Winding Down
The Writer, by ‘Norman Rockwell’
A month since my previous post and my absence from here – apart from my daily visit to clear the porn bots out of the spam trap – has been because I’ve been writing.
Earlier this year I had an idea for a set of detective stories set in 1930s Edinburgh. I worked up rough outlines and began researching, but started a separate short story to keep the creative juices flowing. As of last night, that story was at 28,000 words. The end is in sight, but I have two or three bubbling under with the same characters. On the days that I’ve been writing, I’ve been exceeding 1000 words a day. Not all of those words will survive revision, but that doesn’t matter. I’d like to get to the end of the first draft before Christmas Day.
If I can maintain the same writing pace in the new year, I may have an unexpected book later in 2023.
In the background, these stories owe something to the sudden rush of AI products that are on the market in two ways. The first is that I had a play with a free trial of a tool called Copy.ai to see if I could come up with some advertising blurb for Amazon and elsewhere. On a whim, I fed a list of the themes of the short stories into the system. What came out was largely gobbledegook but with enough content to form a series of excellent writing prompts. A writing prompt is a sentence or two that provokes the imagination into concocting a story.
Demons in a Dive Bar, by ‘John Everett Millais.’
The second use of AI has been to generate AI art to come up with illustrations of characters. This has been a lot of fun, particularly attempting to render characters or scenes ‘in the style of’ particular artists. The portrait of the writer by ‘Norman Rockwell’ above is generated in Stable Diffusion, as is the ‘Millais’ painting to the left.
AI art does not really understand the human body: figures come out with too many limbs and fingers, contorted at odd angles. Occasionally, two figures merge into one like nightmarish Siamese twins. This, of course, is excellent if you’re writing weird fiction because these illustrations also form writing cues or help me to visualise scenes while writing them.
Also, coming up with the prompts for the AI and having fun with odd juxtapositions of scenes and artists (‘Karaoke Night painted by Rembrandt’} is a great way of freeing up the subconscious as a preparation for writing.
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Karaoke Night by ‘Rembrandt’
The Guardian did its rundown of the top 50 TV shows of 2022. Looking down the list, I see that I watched and thoroughly enjoyed precisely one of them (Andor) and started, but abandoned, one other (‘The House of Dragons.’) The other forty-eight completely passed me by. I make no apologies.
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I listened to Anderson Coopers podcast series All There Is (Spotify link below but available elsewhere.) The series grew from his feelings of grief when sorting through his late mother’s effects. Since his mother was Gloria Vanderbilt, and the effects include love letters from Frank Sinatra, that’s quite a task. There is an awful lot more to it than that, and the series is built around conversations with others about death, loss and grief. That sounds very heavy, but there is also a lot of joy, humour and insight.
I completely recommend it to anyone, even though – or especially because – it deals with subjects from which we instinctively shy away. I’ve listened through each episode at least twice.
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