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.