Despite life throwing a few curve balls at me, I’m still making progress on my next Urban Fantasy novel, Revenge of the Phantom Press. I’m almost at the point where Tom, Anti-Psychic Kitty, and Juanita are about to discover what they’re really up against. If you want to read a sample of alpha draft, I’ve posted a sample eBook.
I’ve given myself a deadline, hoping to speed up my progress. I have to get a draft ready by April for the developmental editor I’m working with again. Hopefully, I can release this in less than ten years. 🙂
The cover on the sample e-Book is temporary. I won a free book cover design earlier this year from one of the moderators at Wide for the Win, a group that helps authors publish their books without being exclusive to Amazon. She’s a great person, but it looks like it’s going to be awhile before she can get to my book cover. I’m thinking her design will become the special edition design. Looks like GetCovers will do the main cover design. They made the current covers for my books.
For the past couple months, I’ve played with an LLM AI to write short stories for my amusement. LLM AIs and I have some creative differences, to put it mildly. There’s a lot of “with shaking hands” and “His eyes never left her eyes.” It also has time keeping track of the story, or even the scenes. Sometimes the result is characters in positions that defy human physiology, and nude characters taking off their clothes. Even with an outline, it goes off on wild tangents.
I heard someone say that LLM generated fiction reads like an AI took all the fiction writing in human history and averaged it out. LLMs are like a very advanced version of auto-complete. It has no imagination or human emotions. While it is possible to co-write with a generative AI, I won’t due to “our” creative differences. Instead, I’ll stick to the AIs that check grammar, and maybe an occasional rephrase.
If you want to check out my Bolingbrook Babbler book series, it’s on sale at Smashwords through July.
Hopefully, next week I’ll be able to post a Babbler-style “news” story. Until then, I hope you’re having an enjoyable week.
In 1999, Finland didn’t get to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest. A journalist decided to create the most average Finnish Eurovision song ever. He made a list of the most common words used in earlier contest entries and composed lyrics out of those, then had some musicians figure out a way to make a computer do something similar with the melodies. The result sounded indeed like the average of all the Finnish ESC entries ever.