A reach

Last week, was watching the new season of Reacher, and old episodes of Supernatural, and both shows went to Philadelphia.

Well, I was in the City of Cheesesteak Love this weekend. Drank at McGillis, ran up the Rocky Steps. Thinking of setting a story there.

I sure as heck couldn’t do worse than those two. Sure, I get Vancouver Doubling, but this is a case where just throwing in an establishing shot of the William Penn statue atop City Hall doesn’t do it.

Edit: Episode 5, they finally have some scenes that look like they were filmed in Philly. And, okay, it messes up the essay, but Reacher actually did pretty well in some sequences in the opening episode, and elsewhere, that were definitely that city.

Okay, I was mostly in Central City; stayed in Rittenhouse and the job was just up from the Delaware waterfront. And there are generic glass blocks in those districts, and newer buildings.

But like Paris, or the City of London (aka, the part with the old Chris Wren streets), it is a town with a very specific stamp of architectural style. Especially when you add the more creative skyscrapers (the older ones, especially, have enough Art Deco and bas reliefs to be at home in Gotham City), you know at a glance what town you are in. No mistaking it for New York or Chicago or Boston.

Architecture is only part. The one thing you don’t seem to do is hear that Philly accent (the best sample I found was a recording on the crosswalk button). They do love that cheesesteak though.

(Also breaking the mold, Chicago locals aren’t fond of “Chi-town,“ and you had better not refer to San Francisco as "Frisco," but the vocals in Philadelphia are fine with “Philly.")

They are friendly, with their own multiculturalism. More permeable than San Francisco (which tends to lock into neighborhoods like a really small patchwork quilt), less comfortable than Oakland (the tensions are easier to find).

And maybe it is just the current fad, but their approach to history has a distinct shading. Okay, I haven’t been back to Beantown in a while but my memory is the only thing there’s more of than Dunkin’ Donuts are the “Paul Revere once had breakfast here” plaques. Same with the DC area. 

In Philly, there’s context. I’m surprised a certain politician hasn’t sent his goons over to demand a few plaques torn down. They’d be at it a while, though. There are quite old and established monuments right in the tourist part of town that celebrate not the flag-toting boosterism of the American Revolution but the hard (and constant) job of creating and upholding democracy.

The context was always there. On the Olympia, displays on the naval victories of the Philippines campaign did not shy from the atrocities committed, or the profits made by United Fruit. This isn’t just inside museums, either. It’s all over the streets.

Oh, and yeah. I was viewing all these exhibits on the tangled weave of human rights, corporate profits, and the struggles of a young nation to define itself and how things were supposed to work, and my light reading for the trip was a book on the Ludlow Massacre.

So I’m taking notes on, I guess you could call it three books now. 

Spending what felt like the larger part of the trip enmeshed in the travel technology gave me some thoughts for Blue. An exhibit on the post revolutionary war China trade at the Independence Seaport Museum gave me some fun thoughts about trade activity on the frontier. And there were some possible parallels, even, with the naval battles against Barbary pirates. 

Keri Sinclair is still up in a J-tube trying to fix a circuit, and her world is changing by the hour. It is what is supposed to be happening at this point in writing the book, but I am getting real impatient to start cranking out chapters.

When she gets out of that tube, she's got a visit to still-unnamed-station in her future. This is at least a big transship station. Might be shipyards and stuff too. Not sure yet. The one thing I'm pretty sure of is Oberon is visible from there. Whether Oberon is visible from anywhere else, I don't know yet. Strange stars are... strange. That scene is growing bigger and bigger. A failure of her skills as an officer. More about the relationship between her and the ranking enlisted in the power room. Probably a brawl. Probably drinking, too. 

Less progress on the other two. I've named the coalfield wars adventure A Fox's Sleep. That part of it (that Penny is trying to keep a low profile) is likely to be the least of it. I've sort of settled on a data center, I want to explore the way that the more obvious social control of the company store et al were polished up by Rockefeller and his cronies until they are subtler (and often harder to fight). 

And archaeologically, it is about protecting a site and applying for it to be on the Registry. What I want is for a boy that died during one contested event to be a sort of town mascot, and for his story to be used by two sides of a political fight. They don't want fresh archaeology done because they have gotten good at spinning it the way it is.

Oh, and the Bell Witch. Maybe.

Thing is, the specifics of the Ludlow Massacre are so fascinating. I don't want to change anything about it. I binge-read several Lincoln Child/Douglas Preston books recently as well (hey, they are mystery-thrillers with a strong regional flavor. Exactly the market I'm aiming for now). One featured the Roswell incident and stayed within the (updated) facts -- such as Project Mogul. Another left New Mexico for a Donner Party story that, again, stayed pretty close to the truth.

But then there was one with a party of hikers in New Mexico going mad and running out of their tents near-naked into the snow and I am ashamed I got a full chapter in before realizing this was the Dyatlov Pass incident. Okay, the writers did manage to tie it to a couple of fun bits of New Mexico history in the end, but there are more and more places where they chose to change the facts to make a better story.

And it still bugs me. I've had to do it, I'll do it again, but it bugs me.

It's like putting the Chicago "El" in a story set in Philadelphia.

Talking to machines

The cover came back. Instead of tweaking what was a nearly-finished design, she moved everything around and ran AI on the remains. New Mexico turned into Cabo (one white sand is like another, to AI). I did a soft confront on her using AI to communicate with me, and she returned a soft admission. 

I am very, very tired of getting nothing from cover designers but more ideas I can play with. I'm back to making my own.

And I'm stuck on Early Fox because one of her ideas was so good I really want to see if I can make it work.

The space opera goes as expected. I'm okay with the first scenes taking a while. Now I'm into the tech density question; how much world-building here, how much in the entire book. It should go faster after this. It is space opera, after all. Whereas classic SF is (supposed to be) about the ideas and/or the technical execution, space opera is towards the adventure side of things. Less technical explanation, more fisticuffs.

Mostly.

That's my new fear. I've been stopping every sentence to look up stuff. It is nice that I sort of know my way around tech, so most of the stuff I've been dreaming up, like nanofoam fire suppressants, is already something somebody is writing up papers on and putting them in NASA Tech Briefs or JSTOR.

But as much as I mean for Blue to spend most of the book running around with a blaster in one hand, the plot I've constructed for book one (and the parts of her character that make her different and interesting) require there be a spanner in the other. There's a Robinsonade happening; the first third of the book absolutely will take some looking stuff up.

And in the last of my nowhere plans for nobody, I checked out one of the forks of LTX 2.3. Those are on confused legal ground. The original is free but there are restrictions -- in fact there are safety rails built into the model (which I generally consider a good thing).

So far the model I have been messing with is more accurate in some places, seems to generate somewhat less animated animation, and might be slightly faster. I have yet to get into the huge number of nodes that can give more control.

People are already using this stuff commercially. A lot of the energy towards staying on-model, and tightly controlling the timing and camera moves, is coming from people doing product showcases. I don't know if these are being used internally or going out on cheaper advertising slots, but this is happening. And some band videos as well.

So it ain't just dancing cats. Whether this is good or bad...

Phase 1

Writing the test scene (the opening scene) for All Systems Blue -- the space opera. Which means discovering the character's voice, the style in which I am writing, how well free indirect speech in third person is working for me and how I mean to handle it, how the world is presented, and as expected; I'm running into a lot of world-building questions.

You really don't know what you need until you've got people in it, regardless of whether you are a games master with a bunch of unruly players, or the writer and sole creative spirit.

I'm aiming for the 90-100K range with this one.

Also dealing with cover artists and editors and blurb-wranglers and I'm sick of it. I just want to put The Early Fox out (the archaeological-adventure series which is currently getting staged as a mystery-thriller) and return my concentration to writing. 

I feel like half these people at Fiverr and in the cover shops are not actually talking to me, but shoving all that correspondence through Claude. I'll say in my query that I need help with cover art on a novel, and I'll get back an ELIZA-like "I understand you want to talk about cover art." It really is that blatant.

My current -- subject to change at any moment -- feeling about AI is that it is a tool and it is inevitable. We are dealing with the teething problems of any new technology now, and much of the presentation is oversold and much of the adoption is premature. And that means the problems are also significant right now.

I won't say there aren't systemic issues but there are with all technologies. There doesn't seem to be anything particularly new here. We humans have always been prone to offloading whatever we can. Saving labor. Saving time by having something else do it, or by cutting corners when we can get away with it. And offloading the need to think about everything in our environment, relying on simple rules or better yet, systems of rules (like religions or political beliefs) that give answers we can use and more-or-less rely on.

Right now, the market pressures are extreme and the pace of economic activities (and change) is extremely rapid. That's an opening for scammers, charlatans, and for human laziness to overtake any spare brain cells we might have to consider whether the AI is giving us good information.

Eventually it will be subtler. The tendencies of AI will be as well understood as how watercolor paints work or what you can realistically accomplish in three weeks of rehearsal. Implicit there is that the results will often be good enough, but there will exist a boundary where it isn't good enough and it will be considered the wrong tool. Going along with this, AI becomes more interactive. I am seeing this in AI video generation, where it has moved sharply beyond where the user puts in a prompt and hopes, to where the user can manage at a closer scale, dictating camera moves, pre-designing characters, and so on.

The earlier version of it was a black box, and this is how it is still being used by the terminally lazy. Used intelligently and with a good work ethic, yes, it can help edit a novel. Used by someone on Fiverr who dares to call themselves an editor and might not have even looked at the manuscript themselves? That's crap, that's insulting, and I'm damned tired of people who think I'm sucker enough to keep paying them for it.

Because even when you toss out the stealing and the environmental costs and the many and fascinating abuses, even when you boil it down to just whether the result is good... the result ain't. It can be, but when it is used as a crutch, when it is used out of laziness, when it is used only for quick cash, those results are not.

Anyhow.

Not one to stow thrones, I've been messing around with LTX far too much lately. I haven't installed some of the front-end stuff that makes it more controllable, as the Comfy-UI front end has a bad habit of breaking everything with each mandatory install (its the freeware version of Windows 11!) To protect my rig I leave it off line. And that makes it harder to install new tricks.

The latest down the pipe is MinMax H3, which is even more scriptable with multiple references of multiple types. And much higher character consistency. LTX 2.3 has that same object permanence problem all AI has: you can start with a fully rendered character, but if they ever leave the frame, what will return may be something different. So does MinMax, but at least you can give it a stable reference to look back on.

Having a combined video-audio output is a mixed blessing. Mostly to the good, because character animation matches the vocal track in a way even the audio-track-plus-starting-image method in Wan2.2 didn't. The weird thing is, since you are giving it a starter image (the usual approach) you can make multiple clips with character consistency, but you won't get consistent vocal performance. That makes it very difficult to marry clips together into a longer video.

It also doesn't normally loop, though there are workflows to achieve that. My last run of experiments was mostly pressure-testing by running either pixel size or frame length out to excess numbers to see what would happen. I could get one or two renders out to 1400 frames -- almost a minute at the default frame rate -- before memory leaks started throwing errors. And at a much much higher consistency than anything else I'd tried before.

The other thing I was messing around with was multi-character dialogue. It did sometimes lose track of who was who, and the range of performance styles can be limited, but it was pretty surprising how natural the results could get. In fact, I just finished an experimental render in which I prompted a 1970s holdout to stroll into the scene carrying a guitar and sing a song badly. First try, and it did pretty much everything I'd been hoping.

Which is another thing. Although I'm told MinMax H3 is even better at smoothly combining character action, dialogue, and camera movements, I've been impressed at how much more agile LTX 2.3 is about camera moves. It was pulling teeth to get Wan 2.2 to even pull a zoom. LTX 2.3 seems to understand the dramatic intent of a camera move, and will integrate it with action.

Of course, it probably helps that I'm writing camera motions and character actions in between chunks of dialogue. As with all things AI, it doesn't always do them in the order prompted. But quite often it comes close to story-telling norms.

Now if only I could do multiple shots and cut them together. I still haven't done a character LoRA and there's an additional step of converting a LoRA to work with LTX 2.3 (and I really miss the LoRA I had with WAN 2.2). So maybe I will try that MinMax install.

It seem silly making video clips nobody will ever see. But some days I just want to sit down in front of the gaming rig and mess around... and how different is this from building factories nobody will ever visit?

The boron part of the story

I'm going with boron. It has the downsides of mostly being a mined material, but if I stick with the idea of Oberon station as a wormhole tap (for ridiculous amounts of power) you can still make the stuff the hard way.

In fact, the whole boron chain has some cool world-building aspects to it. First, if you've got the infrastructure to be pulling the raw stuff out of the ground, you can be using it in various high-tech materials; boron-fiber composites, borosilicate glass, etc. For fuel use, it has to be refined. It has to be extremely pure, and you need 11boron and leave the 10boron alone.

Which is easier than U238; with an atomic number of 5, the difference of a neutron or two makes a significant difference in mass. There's a couple different chemical isotope exchange distillation processes, the second one a "greener" one (aka fewer nasty acids to deal with). Or there's laser distillation.

And for that matter, you can breed the stuff by slamming a proton beam into oxygen-16. And I don't have any idea what the surface of Oberon might be like (it is an exotic star) you can always find some water ices or molecular clouds when you want them.

So that gives us three nice layers of tech. Oberon Station could be producing Boron out of pure, err, interstellar gas, purifying it with more lasers, and sending it straight (because it is purified in basically the same sequence of operations) to packaging up as starship fuel.

On other industrialized colony worlds, mine the stuff as borax or whatever (a lovely thing about boron is just how hydrophilic it is, meaning not only are there beds of concentrated deposits, but these are happening on planets with a water cycle (that is, probably habitable ones). And being as these are heavily industrialized colonies, those dark satanic mills can run the stuff through chemical distillation. And, as I said, turn a bunch of it out to local industry.

And then you have the worlds that could happily mine you some borax, but a twenty mule train isn't adaptable to the task of purifying and distilling the fuel, meaning you are getting the thing I wanted; the high tech worlds at the center of the web are exporting the power that makes the trade lanes possible.

And the stuff is a stable isotope, if it wasn't for oxidation and other potential contamination, you could shovel it like coal. Or like cocoa; pick your allotrope. How it is packaged I don't care but the only part of it that calls for special handling is the purity, and the consequent price.

And when you get it into your engine room, outside of confinement questions (they are still playing with inertial confinement) the short version is you superheat it into a plasma then fire an accelerated proton beam at it. Which you might be getting by blasting some hydrogen feed stock. And then the output is mostly aneutronic and as such not only less of a hassle, but you can use direct electrical conversion instead of running a steam cycle.

(Mostly. Biggest problem is 10boron poisoning. You are breeding the stuff in the reactor and you've got to get those products out of there because they do reactions which are much dirtier.)

(Which also might be with lasers.)

Today I also had a wonderful bit of serendipity. I was writing a test draft of the first scene. It felt like I needed to name my protagonist's home world. So, Keri Sinclair comes from an "ag-world"; a farming planet, breadbasket for the more centralized and population-dense worlds. They are your typical poor-but-proud. And as is already noticed, there's a bit of Celtic (and English) mythology going on.

I was thinking about Stirling Bridge, but I wiki-walked in the wrong direction and ended up on Bannock. Which reminds of Bannockburn. But is also a bread eaten in Scotland.

Oh, yeah, and connected to medieval Scottish breads there is some wonderful stuff about the manorial tenant farmers of Scotland, all sorts of thirlage and multure, grassum and quern-stones. And I'm probably not going all crazy with Scotts terminology and culture for Keri's world -- it is enough they are thought of by other worlds as hayseed farmers -- but that vassalage et al gave me a direction for her character other than joining the Navy (that is, the merchant fleet) for the education and a lack of any better options.

No, she joins because her people consider it an honor and an obligation. She doesn't need to find it later, translating from her dutiful role as middle child seeing after the young ones after the oldest children have gone off to college. No, she can walk in intending to serve her duty to the best of her ability.

The only problem is her idea of what that duty means may not quite match up with that of some of her bosses.

"The time has come," the Walrus said

"To talk of many things. Of starships and helium-3... "

And now I want to write a cozy fantasy and title it Of Cabbages and Kings. Apropos, the cabbage rules in Skyrim, second only in cooking utility to wheat (wheat, besides making bread, is a powerful alchemical ingredient.)

Yes, I re-installed Skyrim on my gaming PC, with a couple dozen graphics improvement mods.

More to the point, I was outlining a potential long-ish scene on Oberon Station, where possibly T4M is getting refueled. I went to look up physical properties of 3He. And you know what? It kinda sucks as a fuel.

The point of the exercise is that the core worlds are lousy with generated power, and can afford to produce extremely high-density fuels. And that FTL travel sits at the peak of my imagined pyramid of power usage, taking more power than can be accomplished economically with anything as simple as fossil fuels.

Helium-3 ain't it. The return for mass spent is small, and the kind of structure you need to get across the Coulomb barrier of 3He-3He is massive as well. The most common sources for the stuff are also as a byproduct of things like CANDU reactors (heavy water cooling) or tritium for bombs (going out of style). So in any near-future scenario, it would be a product of a robust civilian nuclear energy program and found in relatively small amounts.

Really, the big excitement for people is that it is technically aneutronic (practically? Well...)

So unless I reach for some sort of stable exotic matter for the power plants, it looks like antimatter is it. Or lower the bar until you can make it happen with fission, leaving antimatter for the military. Which is a distinction I was already thinking about for hand tools; those superconducting magnetic storage for civilian gear, and nuclear isomers for high-power or military applications. The latter is also essentially one-use in the field, whereas the former is ridiculously easy to recharge.

Incidentally, I've already got an inciting incident around those SMES cells. The mining camp is using a SMES bank in conjunction with solar panels. The lower-cost version that requires an outside source for refrigerant and you can see where this one is going...

Fission has a similar downside to fusion, in that everything that isn't a bomb is designed for duration, not peak power output. Except for, well, rockets. That aspect of delivering full power over a long time I guess you could crowbar into the FTL drives by having them charge for days or weeks and then having a jump limit defined by that stored power.

Anyhow, instead of cabbages and kings, I'm dealing with candy and spinach -- to borrow the terms from Mythcreants. And learning about the full glory of Dutch disease (not to be confused with Dutch Elm disease), rentier states, petro-aggression and how the resource curse can lead to stratification and even gender inequity (the short version is, a concentrated high-value resource lowers mass employment, concentrating wealth and refocusing government concerns from a taxable populace to the owners and often external investors).

The best insight I've had on Keri Sinclair over the past week or two is I'm going to make her earn that Candy. This isn't just character arc, though. Having her have to learn how to be a wizard hacker on-screen means more scenes, and more chances for world-building. I'm taking away physical conditioning before she realizes she needs it to keep use of the implant from hurting so much (and until she meets the Colonial Marines, who she still considers a bit mental on the subject).

And all in all I've chosen the slower start. Which is why I have plans for a sequence set on Oberon Station.

Cover to Cover

The Fiverrrr hire showed up and completed her work. I started the application at BookSirens to distribute ARC copies on The Early Fox, but one of the things they want is the final cover. So back to waiting on the cover artist to finish. They didn't like the desert, by the by. They liked my other concept better.

I will see. I'm itching to rough out comps for the other covers, but I need to see how the artist changes that cover so I can be going in the same direction.

I also am trying to rewrite all the book descriptions. I mostly got a pass on the one I have, but it needs a tweak or two I haven't been in the right mental space to finish. 

Rewriting the books, though... Well, I had a beta reader look through the first book, and there's no easy fix to it. I can't fix the structural issues without writing a completely different book. Fortunately, after the rewrite I just finished on The Early Fox, I feel more up for the challenge of fixing voice, cleaning up the emotional focus and plot beats, and trimming the excursions severely.

That all said.

I've been binging on Douglas Preston lately. He's got a whole series about a female archaeologist based out of Santa Fe and he's pretty much going down the line of New Mexico's biggest hits. The one I'm reading now is Roswell.

The previous, The Scorpion's Tale, was a bit too rich, combining the jornada del muerto/el camino real, the Victorio Peak treasure, the Pueblo Revolt, and the Trinity Test -- there were significant scenes at the (renamed) MacDonald ranch house. It also touched on the plight of the downwinders, the regrowth of the White Sands area after the military took it from the ranchers, and several other things I'd been writing about in The Early Fox.

The descriptions are dense and he captures the landscape better than I do (well, he lives there. Plus he's got forty-odd bestsellers to his name). But the plot sort of goes everywhere.

Really, density per se is not the problem. Preston, the Rivers of London series, the Trina Piper series, all go just as crazy for setting and history. My last beta reader said the only problem for her was the stuff was so fun she kept losing track of the plot. The beta reader before that didn't tell me to gut the stuff, just that I went a quarter to a third too far and just needed to trim back to where the stuff wasn't overstaying its welcome. Which I did, and a little more, in that two months of revisions.

Anyhow.

Made some progress on the space opera that is definitely the next thing I'm writing. My protagonist is finally coming alive for me. I was trying out some terminology to see if it felt right that people from farming worlds might be called "ag-worlders" or even "aggies." I tried a bit of dialogue in my head and the character I was using said, "Oi, farmgirl."

And Sinclair snapped back with "That's cadet farmgirl to you!"

Yeah, that's her. She's got that temper. Holding back, especially after the implant. Aware that fighting back is in her position the nuclear option. But she will make a smart remark, even if it isn't smart to do so.

And that same internal discussion (I do a lot of work and take a lot of notes during long walks) is having me change the rules slightly on cadets. Sinclair is fish and fowl; as a cadet getting what in some wet navies might be called the middy cruise or snotty tour, she is a student, is pre-commission and should not be giving orders or even stand watch without direct supervision. So much like the ratings (who are typical of wet navies in that so many are college age), but unlike them she has two parallel chains of command. The XO is who is supposed to be directing her training. Anything else goes through COB.

Which gets even more complicated as the Power Gang is sort of a world of its own. They are more highly trained and need to be, because not only does the ship not fly without them, with the kind of physics required to move faster than light, doing their job wrong means the ship explodes. They have their own top NCO (the Bull) and of course the chief engineer (officer on engineer track, like Sinclair), and unless it gets out of hand COB leaves them alone. Especially on T4M, the deck apes are his darlings and he'd prefer to be working with them then worrying about the power gang.

But I don't want to get too crazy with this stuff because while it sets up her character arc, I'm only doing a few chapters on the boat before the mining world sequence. The plan is that the abandoned mine Sinclair gets marooned at, and the refugee camp built at what was the landing pad and HQ for Atlas operations there, is the large middle of the book. Then the enclaves planet and some more stuff in space to finish things off.

In the Navy

Once again a Fiverrrr vendor has missed the deadline without a single communication. Meanwhile, I drew up two cover concepts and restarted my order at 100 Covers. I'd like to cut a deal and order the whole series at one shot, but I am still iterating.

I need to get that cover, finish the description, complete the front matter, upload to KDP, and then I'll be ready to apply at Book Sirens and see if they will let me do an ARC run before release. I'm moving slowly from book prep to publicity. And behind this book, there's clean-up and re-release happening on the previous books -- and the possibility of new books to come.

My old work called and I will be going in for a day or two this week to help with a project. Earnest is months away, at least.

And I am starting to outline the MilSF book (All Systems Blue).

The subgenres merge and blur, but within the SF genre one can generally point at something called Military SF, and within that (and also crossing over heavily with Space Opera) a story form that focuses on the career of an individual. These are books in which the character arc of that individual can only be understood within the frame of their military career. (In fact, it is often understood that their growth is entirely because of the military.) Which means, practically, there are a lot of pages of people doing military things. Not just fighting, but making bunks and having inspections.

The plot I've concocted for this book is mostly planetary setting, with no fleet engagements (at least not yet). I had hoped to start the thing on a planet. Even then, I was going to have to figure out something about how the ships work. Starting on the ship, which is the current plan, just makes that a more immediate problem.

So here's what I've got for a working premise:

A Merchant Marine. This is a system that sits at the heart of space operations, forming a centralized body of training and certification (under the Colonial Administration), operates maybe half the hulls out there, and those CA-flagged ships and people are also available to the CA in times of war.

But let's back up. Started with a colony of Earth. They built up one world and sent their own Navy as protection (strictly a military arm, this). It was an extraction colony, meant to send much-needed materials (partially-processed; FLT ain't that cheap) back to the Sol system. So it was always very industry-focused.

The colony grew, expanded, and in time won independence. By that point value-added had reached the point where the colony was actually competitive in manufactured goods. But standard of living, and the population, were enough that they'd started their own extraction colonies, which in time also grew sufficient populations to desire self-governance.

At this point we've got something more like a federation than an alliance, a strongly centralized government that is otherwise weak in comparison not so much to local rule, but to the large corporations, and the remaining structures of the old Colonial Administration.

The Navy is still there on tax dollars, their aging ships too large and expensive to crew and trotted out just enough to blow the dust off them. They and several other functions of the old CA are largely subsumed into the new government, just another bit of local rule as far as they are concerned.

So the hull and the crew of a typical Merchant Fleet ship come out of one or more of the various "worlds" (self-rule polities, aka states) but are built to Fleet standards and trained at Fleet-qualified and overseen academies, to be given the standardized Fleet certifications. The latter two being true of essentially every crew with an actual rating, and particularly important to officers.

And on paper they cooperate with the Navy, which still has some people out there serving the remnants of "Papa Earth will watch over you to make sure the big bad aliens don't bite."

And yes, that is a hell of a lot of agreements-on-paper and traditional cooperation and all sorts of interesting ways for things to fail. I am fairly sure it did get tested when fighting broke out between a couple of the secondary colonies but I haven't worked on that yet.

In structure, I'm mixing mostly American merchant marine with a bit of US Navy and particularly submarines. For no particularly good reason. Which means I'm bogged down right now with things like watches and titles which I wouldn't have to deal with at all if Keri were to spend the entire book dirtside trying to get back in contact with her ship!

Plus, as an engineering cadet...well, just figuring out watchstanding brought up the matter of the Power Gang. To figure out how the ship runs I need to know how the ship runs -- that is, what it actually looks like when we "take her out, Mr. Sulu, Warp 6."

Yet another wrinkle. So the Merchant Fleet is generically "carry stuff" for commercial trade, plus various government businesses (it ain't wartime so they are getting properly paid for it). The companies have their own vessels, of course, which vary more in design and have their own cut-outs but more-or-less follow the same regulations. The Academies are well-tested by time and the certifications are trusted so... why change what works?

They also have some more specialist branches. Support is the big one for the book here, a fairly vague category of repairs, setting up and maintaining navigation satellites and the like, probably wormhole operations, closely connected with the labs/yards that are busy testing safety systems and so on, rescue services most likely...

So our boat is T4M (Ln). Doesn't get a name (the crew calls it "Tammie.") Support Branch, built like a Swiss army knife for a little fire-fighting, a little repair, a little survey. There's a standardization taken a bit too far for Support, meaning flexibility was optioned over utility (not that they don't have very specialized and very effective single-role ships and crews). Support was really intended to support, well, Fleet operations. Most of them, especially the gopher ships like Tammie, were never meant to go all Starship Enterprise out into the wilds far from the core worlds.

Add one more thing into the mix. That moment when Earth figured out how to run an extraction colony far outside of the Solar System, that moment when the extraction colony really, really needed a bigger breadbasket and developed Keri's "Ag-world" home planet as basically a big-ass farm? Well, that moment has happened again.

Keri's world is now developed enough, and with a rising technical competence and population and rising living standard putting the lie to the "bunch of hicks on a farm" stereotype, that they are joining the clamor for markets (and mines) somewhere else other than their own scenic mountain ranges. So is everyone else. And the dendritic network has touched a whole new cluster of potentially rich worlds to exploit and/or trade with. Trade with, because they already have locals.

That's put everyone into running around with their own Bright New Ideas. The CA is jumping out from hiding with a "See, this is why you kept us around!" The Navy is being very wary and enquiring if perhaps they could get that increased budget Real Soon Now. The corporations are eager to show who is most bleeding-edge of the bleeding edge and some of them are going Full MacNamara in wonderful schemes for how they can make their crews safe and effective.

Which is how Keri gets yanked out of her career progression of getting her degree in mechanical engineering and a nice quite job in Fleet HQ running the future space equivalent of a Steiner Tunnel, or helping to develop the next better version of a Halon fire suppression system. Fleet needs warm bodies to fill those new hulls. (And Tammie is so new it still has that new car smell.)

And one of those labs she had hopes of joining has been brainstorming with big-brained Terry expats and has found a way to download terabytes of survival skills into an adult human brain. If they can just get it to work right, this will surely be exactly the thing for crews getting sent to the frontier in this new gold rush.

Blue Coal

The person that was advising me on genre placement -- and we'd just moved into cover design -- got vanished by Fiverrrr. Second time that has happened. Sure, I get the money back, but I've lost all the time I sunk into working with her.

So I've got a formatted manuscript, but no cover. I broke out my old drawing pad to sketch some ideas but that has been going slow. When I get out of this current sick I'll open up some maps and see if I can do something with that.

I need that cover before I can sign up for ARC, and I want to do that sort of thing before I release. So the book is still in limbo; essentially unread, unless you count two editors.

I am currently using a jigsaw puzzle model for the brainstorming portion of a novel. That is; that there are edge pieces which you already know you want in the book, and the more you fill the remaining open space, the more it is clear what shape the missing pieces will need to be.

When I finished the trunk novel -- Shirato -- I actually spread print-out over the floor to try to understand how big the chapters were, how many pages there were between events, and how much more needed to be written. Now I have that as an instinct. And my instinct tells me I'm missing about a third of the plot for All Systems Blue.

Except, this one it feels like it isn't going to add a chunk of new, it is going to elaborate on what is already there until it fills the space.

I just binge-watched Last Resort (it's sort of The Silent Service with an American boomer), a couple of movies so forgettable I can only remember the name of one of them (Moonfall), and read some stuff from Brett Devereaux about the antics of the "Statue Profile Pictures" crowd. And, of course and as always, reading the truly endless pages at Atomic Rockets.

That jostled things enough. Unfortunately, the fleshing-out is pushing me towards a slow burn opening. I wanted to do a Storm Over Warlock; start the narrative with Keri being marooned on a hostile world after her ship sent a small party to find out why a remote mining installation stopped transmitting.

Instead I'm needing to start back with T4M (Ln) still back in the Core Worlds, with time for discussion of their role in Fleet, and for Keri to get into a one-sided fight, plus we get to look at Oberon Power Station before we set out for the Frontier.

But the politics got a lot meatier, meaning there is plenty for my protagonist to do both on the mining world and on the "legations" world; a world where a whole bunch of different aliens (humans included) have set up enclaves for trading and politics. The "Corsairs" are absolutely are an agent of state policy (for much as the Klaathi have a state), and Atlas Metals is not just the victim of their raids; they are ready and eager to return in kind, and may have left the crew on the mining world out to dry for exactly those aims.

One big thing I haven't got, though, is anything cool for her to do with engineering. I've got some moments for The Thing, when she is left without good options and takes the explosive one nobody in their right minds would have considered. But those are mostly leveraging the situation. I want her to be able to do something crazy-dangerous and undoubtably destructive that comes out of the tech and science at play. The "What do you mean, bring up the hyperdrive inside a gravity well?!" sort of thing.

And the problem with that sort of thing is figuring out why people aren't already doing it.

Section 106 rule changes

 

Anyone who is in American archaeology knows exactly what that headline is referring to. Anyone who has been following the current administration has a pretty good idea what kind of changes are being imposed. Yes, imposed; no discussion, no consultation, just dropped with a typical DOGE chainsaw, administration fiat, hamburder-fueled late-night tweet.

That's Section 106 of the 1966 National Historical Preservation Act. The basis of CRM in the States.

And the changes are not what we could have expected. They are much worse.

Consultation no longer required with SHPO and THPO, as well as local agencies.

Public participation now discretionary. Of a process which now belongs, not to a historical preservation agency, but the contractor that wants to bulldoze that cultural property.

If that wasn't enough, a new class of "categorical exclusions." As in, coal mining gets a free pass, no discussion needed or wanted.

Natural features excluded from preservation rules (say goodbye to that sacred mountain). And there's more. Yes, more, including a clause that the President can at any moment unilaterally declare a "state of emergency" requiring waiving any and all remaining protections.

Basically, it is drill baby drill and who the hell cares about stewardship.

Hired Oscar Wilde

I got The Early Fox back from the proofreader. The main thing he did was change " -- " to "--" and add a trailing space to ellipses when they occurred in the middle of a sentence.

All of my style guides say that the em dash can be used with or without spaces; AP style likes the space, Chicago no space. But the trend is also spaces for journalism, no spaces for books. So I'll go for that. I had already switched to no spaces when used at the end of a line. Which, oddly, my proofreader missed in the one or two spots I hadn't it right myself.

He gave me about a dozen line notes. Of which half changed the meaning of the sentence on the way to making them more grammatical.

So did I get value out of the service? Well, the nature of the changes is a sign this was a human working, not a robot. (He caught the one place Penny returned to her hotel, after she'd kicked up a fuss all the way back in Chapter 3 that she was choosing to call it a motel.)

And he did pick up several annoying omitted words or extra/missing spaces.

But the thing I really gained is assurance. Most of the mistakes he caught were things I needed to learn, and now that I have, I don't need him. The even better thing is what he didn't find; the many pages that didn't have a single note on them.

I am dumping money down this drain, and I haven't even hired a cover artist yet.

The SEO person (that is, Kindle marketing person) has sent me an offer but I haven't signed it yet. She's the one who zeroed in on thriller over adventure, and mystery over archaeology.

Which brings me to the next book.

I'd really love trying to write on deadline. With five (six) books down now, I have a pretty good idea of the tasks and labor and I could break it down to milestones.

Had a bunch of ideas floating around for Penny. Today over brunch a bunch of them fell together -- but not in quite the forms I was expecting or hoping.

The stuff I wanted to do with a EPCOT-like planned community, and my Elon Musk stand-in, and a tech center somewhere in West Virginia or something, packed up, grabbed the science museum I had lying around along with an ex NASA engineer, and went to Greenland.

So now that's the over-the-top one -- but it isn't in conus anymore so wrong for the Bill Bixby arc.

What was left took the coal miners strike, went looking for a crime, and after a weird detour through urban fantasy heroine archetypes, leather coats, and vampires found itself a for-profit juvie center Penny can stage an intervention at -- after a contested election goes through the the help (and hindrance) of a modern-day Mother Jones.

And the only reason to put up with Penny going underground again is that I get to call one of the parts "Enemy Mine."

Anyhow, lots of fun, but not exactly what I was wanting for the next episode. Maybe I should just get that tagelharpa for her and do the viking story next...

If I only I was closer on Blue. I have the basic layout of the place. I have lots of tasty bits with my tech and aliens.

I lack a sensawunda. There's nothing about the place you could put on a cover or in the elevator pitch. They aren't on the back of a giant turtle or doing magic with hair plaiting or have laser shurikans.

I think the problem was going in the Honor Harrington direction. That is, Mil-SF with the focus being on one person's career progression. Because those things do love them politics and engineering but only from the numbers side. Which gets as excessive as their counts of missiles.

(I just read the first book of the Lost Fleet series. Space battles galore. The protagonist is the admiral of a fleet and the POV character. Through the length of the series, we get like five settings, tops. And two of them are his cabin and the galley.)

So I also have a plot currently that goes after one group of aliens and beats them up. I can't make it really go deeper into the politics or philosophy or theme of the place, much less the physics or whatever. It is just "oh, and we have to shoot at some bad guys."

The main reason I'm not quickly switching gears and cranking out the Tiki book instead, is I want to decorate my space to put myself in the right mood first. And despite retiring, I have yet to clean up my place properly.

Well, that and I actually cranked out 7,000 words already -- in one day! -- on a new, nonfiction book.

Go home, LTXV2.3 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. SmoothMix high and low, with a fast move Wan 2.2 in the first slot. Then upscaled to final resolution. 

(Especially since I learned on a subreddit that when using lightX (lightning LoRA), 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.)

Also turns out it can handle 400 frames without significant degradation. At least, in the more compressed fp8 checkpoint!

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.

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.