Legacy Progress - Day 13

Uh oh.  Looks like another day with no progress.  Although today and yesterday were the last big toy selling days of the year for me and my cousin, I stretched myself thin enough that I couldn't stay awake whilst editing, OR whilst watching "Saturday Night Live" on television.

So, it was pretty much a failure, editing-wise.  But I did manage to make a little money, have a good time, and pass out early enough that I woke up with the sun the next day (which caused me to accomplish quite a bit in the morning, and then start dragging as afternoon became evening).

I only managed to edit a single chapter, and went to the living room to watch "South Park" and have a little ice cream.  I opened my eyes not long after to discover that the half-hour show had long ended, and the ice cream had melted over the coffee table.*  Sorry about that.

*I did force myself to do push-ups before I dragged my flabby carcass to bed, so I don't feel nearly as bad about it as I should.

Legacy Progress - Day 12

Well, it finally happened: a day without working on "Legacy."  And that was with getting up nearly two hours early this morning.

Wait, that's not quite true (the no working on "Legacy" part).  I sat down and did relines in two chapters, then got those two edited back in, but still, that doesn't impact my chart at all.

Bonus points if you can identify the two horror movie images above.

Legacy Progress - Day 11

I'm at the cabin, and my hands are cold (my feet were really cold yesterday, and I did that thing where I kept putting socks on the stove, then switching them out with the ones on my feet, but for some reason, it's my hands today), but I've accomplished a great deal with the time I've had today.  I have to leave extra early today--earlier than I've ever left before, because I need to trade vehicles with my cousin, and yesterday, the road to the cabin (at the end of the canyon) was closed, and they were turning traffic away, so I went all the way back up the canyon and back into town, and considered--seriously considered--just going home and trying to edit there.  But I ended up driving an hour out of my way, going way down south to another road that bypassed the canyon altogether, so I could get here and do my thing.  And it was very nearly dark, what with the time change this past Sunday and the extra hour of delay, so I didn't go do my run or check messages or anything, since I just didn't have the time.

I edited a couple of chapters, edited a podcast, recorded a podcast, ate, wrote a blogpost, started editing another podcast, and now ought to go stack wood for next week (I burned nearly all I had piled up two weeks ago, and if next week is the last time I come up here, I'd like there to be dry stacked wood just outside the door), but I had also thought about recording an Algernon Blackwood story today, and maybe watching a movie before leaving to meet my cousin (I have to swap vehicles with her for the "big" toy convention this weekend), but you know how it is--there's never enough time to finish everything on your to-do list . . . even when I discovered that, because I hadn't set the clock in the cabin back, there was an extra hour before I had to leave.

Sadly, I didn't get any editing done today on the book--just the chapter Marshal Latham edited for me.  Still counts.

At this point, the recording is 100% done (not including retakes), and the editing is 38% done.  I'll take it. 

Legacy Progress - Day 10

What if there comes a day when I do no work on "Legacy," either recording or editing?  Would I still blog about it? 

Hell yeah.  And I'd include something like this, as punishment for us both:

I asked A.I. to make me an image of Satan hugging a teddy bear, and it couldn't (it only drew a teddy bear--although one of them had three ears).  So I told it to draw the Devil hugging a teddy bear, but same result (this time, there were two teddy bears side by side, but no hugging).  I told it to do a demon hugging a teddy bear, and no go (I can't understand what the problem was), so I told it to do the same with Hitler.  And this it could do (although the bear looks a bit stretched out, and Adolf looks way too much like Walt Disney for my comfort.  But ah well.

Legacy Progress - Day 9

Alright, I sat down and went though to the end (recording-wise).  She wrote such short chapters that, every time I reached a long one, I felt like it was actual work.*  Oh no, a chapter of three thousand words, whatever will I do?

On the last chapter, I put a pizza in the oven right before I began, and challenged myself to finish before the timer went off.  I failed, but the pizza tasted all the better knowing I had earned it.

Should I put "earned" in quotation marks?

*Of course, on my own books, there could be a nine hundred word chapter that takes me half an hour, so it's all relative.

Legacy Progress - Day 8

Abbie has started to listen to the chapters I've sent her, and she sent me a list of lines she wants me to do over again.  I was thinking I'd wait and do all of them together, once she'd heard a dozen chapters, but that might not be logical (after all, can I really mark them off my chart if there's a mistake in every one of them?).  What I'd really like to do is buckle down hard, getting as much done now as possible, so that late, when I'd tired and grouchy, I can move at a much more leisurely pace.

Hence:

Something interesting (to me, anyway) that's been going while I record is, every time I make a mistake, I get angry, because I know I'll have to edit it out, and editing is a pain in my gonads.  And so, already getting angry, I make a second mistake, which makes me angrier still.  Fun, fun, fun, as the Monkees said*.

*Until her daddy took the bananas away.

Legacy Progress - Day 7

So, here we are, a week into this thing . . . and I'm doing great, at least as far as recording goes.  We had that thing where the time changes--you know, Rosh Hashana--so I woke up more than an hour before my alarm.  I lay there for a while, thinking about nonsense, and then put on Marshal Latham's podcast to listen to (either to lull me to sleep--the heavy embrace of welcome death--or just to pass the time), and it was interesting enough I couldn't go back to sleep.  But he spoke about his goals (you know the thing, I could do better, I could work harder, I could say the Q-word less often), and it got to me enough that I turned off his podcast and got to work editing Chapter 7 of "Legacy."

I got it done before my alarm went off, and wasted four or five hours on this dumb graphic before finally getting up and starting my day.  Okay, a bit of an exaggeration, but that's how it felt.

I did manage to get an episode edited, but I did it with little enthusiasm . . . and I found a bit where I said the wrong word (and didn't correct myself), which means I'll have to do some relines.  But I always do.

The Computer Wore Artist Shoes

I meant to share this a week or so back, but when I write a blog post in the Blogger itself, it doesn't save it until I connect to the internet (it's a whole thing), and my laptop hates me more than you do.

If you're a Patreon supporter of me (and if you ain't, HERE'S THE LINK yet again), you've already heard a bit about this (in my November Patreon address), but I've been experimenting with one of those A.I. art programs, such as this image of a "woman wearing a Guy Fawkes mask," which was my prompt:

People have speculated about how A.I. will destroy us all for decades, but it's really ramped up since you could just go on the internet and tell it to write you a paper, create you a painting, or arrange the death of your wife.

You see this, don't you?  Somehow, this woman is sitting on a Jabba the Hutt beanbag chair, or possibly a two-headed Jabba, that happens to match the giant olives she's holding (not to mention her bikini).  Artists are strange.

Anyway, the time had come to put a cover to my novella "Bundling Made Easy," which is the third Lara Demming story I wrote, back in 2020.  It took me practically the whole summer and fall to get the audio done, and when it came time to create a cover for it, I had rediscovered one of those A.I. programs--oh wait, I just mentioned that in the above paragraph (this blog post has also taken weeks/months/year)--and I thought I'd see what it could do for me.

In the prompt box, I typed "blonde girl holding bouquet of blue mushrooms," and it created three images for me, including this one: 

I quite liked it, so I saved it, then changed "girl" to "teen," and this was the result:

This time, I added the word "glowing" before blue mushrooms, and it put a field of 'shrooms behind her . . . as well as too many fingers.

I noticed, by the way, that the girl kept having the same face, though you're seeing only a third of the images I was seeing.  I liked the one below, but she looks like an angelic eleven or twelve year old to me, and Lara Demming is sixteen in "Bundling Made Easy."

This time, I added a word to the prompt, so it said, "cute blonde girl holding bouquet of glowing blue mushrooms," and I liked it, but again, the girl's face is too young, and much too pretty.

This one was "cute blonde teenager holding bouquet of glowing blue mushrooms," and it was the best one yet, though my god, she'd somehow gotten even more beautiful than--  What the . . . she grew and extra hand!

So, I thought I would overcompensate a little, and typed "Ugly blonde teenager holding bouquet of glowing blue mushrooms," and the result was . . . well, I can't explain it.  

Elle Fanning and Gollum had a love child, apparently.  At least the face changed, I suppose.

One of the options was to make a Magic The Gathering card instead of the usual cover, so I tried that.  And I like it--again, the girl is too beautiful*, but that's a complaint you'll rarely get from me.

This next one seems to have her in some sort of futuristic/fantasy world leather outfit, which doesn't work for the story I'm telling, but would be great to see in a movie sometime.

More card art, and again, there's that face.

This one is excellent--still got a background full of mushrooms, for some reason--but it worked great for me, even though it's that same, angelic, perfect face.  Fun how the hairstyle changes, pretty much on its own, right?

So, I thought the problem was that the template I was using (or whatever you call the type of image) was too realistic, so I told it to be more like a painting.  It changed the face, now it's more like a specific art style, but the gal is wearing a mushroom as a hat, and, well, that's just weird.

On the one below, I decided to use my dad's word "homely" to describe the teen girl holding the shrooms.  

I don't hate it, but again, it looks too realistic--of all the images it's produced so far, this seems the most like a photograph to me of a real person.

So this time, I told it to make me a "cartoon teen blonde holding the blue mushrooms."  And it interpreted that pretty literally.

I went back to the original template-thing for this one, and thought it made Lara seem VERY young, like, twelve or so, but again, way too beautiful.  Her sister Emma was the beautiful one.  Her sister probably looked like this.

But not with so many fingers.

Finally, it was getting late, and I'd been doing this for a half hour or more, so I told it to do a "blonde teen student" holding shrooms, and I liked it better, since it appears to be in a room, and though she's in a European-type school uniform, I said, "This is it, this is my cover.  I'll just crop out all the mushrooms at the bottom and send it to Big."  

And that's what I did.  The trouble is, I hadn't noticed the arms--did you?

He sent me a message saying, "Uh, dude, that girl has three arms . . . and seven butts."  I didn't believe him--how had I missed that?

I had been tired, I guess, and desperate for a look I could live with.

And for some reason, I decided I liked what I liked, so I (rather-crappily) painted over the third arm, and told him to do his best.

And this was the result:

I'm happy with it, frankly.  It was a fun experiment, and I hope (some of) this was interesting to you, too.

*I've often heard theories/accusations that A.I. just takes existing images and artwork and pulls from it, so it makes me wonder if that girl's face is based on a real person or combination of real features.  At the same time, I have been curious what it would do with real people, so I asked it to do a Britney Stears one (I had her brandishing a spear against a giant spider, and it instead turned her into a giant spider), a Bruce Willis one, and one where I typed "Alexandra Daddario floating in outer space," which produced this:

Legacy Progress - Day 6

 I set up my microphone in the late afternoon, and recorded a couple of chapters, then went and did other stuff (my nephew has another book he has to read for his English class, so we're doing two chapters a day so we won't be behind when the deadline hits in December), and came back and recorded a couple more.

I unplugged the mic and decided to go for a run, but then helped my other nephew clean and replace his turtle aquarium and replace it with a big plastic tub.  I listed some figures on eBay (Marvel Legends has a new wave that's really good--and selling well--for a change), then got a text from Marshal that I'd screwed up a couple of lines in the chapter I sent him.

So, instead of my run, I sat down and re-did those lines, then decided to do one more chapter, since they're always short.  But this one turned out to be the longest chapter in the book (so far), so it was nearly two am when I finished, and decided that there'd be no running tonight.

All good, right?

Except the next morning (tomorrow's post), when I uploaded the relines for Marshal . . . I realized I hadn't plugged the microphone back in.  It had recorded audio, but not useable audio.  And the longest chapter?

Well, on with the countdown.

Big and Rish "Do-Over" the Anklecast

Over the last couple of months, Big has had me on his podcast to comment on his novella "Do Over" (which I've been spelling do-over all this time), about a middle-aged man gets a chance to re-live the years when he was young, hopefully fixing what all went wrong.

Big presented it in five episodes of the Anklecast, and the last one is available now.  If you weren't aware of it, and want to hear the two of us talk, as well as a twisty time travel tale, go HERE (for Part 1) and HERE (for Part 5).

Legacy Progress - Day 5

I was at the cabin for a day, and really tried to focus on editing.  But I had other projects too, did a little writing, and an awful struggle to stay warm, so I didn't manage quite as much as I'd hoped.

As a lark, I asked Marshal Latham if he wanted to edit a chapter (I asked him this in the middle of recording a chapter), and he said he did.  Though it will surely end our friendship, I sent him one and will gladly add that to my Editing thermometer when he finishes it.

So, on this fifth day (I haven't missed a day working on it yet), I'm 63% through the recording (not including retakes), and 15% through editing.