Among reasons that I haven’t been watching many movies (movie reviews being one of the main ways this blog stays active) is this one: I’ve been pushing to finish writing, editing and prepping this book of short stories:
My goal was to have it complete before Writers Cantina at the end of June just so I could mention it as my latest publication. Well, the ebook is ready to upload, and a proof of the print version is heading toward me as I speak. This is the first time that I’ve actually finished the backend of a book with enough time to do a pre-order. Whee!
The cover? I had originally meant to actually carve something Lovecraftian in a Nordic style, burn it for patina, photograph it… and then I started playing with several A.I. image engines. This experience shows me that, like all other cover creation tools, the quality of the output is still determined by the will of the user. A.I. didn’t “create” this cover; it gave me options for the wooden seal in the middle (through successive attempts with refined prompts) and for the background and border (ditto — oddly enough, I got better results for each element from different A.I. tools), but I still had to know how to lay it out, how to play with fonts until I got what I wanted… As with most creative tools, A.I. art can help skilled people turn out good work faster, but it will only help unskilled and unaware people make amateurish crap more quickly.