Tag: Rags and Muffin

‘Rags and Muffin’ According to Bing Image Creator

I see a lot of people playing around with Microsoft Bing’s new Image Creator, which uses Dall-E 3 as its engine. I’m toying around with AI because, like other people, I find it interesting and fun but also because I’m obliged to familiarize it for work reasons I won’t discuss on the blog.

In any case, I decided to try to get Bing Image Creator to reproduce some scenes from my novel Rags and Muffin. Here we go.

First, I wanted Rags sipping tea in her iconic wingback chair with Muffin curled up nearby. These images, I note, are quite similar in lighting and composition no matter how I tweak them. Also, Bing cannot understand what I mean by a furry, dog-like dragon no matter how I phrase it. I get either a dog or a dragon, no in-between.

Girl sipping tea with a dragon.
Rags sips tea with … Muffin? Is that you?

Some of the images are more convincing than others, but never once has it given me a picture that didn’t have obvious telltale signs of AI generation.

Continue reading “‘Rags and Muffin’ According to Bing Image Creator”

D. G. D. Davidson on the ‘Blasters and Blades’ Podcast

My interview with the Blasters and Blades podcast is now live. You can listen to it on Anchor FM or on YouTube:

My wife listened to it earlier and said to me, “You talk too much,” which is true. I was nervous during this interview, and when I get nervous, I talk.

During the interview, we mostly talked about Rags and Muffin, which, it just so happens, would make a nice Christmas gift for the geek in your life.

Cirsova Reviews ‘Rags and Muffin’

The blog of Cirsova: The Magazine of Thrilling Adventure and Daring Suspense has produced a new review of Rags and Muffin:

This one was a bit of a surprise, I’ll admit. All I knew going in was crime-fighting catgirl with an Asian dragon dog. I didn’t know what to expect, really. Certainly not an incredibly rich fantasy setting heavily inspired by Indian mythology.

As an aside, the “pseudo Indian” (as he calls it) setting almost didn’t happen. When I first started this project, the setting was a more generic dystopian city vaguely resembling Blade Runner. But while I pondered what kind of city it was, I mused that it might be a religious capital; I then asked myself, “Which religion?” and the answer instantly came, “All of them.” After that, an early test reader said the book had an “Indian vibe,” which further encouraged me to build the world in that direction.

Also, the novel’s conception of religion is partly drawn from the syncretistic and drug-fueled stew that was Vedantism and perennialism in the 1960s. The portrayal of people getting doses of hallucinogenic drugs as a shortcut to mystical experience is ultimately inspired, albeit indirectly, by Timothy Leary, whose ideas I absorbed as an undergraduate through third-rate philosophers like Huston Smith, John Hick, and Marcus Borg. Of course, Leary, Huxley, and their disciples were all enamored of Hinduism, however deficient their understanding of it, so a pseudo-Hindu setting seemed appropriate for a story about a world where drugs and religion are inextricably linked.

But what ultimately convinced me to go all out with the Indian elements was my happy discovery that the religious practice I invented as a central feature of my fictional world—the worship of young girls as living goddesses—exists in real life. Although I obviously employed a lot of artistic license in my fantastical portrayal of it, kumari puja is a real thing: It is particularly prominent in Nepalese Buddhism, but there are versions of it in India as well. In the world of Rags and Muffin, of course, it is essential to every religion, which is why early chapters give the reader brief glimpses of both Christian and Tibetan Buddhist kumaris.

Cirsova also says,

I used to be something of a Hindu Mythology wonk in my younger years, so this was a pleasant surprise. Davidson incorporates the cultural textures without overly romanticizing them, showing both the beautiful aspects which Lord Curzon fell in love with as well as the ugly and downright evil.

If I depicted anything as evil, it was on account of plot necessity rather than personal opinion. My attitude toward India and its neighbors is about as neutral as it is possible to be: I am enamored of Indian culture and people, but my view of their history, religion, and mythology is almost purely academic. The Bhagavad-gita is a book I like to return to from time to time, but mostly because it has fine passages; I am not especially moved by its sweeping theology nor repulsed by its amoral and fatalistic stance on ethics.

Even kumari puja, which often exercises Western philanthropists and busybodies who believe Nepal’s worshiped girls are being abused, is a practice on which I have no strong opinion. On the one hand, I find it a rather charming form of idolatry. On the other hand, I think its critics are likely correct that it leaves its pampered girls unprepared to cope with the real world once their stint as goddesses is over. But on the gripping hand, Reuters and the BBC hate the practice, as revealed by their frequent exposes on the subject, and anything those organizations hate must have something good about it.

On another note, it was originally my intent to be entirely agnostic about the religious beliefs and practices portrayed in the book, allowing the reader to draw his own conclusions as to whether any of the mystical experiences are real or just drug-induced hallucinations. However, as the story developed, I reached a point where I was forced to reveal that the gods truly exist, which I partly regret.

Cirsova has one prominent criticism, which is quite fair:

There’s a lot of excellent worldbuilding in Rags & Muffin, but as a book, it’s a little all over the place in setting things up. A number of seemingly unrelated events, as well as side excursions of the main characters, tie in to the world and add a backdrop to the story but go nowhere on their own in this volume.

He’s correct that the book spends some time hanging Chekov’s Guns to be fired in later volumes, but part of the problem he detects is that I blended two different types of stories without complete success: This is first of all an action story, which requires a tight structure. But it’s also a milieu story, which is allowed to wander around.

That’s why there’s a sub-story, starting in chapter seven, in which an elaborate, city-wide, syncretistic religious ritual ends incongruously with a terrorist blowing up a bus: That sequence exists purely to show you what kind of world I’m drawing you into. Plotwise, it is barely justified because it introduces both Rags’s medical problem and the characters of Miss Marie and her henchmen, but its true purpose is to display the city, which is really the main character of the book.

Buy Rags and Muffin here.

Assorted Updates

Happy Easter.

A lot is happening in the Davidson household. The little magical girl is now fifteen months old. As is typical for a girl her age, she’s hit a sleep regression. She is having trouble getting to sleep at night and can’t handle being in her crib by herself, which is putting some strain on both her mother and me. My wife is a nurse and works nights; previously, when she worked, I could put the baby to bed and then write late into the evening, but now that the baby is fighting bedtime, I’m struggling to find time for other things I need to do. I’m attempting to rearrange my schedule to write early in the morning … but the baby wakes up really early to demand milk and cuddles, and then she won’t go back to sleep. I usually end up holding her until my wife gets home, and then I don’t even get breakfast before I have to rush to work.

So it goes.

My parents-in-law have been here for a while and have been a huge help with the baby, but they’re heading back to the Philippines now, which means I need to up my game. I’m trying to figure out a system to write and watch the baby simultaneously; the problem is, I can’t write in her presence because she wants to bang on my keyboard and has a tantrum if I don’t let her. I could potentially block her off so she’s in the room with me but can’t reach the computer, but that will make her cry.

On another first-time-parent, first-time-homeowner front, we’re working on the house. We’re putting in a garden and planning to plant fruit trees in the back. Also, we’re going to plant hedges in the front because the direction of the wind and location of the house cause a lot of trash to blow into our front yard. I figure, if we have hedges, the trash can pile up against them on the street instead of scattering across our grass. We’re moving slowly on all this because budgeting is tight, but we’re moving.

Also, it appears a vole has destroyed part of our sprinkler system. After reading some articles online, I suggested to my wife that I might be able to repair it myself, but she gave me “the look” and told me to call somebody instead.

And although this isn’t the highest priority, I want to put one of those miniature free libraries in the front yard. Having retired from archaeology, I work as a librarian, so passing out books to others is a mtter of principle for me. I don’t want to be officially associated with the organization called Little Free Library for the same reason I refuse to join the American Library Association despite official pressure: Because those guys are assholes. Nonetheless, I’ve always liked those miniature libraries, and I think there’s only one other in town at the moment, so I’d like to host the second. When I finally get it set up, I’m going to fill it with books that are edifying but not too demanding, such as Mortimer J. Adler’s Aristotle for Everybody and H. G. Wells’s Short History of the World.

I have plans to DIY our guest room after the grandparents head out. It may turn into a disaster, but it will at least be a disaster contained to one area of the house. Our house has an atrocious interior texture, and the walls were abused by previous occupants who didn’t understand the concept of stud-finding and thus ripped holes in the sheetrock that were then hastily patched. So I intend to try my hand at skim-coating. Some DIY sites online claim, no doubt falsely, that it’s super easy with the right tools, so I’m going to give it a shot, and if I destroy a room, at least I will have only destroyed one room. But if I succeed, that means I can go on to do the other rooms. The plan is, rip out the carpet, skim-coat the walls, apply new texture (orange peel, probably, because it’s easy and looks okay and comes in cans), and put down a floating floor. If that works out, I’ll move on to other rooms to do the same thing.

I have some ambitions that are beyond my skill level, such as a built-in bench for the dining area and built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcases for my office, which would be extra cool because the office has high ceilings. These projects would, at the least, require tools I don’t currently own and can’t presently afford.

On a more serious note, my computer desperately needs replacing. One thing slowing down my writing is that I simply don’t know if my machine will cooperate with me when I turn it on. Sometimes it boots up fine. Sometimes it takes twenty minutes. Sometimes my word processor crashes unexpectedly or slows down the computer to a crawl. Sometimes I think I can squeeze in a little time to write but actually can’t because the computer is too slow. This computer is now over a decade old, well past its life expectancy. As with everything else, this is a budget item for which there are no funds. But I have been expecting for years now that this thing will simply one day fail to turn on when I press the power button, and although that still hasn’t happened, it is fast approaching.

I have yet another item that is halfway between a hobby project and a religious devotion. I am a fanatical Bible annotator. My notes are a stream of consciousness consisting of points from sermons and my own thoughts but mostly snippets from books and articles I’ve read, with quotes ranging from Jules Verne to Bertrand Russell to the Bhagavad Gita as well as a slew of archaeological journals. I’ve been through three different study Bibles over my lifetime, and I am almost finished copying my notes from the previous two into the third one. That third one is a first edition, in leather, of the Harper Collins Study Bible, and it is getting worn out, so I am seriously considering copying all of my notes, a project that would literally take years, into a new, fourth study Bible.

To that end, I recently acquired, for an embarrassing amount of money, a rare leatherbound edition of the New Interpreter’s Study Bible, a volume I have coveted for a long time. But after examining it and finding it dissatisfactory in some ways (poor binding and narrow margins mostly, but also the annotations are obnoxious), I think I am likely to settle for the fifth edition of the New Oxford Annotated Bible, which I also acquired recently. The New Oxford is horrid in many respects but is also the only “ecumenical” study Bible that updates regularly, is designed for personal annotations, and is printed by a company that actually gives a darn how the product looks.

I anticipate that the fifth edition will be the last version of the New Oxford that is actually useable. All of the Bibles I just mentionend use the New Revised Standard Version, which is an offense to the ears that wreaks havoc on the texts it pretends to translate, but it is the only English version, unfortunately, that includes all the books used by the Eastern Orthodox and some prominent lesser Eastern Churches. A new version of the NRSV is forthcoming, which promises to be worse than the current one; the current NRSV I can fix with a red pen, but the new version will be beyond saving. I expect that the sixth edition of the New Oxford, whenever it appears, will use this newer version, so that means the fifth edition is the last “ecumenical” study Bible that will not be worthless. For that reason, I expect it will be the last study Bible I buy and may be the one into which I copy all my notes to create my own personal “definitive” edition. The New Oxford lacks features that anything calling itself a study Bible ought to have, such as a cross-referencing system and a concordance, and its formatting is horrendous, but it is, sadly, the best thing available in its niche and is likely to remain so.

On the writing front, I have two projects. I am working on a collection of Rags and Muffin short stories, though this has proven difficult: Although I’ve been editing, formatting, and promoting Rags and Muffin, actually writing and living in their world isn’t something I’ve done for some time, so it’s hard to get back into. I’m also moving ahead with the third volume of Jake and the Dynamo. I was having some difficulty with the plotting of that book, but I’ve recently found the solution. Finding the time to write, however—and getting my computer to cooperate—are other matters.

Interview in ‘Book Reader Magazine’

Check out my author interview in Book Reader Magazine, where I discuss Rags and Muffin:

Although I don’t like the term, the book is a “deconstruction” of the trope of the child hero who goes to school during the day and saves the world at night. Although almost invulnerable both physically and emotionally, Rags has surrounded herself with other children who aid her crime-fighting efforts. Unlike Rags, those children get the full brunt of their enemies’ brutality. In most stories of child heroes, the villains are buffoons, foolish adults who are so silly that even children can beat them. I wanted to change that formula by pitting kids against genuinely evil and ruthless adults who are perfectly willing to do the most atrocious things to children. For that reason, Rags and Muffin is not only a story with a lot of action and excitement but also a tale of horrifying abuse. Balancing those elements, being careful about what is shown and what is not, and being tasteful, was extremely difficult.

Artisan Book Reviews and ‘Rags and Muffin’

Artisan Book Reviews has this to say about my novel Rags and Muffin:

In the imaginative and exhilarating young adult fantasy novel, Rags and Muffin (Deus ex Magical Girl Book 1) by D. G. D. Davidson, a team of young friends fight to free a young girl from a ruthless pimp.

Though mystic and majestic with its centuries-old temples, Godtown is also a city fraught with criminals, warring gangs, and a history marred by consistent war. In the city which is now occupied by the powerful Elysian Empire, criminality and skirmishes are still rampant. Among the city’s residents are hybrids who have special, mystical powers. Rags is one of these and is intent on fighting off criminals within the short time she has left.

The novel builds a believable world complete with its own language, political and religious scene, and landscape. Striking descriptions of the city’s splendor and detailed accounts that paint lifelike images of the city’s underbelly are included. As the Ragtag army moves through slums to execute their plan, the novel includes precise details that depict the city’s filth and various ruins. Its elaborate coverage also extends to its characters. Members of the Ragtag Army are described in depth with details that flesh them out as some of the main characters in the book. Their extensive backgrounds are included and their friendships are covered. The book is packed with fierce action scenes which involve numerous fights between the team and the criminals they encounter. In a city that is rife with dangerous clashes, other exciting confrontations also appear. The novel’s paranormal elements enhance the story. Mystical events such as when Rags, being a hybrid, is able to subdue her opponents through her supernatural powers generate suspense. Explanations about other hybrid abilities and weaknesses are also captivating. The Ragtag team’s clandestine operations are unknown to their parents which adds tension and excitement to their escapades. Some of their activities and experiences are light-hearted and they balance the novel’s more harrowing scenes.

The immersive descriptions, fascinating scenes and heroic, compelling characters make Rags and Muffin by D. G. D. Davidson an engaging story. The novel will be a delightful read for fans of urban fantasy looking for a creative novel set in a dynamic, absorbing world. Rags and Muffin (Deus ex Magical Girl Book 1) by D. G. D. Davidson comes highly recommended by Artisan Book Reviews.

‘Rags and Muffin’ Reviewed on Reedsy

Excellent for fans of dark fantasy anime and manga, though perhaps jarring to those who only read western fantasy.

Jennifer deBie at Reedsy Discovery praises Rags and Muffin:

Broadly speaking, in western literature authors tend to populate their novels with characters the age of their intended audience. A novel full of teenagers going on adventures is meant for the YA market. A chapter-book full of pre-teens is aimed at middle grade readers. A novel full of women in their 30s and 40s is largely geared towards women in their 30s and 40s, and any readers from outside that demographic who buy and enjoy the book are a nice bonus for the author, publisher, and bookseller.

This is a book almost entirely populated by children, but please do not give it to children. These are child soldiers fighting a graphic war in a city waiting to swallow, exploit, and destroy all of the children it can sink teeth into.

This is not a book for children, or the faint of heart.

That said, D. G. D. Davidson’s Rags and Muffin, the first entry in his Deus ex Magical Girl series, is a complex sequence of interlinking narratives, following various members of the titular Rags’ gang as they go through a particularly perilous few days. While the kids’ adventures unfold, Davidson takes readers through a whirlwind tour of Godtown itself and the complex native religion, centered almost entirely on maintaining caste and worshiping powerful girls born from the union of a human and the native marjara, a race of cat people. These daughters, or hybrids, the only viable offspring from such couplings as far as we are told, are born with an innate connection to the Goddess and thus her power and are destined by their genetics to die before they reach adulthood, preferably after spending the majority of their short lives being worshiped in a temple as an incarnation of their Goddess on earth.

Rags, the Ragamuffin to her enemies and Miss Anne to adults, along with her gang of child-disciples, is on a mission to save her fellow hybrids from those who would exploit or enslave them for their power through a combination of acrobatic hand-to-hand combat and heavy artillery. This never-ending battle for the soul of Godtown is further complicated by the soldiers of the occupying Elysian Empire, would-be colonizers who enforce their laws with war machines called runebots, and an iron fist.

If all of that sounds complicated and potentially violent, the answers are yes, and very.

Luckily, Davidson is an able storyteller with a knack for describing his chosen world and crafting his characters. Sights, smells, and sounds are brought to life with startling clarity, as are every bruise, broken bone, and bleeding wound the children experience. The children themselves are drawn with unerring precision, each characterized by their own linguistic quirks and subconscious drives. This is an author with a true talent for bringing his work to life, even if the results are potentially jarring to an audience accustomed to western narratives, novels, and tropes.

However, readers with experience in eastern media, particularly manga and anime from Japan, will notice a more than passing resemblance between Rags and Muffin and several franchises from that quarter. Most notably certain “girls with guns” properties, like Shikabane Hime and Black Lagoon, as well as dark fantasy/urban fantasy series like Soul Eater/Soul Eater Not, Dance in the Vampire Bund, and Blood-C.

Head over to Reedsy Discovery to upvote the review, which will help me promote the novel! And buy your copy here.

Reedsy Review of ‘Rags and Muffin’: A Preview

I just received a book review from Reedsy Discovery for Rags and Muffin. The review won’t be live until February 8th, at which time I will link to it, quote it in its entirely, and also add it to the book’s metadata on Amazon and other locations.

This is an official, professional review, not as presitigious as, say, Kirkus, but more affordable (yes, I paid for it and yes, that’s a legitimate practice).

For now, I’ll just say that the review is quite flattering. It has a few minor but understandable errors, but it correctly perceives the influence of manga and anime, though the reviewer suggests, as comparisons, titles I’m wholly unfamiliar with. In fact, Cardcaptor Sakura is its most immediate inspiration from manga, but that’s hardly obvious. Most of the story’s elements are ones I developed independently, before I knew much about manga or anime at all, so many of the resemblances are coincidental.

I’ll give a teaser quote:

Luckily, Davidson is an able storyteller with a knack for describing his chosen world and crafting his characters. Sights, smells, and sounds are brought to life with startling clarity, as are every bruise, broken bone, and bleeding wound the children experience.

The reviewer correctly notes that this is a niche title—that it’s unusual to have child protagonists in a story aimed at an older audience. But so it goes; I have my niche and like it even if it’s a tiny one.

Speaking of which, I have a collection of Rags and Muffin short stories underway. I’d like to get that done before writing my planetary romance, circling back to Jake and the Dynamo, and continuing with Rags. An author’s work is never done.

Return of the ‘Rags and Muffin’ Hardcover

I earlier reported that an Amazon order of my novel Rags and Muffin resulted in a delivery of the volume printed by IngramSpark. I had no explanation for this and still don’t.

I needed some additional copies recently and ordered them, again from Amazon. What I got this time resembled the test printing I originally got from Amazon, which in my opinion is superior to the IngramSpark version.

I do not know why I got IngramSpark books before. I do not know what will arrive in the mail if you order a hardcover.

However, the difference between the two versions might not be noticeable to most readers. The Amazon version appears to have sturdier binding, though whether it actually holds up better over time or whether that’s merely a cosmetic difference, I can’t say. The image on its cover is also clearer, but only slightly.

Rags and Muffin back cover.

I think this is a good-looking book. Amazon only recently began offering hardcovers through Kindle Direct Printing, but the product they produce is of high quality. The printing is clear, the paper is bright but not too bright, the cover is good, and the book overall is solid, with a lot of heft.

It happens that Vellum, which I use for formatting, updated right before this book went live on Amazon, so I was able to give the internal formatting some slight improvements over what I originally planned to release. Because the cover was already made, I couldn’t change the page count, so it was too late to use some of Vellum’s newer, more creative layout options. But you nonetheless get a fine-looking interior with large, clear type.

Rags and Muffin interior.

Vellum is expensive, but it’s one purchase I definitely don’t regret: I can format my books myself without hiring a pro, which means I can instantly correct any lingering typos if I become aware of them. This novel did (yet again) get an additional proofread recently from a generous reviewer, and all he found was a missing quotation mark—which has now been added where it belongs. I can’t claim it’s perfect, but it is a very clean manuscript, unusually so for either indie or tradpub.

The only downside to the hardback is that Amazon forces a starting price that’s decidedly high for an indie book. Naturally, I make most of my sales in eBooks, so I’m debating whether continuing to offer hardcovers for my future titles is worth the expense.

Amazon KDP vs. IngramSpark Hardcovers

Depicted at the top of this post is the author copy of the hardcover edition of Rags and Muffin, which I received from Amazon KDP before the book went live (hence the “Not for Resale” stripe across the middle). My initial thought was that it looked really good, very professional and well put-together. The cover art is printed directly onto the case, and it came out crisp.

Recently, my wife, unaware that I could order additional copies at cost, ordered a few of these from Amazon in order to give them as Christmas gifts. When her copies arrived, I immediately noticed that they looked markedly different from what I had originally received from Amazon. Here is a side-by-side comparison:

Amazon and IngramSpark hardcovers.
The two hardcovers, compared.

My author copy is a thicker book, and a little better looking. You can also see that, in the copies my wife ordered, the title is not quite centered but shifted to the right. Even more baffling, if you look closely, you can see that my name overlaps Rags’s sneaker in the author copy but not in the ordered copy. I at first had no idea how that was even possible since I uploaded the cover as a single PDF file.

My first thought was that I had inadvertently uploaded the wrong cover image to Amazon KDP at some point. I have been shuffling a lot of files around to get this book published, so that would be likely—except the book should have failed to publish if that were the case, since Amazon has exact specifications for covers and will automatically reject anything that doesn’t fit.

After hunting through my files, I finally found the answer: The cover art on my wife’s copies is the cover for IngramSpark, the print-on-demand service that more or less holds a monopoly on distribution to libraries and brick-and-mortar stores.

Since Amazon KDP has only just recently begun offering hardcovers as an option, this may be a new discovery: Apparently, Amazon shipped IngramSpark hardcovers to my wife instead of its own hardcovers. That may indicate that Amazon outsources printing whenever possible. I have not tested if this is also true of paperbacks.

I’m not entirely happy with this. Amazon appears to be turning out a better product, as their version of the hardcover looks better in every significant way, including the binding (both are glued, but Amazon’s at least has a cloth backing). Not only that, but I can correct the contents of the Amazon version instantly and for free if necessary, whereas the contents of the IngramSpark printing are locked in by IngramSpark’s prohibitive pricing.

This has got me to thinking—is IngramSpark actually worth it? Their distribution is better, but since I’m small fry, my chance of being picked up by booksellers is remote anyway, especially since I can’t afford to buy back unsold copies. Almost all of my sales are certain to come from Amazon anyway, and if Amazon is willing to sell an inferior product in lieu of its own better product … maybe I should just kill the IngramSpark version and sell exclusively on Amazon. For this reason, I am already enrolled in Kindle Unlimited: It forces me to offer eBook versions on Amazon exclusively, but I know from indie authors with much greater reach than I have that eBook sales on other platforms are negligible.