Go home, LTX 2-3; you're drunk!

...but you have crazy taste in music!

I finished the edit, then handed the manuscript off to a proofreader who will be finding many, many things I missed. In fact, while I was compiling I realized I'd been inconsistent with my hot peppers, and had to find the New Mexico standard spelling for the things. (It is "chile" there, not "chili.")

And celebrating with a short break. I've actually got Wan 2.2 running pretty good on a three-step ksampler with the latest lightx accelerator. The first sampler is high motion, the other two the smoother render. Then upscaled to final resolution. 

(Especially since I learned on a subreddit that when using lightx, 121 frames will quite often return a seamless loop. I did experiment with making cuts, but it is the nature of generative AI to decay over time. Think of it as the xerox effect stitched into a video. Short clips, alas, remain the best option.)

Anyhow, I wanted to try out LTX 2-3. Because LTX also does sound.

Shames me a little, because I used to design sound. I enjoyed designing sound. And neither quality nor control of sound in LTX 2-3 is high. But it does do foley, which is just annoying to cut in to a rendered video. (Without a pro toolset, that is. Doppler and worldizing and stretching to fit are just a pain with something like, say, Audacity and the free filter set.)

However, even a negative prompt won't keep it from adding music. Which is a downside, especially as, if not specified, the music falls into a narrow range of choices that become increasingly familiar over time. Specified, though, it does a lot better than the version of Ace-Step I was playing with a while back. I was able to tell it to give me some lute and recorder and it did. Of course, when I told it to give me some bright pop, my cast started singing. There's that.

Really, the Will Smith is still the stuff that's most fun about AI. Not when it gets it right, even though it can be quite startling how close it can come when it does. But the times it just goes way, way off script into a "please tell me the name of that drug" territory.

(I was in img2vid mode for the first experiments and didn't have much in the folder I could play with. So I was taking some very random stuff and seeing what I could do with it. Got the jet bike to take off quite nicely; that one worked. Another one gave me a power walk that made me laugh out loud. Before I shut down the PC, I'd found something appropriate for "render me this in the style of a 1970s British sci-fi television show" and the results were so hilariously bad in exactly the right way...! The music, in particular, was spot-on.) 

(I also had some water-acrylics-on-white-paper style "renders" I'd done to generate ideas of the various aliens in the Blue universe. I animated those, giving them some dialogue. And I tell you, I have worked with voice actors who were less on the ball in giving me the kind of voice I wanted. The Dren was perfect by take #2. The gestures the AI gave to that vocal performance, though; well, those have given me some character ideas.)

Cutting room floor

My beta reader had concerns about pacing and I agreed. I do tend to write fat and then trim. One big reason is I let Penny babble. Both of us love to analogize, and when I do her narration as a stream of consciousness a whole bunch of "this reminds me of" gets in there.

For the pop culture references, I had a plan. I was going to start with her going to that well too much, then have the solitude of the desert quiet that internal monologue until she didn't need it so much. That...didn't happen. So in the last two or three edit passes I've been throwing a lot of it out. I'd trimmed a quarter before the beta reader got there. That was her note as well, and with new confidence, I took out over 2/3 of the remainder.

The "heroes" scene, for instance. That one is all about a bully at a retro diner that drags Penny into thinking and reacting like she's in an '80s movie, and consciously having to move off that.

What survived the last cuts? Flashdance. And that was just in the opening. The whole confrontation and resolution is down to...none.

Similarly, for the whole sequence from the diner to the end of Part III, Penny is complaining that everything is reminding her of a movie, from the Escape from New York street scene of Albuquerque's "War Zone" to the Damnation Alley of entering the Atlas-F missile silo. But my choice in the revisions was to let the reader pick the movies or visuals. I might have hinted in a place or two (she thinks about giant scorpions while she is exploring the illegal radioactive waste dump) but it is stronger if the reader makes the connections.

Besides pop culture, Penny does the history/anthropology thing. The "monkey dance" squeaked through. Most of agriculture went away. The Face of Agamemnon stayed, barely. From things that weren't her: Pueblo language groups and Permissive Action Links went poof. Much of MAD went away and, sigh, the knife in the briefcase never made it in. Ham narrowly missed getting memorialized; the Challenger Memorial (roughly thirty feet away) was less distracting to the flow of the narrative.

Somehow, the Daisy Track, Colonel Stapp, the refrigerator and all managed to stay. 

Another big cut was that almost 2/3rds of Penny's "Now lets go over the facts of the case" stuff went away. In the final chapters, everyone but the White Sands girl, the Juan de Onate, and Lozen got cut -- even Joan Hinton, her words moving to "Ginny." And almost all of the explicit discussions of theme went, stripped down to one thin paragraph in the last scene.

Some of them my beta reader complained about, and my feeling is now that this is a bit like describing emotions. Don't feel the emotions for the reader. Let them take those emotions from what has happened. And by analogy, let them make the connections, understand why a character acted a certain way.

Anyhow.

I extended the WIPP sneak-in with a longer sequence of stuff. I couldn't quite get her into the mine itself, but how I staged it let me at least mention the Salt Hoist and the Salt Room and the Transition Line (yeah, there's a lot of salt involved). The climb out of the missile silo is also longer and harder, but mostly different; she's doing it with a hurt shoulder now.

With all of that, I'm still at 73,000 words. Hell of a lot of work for a book that's shorter than today's publishing norms...

Half way through running ProWritingAid across the revised manuscript. And, what have they done to my boy? ProWritingAid is sucking in new and surprising ways. I have decided, for instance, that it has no idea and no ability to understand when a semicolon or a full colon is better, and so is programmed to alert on all colons and wait for the user to do something about them.

In the early iterations it (like most grammar checkers) couldn't figure out dialogue punctuation. Now it has over-corrected. If I write; "I have finished." Tom closed the book and stood up? Well, PWA will flag that first period. "This should be "I have finished," it tells me. Because Tom can't possibly be doing an action that follows a closing punctuation; he can only be there to be followed by "...said."

(Or would that be, "...concluded?")

The death loop is back with a vengeance. And not just for clauses; now it will argue with itself over tenses. Wrong word use "sent." Wrong word use "send." Wrong word use "sent." Wrong word...

And stuff so blindingly weirdly wrong. We're talking Grammarly level wackiness. I need to go back to their site and make sure they haven't changed how they use AI again. And find out how to switch off the increasingly aggressive "We can rewrite this sentence for you, just press the AI button..."

Or maybe it is time to dump that subscription. In any case, I need a human editor. Spend thirty minutes fixing capitalization of "colonel" until I realized I had done most of them wrong and put them back again. I hate capitalization. And hyphens.

It saddens me that software can't be relied on to capitalize "Sir" correctly, put a comma after dialogue followed by "said," or determine if it should be "desk top," "desk-top," or "desktop." Because these seem to be simple things.

Where I would want a human editor is with ungrammatical speech, especially when it is conscious, mixed, and rapidly changing formality levels. Half my cast are archaeological field techs, which means they switch from precise and technical to slangy and casual at the drop of a trowel. Penny more and more admits to doing a sort of Valley Girl act to put others off guard. And that's before you get to Jackson and Sanchez, who speak distilled 1980's Army.

And tense, because story-telling tense is peculiar. One of the ways of achieving the effect of events happening as they are narrated is for the free indirect speech to be in present tense. I am tempted to say that tense in a mystery is almost as bad as tense in a time-travel story; "Now I knew that I wouldn't have given Richard the locket then because all the while I had been searching the mansion I had thought it was there, and not, as I knew now, on the boat -- or at least I hoped it would be when I'd finished searching there tomorrow."

Finis

I just one minute ago typed the last word. The Early Fox is now revised.

What remains is to edit it again. I think I can't face the round of beta reading et al again. Sure, making a good book would and should take more than one round of revisions, but a self-published mystery that will be lucky to sell ten copies?

Maybe All Systems Blue will get the proper beta reader treatment.

I am telling myself that the process took as long as it did this time because, like almost everything about writing The Early Fox, I was re-learning how to write. Having a detailed set of notes from a beta reader let me take a long step back and look with new perspective on a lot of the things I was doing.

Some relatively easy to spot, like big chunks of lecture. Some harder, things I needed the Golgi Stain of a beta reader's notes to pick out from the text, like the way I belabored certain points in repetition. That one is also an indication of a problem in process; writing small chunks with long intervals between them meant I couldn't always remember if I'd already done a thing.

But it is done.

The next step is debridement. I left all the trimmed bits in the manuscript. Some of them inline, even; when I had a line or a full paragraph or two I'd decided (based again on those notes and that new perspective) I didn't need, sometimes I'd leave them in place and just mark them with a highlighter.

Really, I should re-read from the top and make sure I don't need those little bits after all. Maybe I will.

Right now, I'm just happy to be done with the hard part.

 

You Arc This Carology?

I realize I don't want to leave the tombs behind. I was just looking over some notes going back from before I dreamed up the first book, and I'd been wanting to do the history and the exotic places and the crazy stunts.

And even this mid-course correct to more of a Mystery mode is still a bit, well...

So the Paris book -- the laid-back, talking-art-in-cafes book -- Penny did a parkour chase through one of the galleria, broke into the Paris Opera House (and quoted Phantom while she was there) and finished up ascending Notre-Dame de Paris with a steampunk grappling gun.

This latest book, she breaks into a nuclear waste repository by riding one of the trucks in, gets run off the road by someone in the nuclear industry, nearly dies climbing down an abandoned missile silo, chases a horse across the New Mexico desert (through the aptly-named Jornada del Muerto) and finishes off having a fight at the site of the first atomic bomb...with a stone knife.

(I'm finally at the Atlas-F chapter in my revisions. Boy, revisions are not fun!)

So maybe I've been playing too much Tomb Raider lately (just did a cherry-tapping run on Rise of the Tomb Raider. Pistol only -- but I make exception for bears. Yes; the automatic shotgun with Dragonfire rounds is exactly what that bad-news bear deserves.)

Even in my Bill Bixby schema, there was some Old Gods and hints of secret history. I don't want to lose the grounding and I'm not going to give her a gun and an off-screen training montage to black belt in waif-fu. But I am willing to have the world get a little weird. Not just in letting her get into (and survive) increasingly cinematic situations, but in outright Masquerade-type stuff, secret organizations and all.

And the Atlas chapter is done. I'm on to the final part of the book now. Maybe a week of revisions left.

Zenshu

Had to write a new scene with new research, too. Spent a while watching videos on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, NM. Annoying how many would show me the token board but not which room it was in. I won't say I worked out the geography of the place, but I came up with a geography which was plausible enough to write the scene.

I think that's the last one of those. I do have one more almost completely new scene to write, but it is all geometry and random; I need to actually detail Penny climbing out of the missile silo, only this time with a hurt arm.

As far as I can tell, although there are a lot of words getting changed from where I am to the end of the book, they are mostly simple changed. What was killing me over the past couple of weeks was scenes where major plot threads were being obscured, or didn't work in the first place.

There's two of those spots left, and before I even get out of Part III. The sequence as she flees to Albuquerque after getting run off the road is another almost complete re-write, and I have to revisit understanding of the plot, and her reactions and intentions. And then again at the bottom of the missile site, with her talking herself back down from the wave of paranoia that sent her to the War Zone.

I really wish I was writing something else.

Even another Penny story.

I'm still juggling the parts for Blue. I'm simultaneously finding the genre I want to be in, and deciding what kind of things dominate the story (right now, it is leaning towards the space opera side with a lot of hand-to-hand -- or at least close-quarters -- action). And coming back from those with how to make an overall plot that hits the right places, and that in turn influences some basic premises of the world and her personal story in it...and that comes back around to feed into what the genre is.

So that's not quite where I can start pushing prose. I'm more than a little tempted to just start typing on the New Orleans story -- because the game there is that Penny doesn't know what actually happened or even what the town looks like, having to reconstruct from notes and news articles. Meaning the framing story could, potentially, excuse a lot of errors and omissions. 

***

Started a scene in my mind. Was thinking POV for Blue and had the idea for an introductory chapter with the scientists that developed the experimental mental implant thing. And almost immediately my brain went into that particular cadence of Military SF, with all the backgrounding. Not quite How David Weber Orders a Pizza -- but not far off, either.

Might be better than the Jeffries Tube scene I've got now. 

Fix All

I watched two things recently which touched on the nature of creativity.

The first was The Minecraft Movie, really only because it had come up as free on the Prime Video rotation. I can barely remember what happened in it. Creativity is brought up in regards to two characters. Jack Black's character (I don't remember the name -- basically he's just Jack Black on a sugar high) loves the world of Minecraft (a real place in this movie) because it allows him to create.

He spent twenty years at it, covering the world in his creations, then was captured by the bad guys. When the rest of the cast fell into the Minecraft world I sort of hoped they'd see and explore all these strange ruins and wonder what was going on. Such was not to be.

The other character is the kid, and I can't be bothered to remember character or actor name. He's okay. He does what is required. He is called creative but being stifled by the world. This creativity he shows by, among other things, putting a jetpack on a still-life banana. This bit bothered me because I half agreed with the arts teacher. Drawing what you already know and love, in the style you already know, is what exercises like that are intended to break you out of.

But the part that really stuck with me is that the drawing shown (and the drawings shown from some of his classmates) are totally wrong. They are the practiced render of school-trained artists. There's a style of rendering in pencil that isn't instinctive but really has to be taught, and they are all using it. So...it looks bad and fake and this "has little left to learn from you" rendering completely defeats any of the purpose.

And when it comes to the environment of the movie? There's no process of creativity. He just builds stuff that works, end of story. 

The other thing I watched had a more interesting take. I ran into it because I'd taken on as a research project to learn something about Isekai (and the often-related LitRPG genre.) I found enough to become quite familiar with Truck-kun:

Zenshu isn't really an isekai (despite what Natsuko says when she first wakes up in another world). Of course, so many isekai are deconstructionist it would be more accurate to call deconstruction of the idea of being reincarnated as a hero in another world the "standard isekai" plot.

It follows some of the template of superpower stories in that Natsuko's new-found ability turns out to be a liability, gets her in worse trouble, she gives up on it, then returns to it to finally save the day.

But even that is not quite right. Natsuko has been dropped into the favorite anime of her childhood, the one that made her want to become an animator herself. And, itself, A Tale of Perishing is not standard golden-age fare. The Nine Legendary Heroes become one by one the dead heroes, until Luke Braveheart breaks under the strain of seeing his friends die and the Void win over and over, and going mad, destroys the last Soul Future himself and ends the world.

Natsuko's power is completely OP, but that isn't the point, nor is it enough, as the world contrives to reshape itself to ensure the original bleak ending remains. Until she breaks through; leaving behind her unthinking adoration of the original's director, her imitation of other works, and her fear of her own failures.

And yes, one of those failure is she died of bad food and overwork while tasked with directing a high school romance -- something she had so very little personal experience with she went as far as charging down the corridors of the studio with a piece of toast in her mouth.

In her final victory, she first draws Luke from memory; the same lines she drew thousands of times while teaching herself from the work of others. That holds off the Void for a little, but what wins the day is drawing the Luke she has come to know, and even love; a real person in a world she thinks is worth saving for itself, not as a memorial of the animation director she idolized.

Oh, did I say draw? Because that's her power in this world. She gets a full-on Magical Girl transformation, only her henshin stick is an animation peg bar, there's no costume change, and what it does is summon her drawing desk (which then exists as a real-world object and can be interacted with during the fight scene).

And that transformation goes so hard some of the MAPPA animators might have keeled over from overwork themselves...!

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.