when I somehow got it together to get through the Roswell sequence.

Did have one of those nice moments of discovery writing. For pretty much no reason (well, I'd included a mention of the Gort diorama in the description of the place), when time came to describe Random Museum Dude I decided to make him a ringer for Michael Rennie.

And then when I maneuvered them in front of the space exploration exhibit to name-drop the Drake Equation, I was able to work that into a little payoff. Well, probably only a payoff for those who remember the film, but still...

Anyhow that's 1,800 words in the can, and now on to a chapter I've been calling The Railroad, as the Lon Gunman runs Penny around Alamogordo playing with dead drops before he finally deigns to meet with her in person.

The Fox Knows Fewer Things

I've been putting together a cover order at 100 Covers. But not for the upcoming book. I thought I'd try re-staging the first one and possibly get some attention on the series.

And for some reason the book is very clear in my head at the moment. Okay, might have been I needed to look up her description of her parents for a conversation I was working on for The Early Fox. And I ended up reading straight through from that conversation to the end.

But for whatever reason, I feel like I could edit and it wouldn't even be that hard. Because I'm not thinking about trying to fix everything. I'm just thinking of sanding down a few really high spots.

There's seven I can think of right off the top. That I've been thinking of for a while. One of them that's important for reasons other than there being too much damned stuff.

The lecture on the Acropolis. I was still learning how to write this damned thing, and I was using her having a lot to say as a way to pace the scene and space out other description. I don't need that much padding or space or length. I can happily get to Spooky's dialog faster.

The conversation with the French couple. Alexander and Diogenes is too fun to skip but the whole sequence is too long.

The history discussion at Ariadne's store. It always dragged. Plus, the motivations are wacky and I know enough better know I could clean that up.

Penny's delve into some darker corners of the internet. I've made enough of a point about racist idiots; I don't need to underline them or straw-man them. There's entirely too much in both of these scenes about defending the plot, as well.

The talk with Vash at Oktoberfest. No, it isn't too long. It just kinda sucks and I should be able to write a tighter version.

The lecture about the Hermes of Athens. Just too long and too rambling.

The museum. I love the whole vibe of the scene with Penny running around looking at pots and flirting with Marcos, but she doesn't have to strawman the Dorian Invasion quite so hard. And there's more history here than is really needed. 

And for once, not a lecture; the spinnaker bit in the voyage of the Wanderer. Again I put it in for pacing reasons, but the pacing doesn't actually require it.

And there's quite a bit of trimming and clean-up I can do as well. Funny thing is; I don't expect to lose that many words. If it takes a thousand off I'd be surprised -- and since a lot more of that is in tightening up, I can easily make up that much and more by decompressing some dialog. I can even trade dialog and actual "business" for some of the place descriptions that go on too long.

Did I get that guitarist on the steps of the Acropolis? Because if he isn't there, I could happily add him in now.