Hi ho

I've got a verbal agreement for Earnest in July. I have a meeting over a possible gig. And the email chain has re-started on a thing I might come back to my old workplace to work on. I've got most of the things signed over even if I haven't quite figured out what to do with the 401k, but I have yet to get those new glasses.

Or clean the apartment.

Based on current pace, revisions on The Early Fox will take another month. I wish it was faster. I wanted to do all five books. More than that, I feel the process is so good I want to be using beta readers (and editors, if I can afford it) from here on in.

If I could kick them out the door faster... Six months, maybe. Would help with less research. I mean, I like the big questions, but I spent hours checking the color of the awning on a burger joint that I don't even name in the novel (it's the Blake's Lotaburger in Albuquerque).

Maybe I don't have to do this. Maybe I can be a little...looser.

While I was taking a nice walk I realized that, IF Early Fox gets some traction, and IF I can kick out a book every six months, I've a stack of plot ideas for that series that actually seem to line up in a sensible way.

First, I have to keep her in the small towns. Do the coal mine thing. That's when she joins an amateur preservationist and gets involved in old sins of the Ludlow Massacre.

Then a wacky experimental one. It is told in third-person because the framing story is Penny waking up in a hospital with amnesia, and being handed news clippings that lets her try to reconstruct just what strange things she was up to over the last few months. Like, getting injected with a zombie drug, taking up boxing, falling in love, and doing a b-movie armed assault on a burning drug lab. And, oh yeah, since she doesn't remember any of this, the New Orleans setting can be largely "without reference material."

Probably stay in the small town for one more (the Big Easy ain't small, but...) and do the tech center in the backwoods.

Then go weird again, hanging out with an ethnomusicologist, learning to play the talharpa, and ending up with a Viking-folk band on the circuit. There's the Kensington Runestone, there's people muttering "Winter is coming," and there's a big hint of old gods.

And possibly stay with the gods and get her out of the States again. This is the one on the boat; a repossessed millionaire's playpen in international waters, filled with enough dubious antiquities that multiple nations are arguing repatriation and have flown out their worker bees to identify the stuff.

And I also have more ideas for Blue. Including some idea of what happens in the second book. But I'll leave all that for another post.

The six-pack abs of the beast

Egyptian hieroglyphs contain determinatives; special characters used to indicate whether characters are meant to be taken for semantic value or phonetic (or for a non-literal value that has become common).

This is true of all logographic languages. Learning how to make a rebus is the innovation that allows them to become full languages, capable of capturing new words and foreign concepts.

In many other written languages, forms have grown that allows one to disambiguate; from the typography of computer languages that distinguishes a string from a command, to the use of balloon shapes to give context to the text floating over a comic book page.

AI doesn't have this.

I think it is a philosophical choice driven by this Apple Computer-like idea that the machine should be seamless. The illusion of the power of "natural language." No special grammar like the nested parentheses of LiSP or technical vocabulary as is used in law, science, and every trade. 

No, an ordinary unspecialized person can just talk to the computer and it will magically understand what they need.

And yet such is already creeping around the corners. In the Stable Diffusion community, there is a primitive grammar, such as using two types of bracket to emphasize or de-emphasize keywords. It is more straight-forward, and less risky, to use ((big)) rather than attempt to rank synonyms, guessing whether the particular combination of checkpoint and LoRAs will weight "gigantic" or "gargantuan" as bigger.

And there is a specialist vocabulary that crossed over from the Danbooru image board, appearing in enough third-party anime-friendly checkpoints shorthand like the ubiquitous "1girl" have migrated into the major models.

The point is, this natural language thinking is crap. There's a reason we have specialist language. Jargon. And grammar to make distinctions that can be unclear even in face-to-face conversation.

This is already obvious in our search engines. But then, the primary driver is not to satisfy your search, but to satisfy the need of the advertisers to sell you something. AI, as currently implemented in so many customer-facing applications, from phone trees to Siri to search to queries, is an over-eager salesperson with a short attention span. They aren't listening for context. They are looking for keywords they can jump on.

It is democratization in the worst way. "It just works," but only if you were looking for whatever the mainstream is at the moment. This is why the "help" systems at something like the phone company are entirely designed around assuming you have made one of three common mistakes. Not that, maybe, something slightly less usual happened, like their equipment being broken.

What I'm saying, is that when I play around with generative AI at home and for my own amusement, I am seeing just how terrible an idea all this AI crap is. When it wants to find "the crook" somehow, it will grab on to any recognizable and repeatable element in the camera it monitors. The agentic systems aren't properly antagonistic, like a court proceeding, they are incentivized for results at any cost, even if the result is a whole bunch of false positives.

This means the entire history of metaphor and simile is out the window. Our speech is littered with terms of phrase and terms of art. Phrases that are each made up of individual words, and the underlying token philosophy of AI, and the way the limitations of data handling means language needs to be broken into the smallest possible pieces, means words are more likely to be taken out of context than in context.

I'm not saying this couldn't be addressed. After all, that's the point of agentic AI. Assign some agents to look for phrases and to weight them higher than the other agents looking at words. You can tokenize any semantic or conceptual item, after all. It doesn't have to be a word. But it isn't being done now, because it isn't useful. What is being sold to us now is something that will always answer, confidently, even if it is wrong. That will always find the right line to connect you to or the evil-doer on the security footage or the product you need to buy (even if you weren't searching for that in the first place).

Where movement is happening is in smaller user bases, more technically oriented user bases. Not the people stuck with whatever stupidity the iPhone is pushing with the latest mandatory update (speech to text gets worse with every iteration. It is so afraid of not having an answer, it prioritizes on whatever is the common answer. Invite a friend for pizza, it will be your pal. Take notes from a history lecture, and it will make a complete mess of it. No, Celine Dion did not speak at the Council of Ephesus. Or perhaps that will be the "Council of ePayments," since after all commercial interest is the only thing important here.)

AI, and Generative AI, has potential. I still think it is a brute-force attack on problems that are much subtler, and being grossly oversold, but when we wake up and start using it sensibly it can be useful.

I've been wasting time again with image generation. Hey, I got a novel concept out of it. (But that's nothing to do with how "creative" AI is -- I did exactly the same thing with pen and paper).

There were times when it felt collaborative. The downside to using Generative AI this way is that it is too easy to chase new discoveries. AI is a lootbox (especially now as the price of tokens are beginning the turn towards approximating actual cost). At any point, it can throw out something that totally isn't what you were working on, but is so "Oooh, shiny!" you want to stop and work on that instead.

(The rest of the analogy of lootboxes is that the house usually wins, giving you not-quite-right results that give you enough of the endorphin boost to keep playing, but also force you to pay up more tokens and roll again. Even with a free generator, it turns too easily into doomscrolling. With a home rig, a doomscrolling that takes fifteen minutes per generation and blasts hot air at your feet. Not a good way to waste a weekend.)

But when I started with a concept that lay inside the models I had available, and I was careful of the no man's land of things the model wasn't trained on and wouldn't understand, I could iterate and repaint until it was pretty close to what I had visualized.

And yes, the trick is to be relentlessly literal. This is a good trick in a lot of design anyhow; don't do concept, do appearance. Write out not the back story, but what you want to appear on the screen. And always be aware of keywords. Negative phrases, for instance, are counter-productive. "It is cloudy but not raining" is a terrible prompt; you will get rain. "The monster is as large as a house" is likely to get you a house-shaped monster. Or a random house.

Using the image-to-video pipeline (Wan2.2 mostly,  lately the Smoothmix checkpoint), a key is that the AI can create anything that isn't currently in the frame but could be. It has great difficulty changing what is already in the frame -- and that includes difficulty not interpreting what it sees, including the smallest artifacts, as something that needs to be there.

More than once a stray fleck on the wall has turned into a fly buzzing around the scene. The negative prompts get longer and longer. But want a lion to walk in through the door? No problem.

Still a waste of a good weekend...but fun.

RDA

So the RDA for potassium is 4700 mg. There is concern in the medical profession over damage to the intestines from high-dose supplements so they advise strongly to go with dietary potassium. "Just eat more leafy greens and fruits."

I checked out the USDA's own list. The first raw fruit to show up on their list is kiwifruit. When sliced, each cup contains 542 mg. The first leafy green is bok-choi, cooked and drained, at 631 mg per cup (spinach shows up at 538 mg/cup).

That's a lot of greens.

So let's go up to the top of the list. The first whole natural food is a baked russet potato in the skin. Large, three to four inches in diameter. 1644 mg. So that's almost three large baked potatoes. For one day's potassium.

You can get there with orange juice if it is made from concentrate; three cups. So the cheapest carton of OJ at the super will get you maybe two days of potassium. Dried apricots also concentrate it down to a similar measure, but here, we are talking a good ten bucks a pound. Trail mix is on the list but you'd have to eat two bags.

And remember, these are the top of the list. You were thinking maybe a little spinach with your balanced meal of bread, black beans, pork round, whatever? Move over Popeye, that RDA requires you slug down five cans of the stuff.

Forget the piece of chicken, piece of broccoli, corn tortilla. The USDA loves this medical advice because they'd like you to eat well and keep American agribusiness solvent. But we're not talking one hot here. We're talking Christmas Dinner every day.

And over in the other corner the AMA is confused as why, according to their measure, some 90% of Americans fail to reach their daily potassium target.

(My doctor is a little smarter. She's authorized me for potassium chloride tablets, 10 mEq, which translates to 600 mg. So that's one can of spinach down).

(And, yes, I'm in the yellow zone on both. Getting a blood draw once a month while we work on that.)

Operation Begonia

I was stopped for a day in editing The Early Fox, and went so far as to read a pdf from NASA on economical testing of small-scale NTRs (Nuclear Thermal Rocket engines).

My beta reader had complained about "Site Theta" and wanted something that sounded more military and foreboding. I agreed in that I wanted a more official-sounding name for the test pad out in the desert that could be used consistently in dialog and narration.

(That reader also complained about Major Robert Flowers, but I just haven't been able to come up with something that isn't either too boring, or too on-the-nose. I'm settling for reducing the number of times he gets reduced in the narrative as "Major Bob" -- instead of undercutting his power and menace, the narrative will more often call him "The Major.")

Anyhow, after all of that; VICTOR-7 is what I came up with. It ain't wonderful. It will have to do.

(VICTOR-7 is the codename for the test pad and associated. The actual non-code project name for the rocket was KITFOX.)

***

The other progress of the past few days is I've put Blue in uniform. There really is a mode in Military SF of the career progression story. Space Hornblower stuff -- not necessarily with ships that behave remarkably like something Wellington would use. (Only, you know, in space.)

This one is engineer career path, which should change things up a bit. She's not aiming for command and I don't intend for her to spend a lot of her time in the big chair. Plus the setting is more corporate security than front-line Navy -- her first adventure is an SAR mission tasked to a nearby Survey ship.

Strangely, one thing that held me back was the rule-lawyer thing.

Let me explain. Given that protagonists protag, even in military SF those protagonists inevitably have to break the rules. That's fine, but the repercussions are often unsatisfying. Either like Captain Kirk they get conveniently tossed into the briar-patch of being forced to command a starship again (instead of flying a desk as an Admiral), or they manage some crazy rules-lawyering by which everything they did was actually legal if you consider this sub-clause of a seldom-read paragraph that only applies when giant mole-rats are eating the sun...

Okay, sometimes they do get put on the beach, or on half-pay. Honor Harrington herself suffered from being taken off active duty (she wasn't cashiered because she has friends in high places. Which is another typical get-out-of-Leavenworth free card). So did Alexis Carew, but that was less for what she did and more because peace broke out.

That both makes a bit of a mockery out of all that insistence on honor and chain of command and respecting the regulations, and also is stuff I just don't feel like trying to figure out (aka, why exactly IS there a rule about giant mole rats?)

But outside of that, putting Blue in uniform is very genre-suitable. And there are good story beats I can get out of Blue having to work within a military-like structure.

Better than that; it provides familiar foundation for the story arc. Her having to survive on a frontier world is one thing. Her having to save herself, rejoin her crew, get their ship back, and finish their mission...that's a lot more structure to work with. Even if the story was headed that way originally, making that her duty makes it a lot more direct.

Good news is bad news

I'm half-way through revisions on The Early Fox. I am appalled at how slow it is going.

At the same time, I am learning so much. I've not really engaged with a text at this level before. I've revised at the top level, when major plot points were obscure or dramatic arcs were broken, and I've spent time in the trenches of sentence-level fixes, but what I got from my beta reader is in the space between those. That was where her notes were focused. And that is the stuff her notes gave me confidence to attack.

And one of the things I'm seeing is that I've gotten stronger as a writer, with this being my tightest book so far. And that I've finally found the heart of the series. This just works better; the mystery format, the smaller-scale setting, the personal fears and doubts, the pressure and suspense. All of it works better for me than the over-the-top Indiana Jones type stuff I originally aimed this series, and this character, at.

I really should have been remembering how much I liked Travis McGee and Jim Chee,  Spenser and V.I. Warshawski. Not Lara Croft and Sydney Fox. (Well, okay, I like them too. But maybe that isn't what I like to write.)

Especially now, when the amateur sleuth has gravitated towards people who have technical skills. Sometimes directly adjacent to police work (such as forensics, for Temperance Brennan), sometimes not. And, probably due to increased female readership (and female writers), not just an increase in female-led stories, but a shifting away from primarily fisticuffs to more social skills.

The genres always bleed into each other, as do the characters. V.I. is about as hardboiled as they come.

In any case, this works for me, and I would love if I could just crank them out. And I think there's a market (as much as there is a market for anything, in this attention-deficit, AI-flooded present).

Trouble is, the other books aren't a good fit. That leaves me in awkward position.

***

I haven't had time to do full research on re-staging into "mystery-suspense," but a brief session with Publisher Rocket. I thought the metrics on Space Opera would be better, but turns out they are both flat for growth, the average earnings are similar, but the competition is actually a bit stiffer in Space Opera. In the right category of Mystery you might only have to sell a hundred books to get into the top 10.

But then, Project Hail Mary currently dominates in both categories. Which tells you a lot about how firm Amazageddon is with this category and keyword stuff.

Brane and brane, what is brane?

FTL is a necessary weasel of Space Opera. Not all space opera, but it is as generally accepted as is the ability of terminal tuberculosis sufferers to sing an extended aria in that other form of opera.

All of the methods and terms are essentially hand-waves. Some touch lightly on ideas in physics that might do something that, if you squint, vaguely resembles faster-than-light travel, but we skate over all the impossibilities and, in the end, it is no more scientific than reversing the polarity of the neutron flow.

In any case, I'm gonna use wormholes.

The main thing they give me is one big hand-wave that ties together multiple implausibilities into one pill to swallow. In a way I hope will be amusing enough that the readers will go along for the ride.

So we've got the quantum foam, tiny vacuum energy fluctuations. Where we part from physics is that in this universe, they can "clump." Anisotropic distribution forming semi-stable solitons. So, basically, tiny wormholes are constantly forming, lasting for a short time, then coming apart. They are largely outside the cosmological universe and thus exist in multiple places at the same time.

(And yes, black holes, especially quantum black holes, aren't handy tunnels. Well, shush.)

Now, to get them to do what some of the plot requires, they have to have a very selective distribution. Have them everywhere in the universe and the effects would be visible on cosmological scales. Have them clump around gravity sources and they'd change stars in ways that would be astronomically observable.

I could give them a goldilocks zone; assume the radiation of active stars inhibits formation of the solitons, for instance, but that they also don't form well in interstellar space. For reasons. I'd really rather not use the old saw that they are attracted to "life" (however we define that), but it would certainly be handy.

For the purposes of story I'm saying they aren't conventionally gravitational but tend to go where dark matter goes. Which is also anisotropic, but only in certain places (so that part isn't cosmologically significant). 

In any case, it can get very clumpy around these dark matter concentrations, and if you are clever monkeys, you can do some technical things and open a stable wormhole. It still requires such difficult steps as making exotic matter, and the chaotic nature of the clumpy wormhole foam plays out a lot like a particularly rambunctious nuclear reactor; quantum embrittlement and point failures, meaning not only does it cost a lot of tech to build the thing, but you have to have a well-developed industrial base keeping up with replacement parts and other maintenance.

But on the flip side, you get power back. Lots and lots of power. Basically vacuum energy extraction and there is some fear this is destabilizing the entire universe (the old false vacuum problem) but so far the practical thing is that these wormholes tend to rip the universe a bit.

That is, the micro-holes start appearing down a spreading dendritic network, like roots of a tree. And eventually nodes appear where the right civilization could start up a new wormhole.

The first one might not have been artificial. Or might not have been on Earth. But anyhow.

Hand-wave, hand-wave, and a starship can, by applying enough power (and maybe a little exotic matter) open semi-stable wormholes long enough for it to pass through. Which since this is based on encouraging the naturally clumping micro-wormholes, means the best routes to take are along the  Lichtenberg figures spreading from a stable wormhole.

So there are lanes, or maybe currents. 

The idea of the vacuum energy -- done through maintaining a stable wormhole -- is that it puts a top level to the energy pyramid I was getting into with the battery stuff. Ships are largely possible because they carry some very dense fuel (H3 possibly) that is possible because the civilization sending them out has the power available. Power that is essentially a natural resource, and a rare one at that (that is, a place where the holes got really clumpy). So it isn't an exportable technology. They can only send out stored power.

I might not even need gates for travel. Given the right dendritic lanes, ships pretty much explain everything. Oh, and they might get some kind of artificial "kick" if launching from around a node.

The other silly thing you get from this is that the unstable micro-holes happen at planetary surfaces just often enough, and are just big enough, they provide a weird sort of panspermia. The interesting thing here is that they aren't just transporting primordial amino acids. They can transport seeds, possibly even small animals.

As long as the transported material is intact enough and advanced enough relative to its new surroundings, it provides the ability to Galapagos fresh worlds with, let's face it, terrestrial analogs. Since the wormholes are random and rare and more developed life is going to be influenced rather less by small numbers of competitors, the ecologies do diverge, especially the more evolutionarily developed examples. 

There's more hands I can wave at this one, horizontal gene transfer etc. etc., but basically this means the film can be shot within a day's drive of LA. After humans have encountered a few biomes, they've even identified a few template biomes; "This part of the planet is falls within the parameters of a Vc template; temperate rainforest, coniferous analogues, cool and humid."

And means once you get done playing with tamed wormholes on your bottled energy, you can set down on a place with breathable atmosphere and possibly even edible flora and fauna.

And lastly, since you can't bottle them, create them, or carry them, you can only make use of this wormhole stuff where it is already occurring. No black hole grenades for you.

Starbase

Revisions on The Early Fox are going so very slowly. It isn't a lot of fun to go back again and again to a thirty-page document on everything you got wrong, then try to figure out how to apply those fixes to an 80,000 word novel. I keep having to take a break, both because this takes a lot of concentration, and because it takes a lot of emotional stamina.

No closer to starting the next book, then. Which I still think should be SF. But wading around in Penny's adventures, spending a big chunk of the day with her narrative and working in her voice, I can't help but want to see her in another one.

I have three images right now. Or call them fragments of scenes. There's a novel drifting somewhere between them, but one that still lacks a central plot.

A dying tech billionaire, a man with strange ideas about transhumanism. He wants to do a thing that sounds on the surface insane -- something about "mental renewal" or regeneration -- but after long conversations and some other things she has learned, Penny supports him.

Penny's friend Amelia, the American comic-book fan she met in Paris. Several phone calls over the course of the book, with Amelia exploring her own peculiar comic-book like theory of what has really been going on behind the scenes through Penny's adventures.

Penny serving at a consciously retro diner. That is, it wears a futurist '50s dress, chrome and rocket ships, but is actually serving soy beef patties and smart drinks -- expensive ones, too. And she's not here because she needs work; she's here to investigate something scary that's happening behind the Happy Days mask.

What ties it together is something that looks a lot like a data center; a tech center, an industrial park, served by a company town which is a utopian designed community. Yes, with all the failings of that paternalistic approach that have been well-known for about a hundred years now. 

You know, Elon Musk actually built one? Yeah. We really don't learn from the past, do we.

BTW... that company town in Texas has a tiki bar, too.