welcome to camp telophase

I'm currently reading the first book of Brian McClellan's second powdermage trilogy. Haven't read the first trilogy yet because I wasn't grabbed by the Amazon sample, but I might go back to it.

Anyway, the MacGuffin in this book resembles the MacGuffin in mine fairly closely in form and effects, although not in its use in the plot except for one scene. Which is totally fine, because these things happen. But if mine gets published I can tell that I'm going to have people saying "Did you steal that from McClellan?" and I'm going to have to explain that no, I stole it from Glen Cook and gave it a faint whitewashing of Skyrim.

BTW, the Midjourney AI bot can now be invited to Discord servers with less than 1000 members. Caveats: you'd need a free trial account to use it with the 25-image limit, or a paid account to do more, the images are still subject to their content restrictions*, and the images would also be visible over on the Midjourney Discord (hence the content restrictions). But given how busy the server is, I'd be very surprised if anyone even saw it.

So: given those caveats, is there any interest in me spinning up a Discord and inviting y'all along with the bot?
It would allow someone with a free account a chance to mess with the AI without having to dive into the main Midjourney Discord, and look on and talk about it without a bunch of randos.

As these things go, I'd expect engagement in the near future, then we'd all forget about it and go elsewhere, but that's how they do.




* I've had prompts that generated results that looked vaguely like artistic nudity that haven't been removed. OTOH when I was rating images and came across one that I'm 99.999% sure someone used a copy of goatse to generate, you can bet I reported that puppy at the speed of light.

I traded yhlee a Music for the Yoonifier random story prompt generator. In Deadwater, there's reference to a song circulating that misrepresents the events of Deadfall*. I of course moaned to yhlee that it meant I had to write the damn thing, and what with one thing and another I am currently eight verses in, and using traditional ballad meter, and more-or-less fitting it to "The Huntes upp," ('The Hunt is Up," a traditional ballad). When I offered to make him a personalized random prompt generator, he asked what I wanted in return and I remembered him saying something about how it might be fun to arrange a Renaissance ballad tune...

*If you're new here, fantasy novella-in-progress and novel-in-progress.

I'm on the mailing lists for a few academic publishers, because I like to poke through their lists when they have sales on for useful history, anthropology, etc. books for writerly research.

I suspect I'm not the only one. Today I'm looking at geography books at Routledge, because one of my side projects is a map of the larger world of my book, which I should really get around to naming one day, and I'm now mildly panicking about weather, climate, landforms, etc. and I want a good basic geography-cartography book to look at. On the page for An Introduction to Geological Structures and Maps, which might actually be a wee bit advanced for what I'm doing (and is expensive enough I'll ILL it if we don't already have a copy in the library), I happened to scroll to the bottom and spotted the Recommended For You section...
( cut for suspense )
That's a list of books for writers if ever I saw one.

I celebrated completing the draft of Deadwater back in January by commissioning art from Adam Barker (Satans_Masque; Adam Barker on Artstation; adambarkerart)

Click here for a larger version

If it's too dark to see much, your monitor isn't calibrated correctly. :) I do empathize: my work monitors are cheap and cannot be calibrated properly so it's a bit muddy, but the image is GLORIOUS on my home monitor which is very much not cheap because I do art there. If you're stuck with a terrible monitor, I used Photoshop to crank the brightness up so you can see the details, at the expense of pretty much everything else in the image. XD

Anyway! If you care about the process of commissioning and what I asked for, and what he suggested, read on!

With a bit of discussion between us, we settled on illustrating a scene from Deadfall, where Calli and Burn sit in an inn. The actual scene is the final paragraph, but the rest sets it up.( cut for passage )

I blathered at him about Caravaggio, chiarascuro, and my favorite genre of "Dramatically Lit People Sitting Around Tables in Early Modern Europe," and dumped a giant list of reference links on him, which he took in stride. I'd mentioned drawing the viewer into the picture by setting it up as if you were the one talking to them, and he took that idea and, inspired by the first-person drawings of Kim Jung Gi (kimjunggius), took it a step farther and incorporated the hands of the local that Calli and Burn are talking to.

He kept me appraised of the various steps, and would show me concept sketches, character designs and color studies, having me pick from various options, and we ended up with what you see. :)

I am thrilled with the end result, and would recommend Adam Barker for any commission work you want done. :)

I am DONE WITH THIS DRAFT!

It clocks in at ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED SEVENTY FOUR words! (Not counting the approx 26K of Deadfall.)

And here is my VErY DEEP AND TOUCHING, EXTREMELY WELL-WRITTEN final line, which you will remember for ALWAYS:

[INSERT VERY TOUCHING ENDING PARAGRAPH OR TWO RIGHT HERE AND THIS FUCKER IS DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE]

(In all seriousness, I feel I need to reread the whole thing to come up with the proper resonances that should be here.)

Anyway. DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE!