Trick Pony

Still not writing. Had one of those rapid trains of thought today and put down notes on two stories in progress...but still not ready to write them. I am not feeling "blocked" (whatever writer's block really is). Perhaps a bit burnt out. Mostly, I just don't feel like, well, anything. Practicing music, cleaning house, playing games...none of it interests me. 

I am looking forward to weather that makes me less reluctant to get some walking and and perhaps more exercise than that. I seem to do better when I'm more physical, and I hope this will help with the not-exactly-depression, too.

Meanwhile I'm just randomly spinning wheels. Reading/watching a bunch of reviews to try and get some sense of what F&SF has been up to since I was last an active reader in the field. No firm conclusions -- but I am seeing there are a hell of a lot of people doing retro SF who are at least as familiar as I am with Norton and (Bertram) Chandler and "Doc" Smith et al. 

Messed around with StableDiffusion some more. Been trying a couple of different base models. I'm inpainting a bunch already -- the example I posted a while ago didn't work out quite as planned because it was pretty much there in the first pass. Most of the images I play around with are made in the inpainting and were very different in the first pass.

Still so lazy I'm using Paint3D (which Windows keeps reminding me will be deprecated for good with Windows 11...so much so, it won't even let me "open with..." any more, forcing me to open the ap first). But last time through, even with the exceptionally primitive tools (I bought Affinity Photo but it is loaded on the other machine) I was able to do a sketch stage instead of going straight for blobs of color. The "pencil" tool did the trick here. 

And I was very surprised when I found the anatomy coming back to me. The fingers remember, even if my brain had forgotten. Not that I was ever good or ever will be good, but is nice that all that time I spent trying to learn artistic anatomy wasn't entirely wasted.

In any case, each LoRA has things it is good at, and each LoRa has its own peccadillos, presumably through over-training on a limited image set. Use a LoRa for a cowboy hat and your character will turn into a red-head. Or dinosaurs will appear in the background. So inpainting is necessary, and switching the LoRAs, and since each checksum model has different LoRAs written to it, switching the base model as well. A lot of switching and clicking and waiting for things to load.

All in all, not a good system for someone who is by nature a tweaker. Too easy to get bogged down making the rounds with different combinations and different prompts, trying to bring the different parts of an image into agreement with each other...especially as AI keeps throwing up new ideas you hadn't thought of originally and get excited about following up, necessitating yet another round of changing everything else to fit...

***

Also made a connection between two bad "kinda wish I was writing that instead" ideas. I need a different term than Plot Bunnies. Plot Bunnies are when ideas breed. I guess I'll fall back on Shiny New Idea Syndrome.

I really think I wrote myself into a corner with Penny. Her strength as a character is that she is an everyman hero. But from the first book, I was jumping all sorts of hoops to get her up to full Adventure Archaeologist skill set. At least as much as a semi-realistic universe would permit. So she can climb rocks, identify artifacts...but is no martial artist and can barely say "Hello" in her seven languages.

The biggest mistake -- and I am tempted to re-write the Paris book just to take it out -- is letting her recognize that she might be a hero. She really does work better as feeling ordinary and being ever-surprised when she manages to carry off what even she calls "stupid stunts."

And her increasing knowledge in history and with travel in the contemporary world also take away something that was very handy; as a fish out of water, she can be as confused as the reader is by new places and new concepts.

In any case.

This whole imaginary conversation flashed into my head; say "Story" is happening to a pair of ordinary people, pushing them into stock roles. The guy so strongly rejected the Adventure Archaeologist thing it rebounded. Now he's got the delights of suddenly being able to read Babylonian Cuneiform (something he never had time to study). The gal is less happy, as she is turning into the Strong Female Character, the two-fisted hero to go with his (more frail) academic. She doesn't mind wearing black jeans and leather jacket now, and being able to beat people up is cool, but she has a great relationship with her sisters and extended family and is far too trope-aware that her character archetype doesn't have such things...

The best I can say is that understanding more clearly the thing I COULD write from these elements has clarified for me that I WONT write it. It bores me even more unutterably than the rest of my current life.