Asides

Working on ‘The Cup of Agamemnon’

Having finished the manuscript for a children’s picture book and sent it to my editor, I’m back to work on The Cup of Agamemnon, a sword-and-planet adventure that I suspect will take me some time to complete This book will be a challenge for me. It involves more large-scale, semi-realistic warfare than I am used to depicting, so I will need some research and assistance to make sure I don’t destroy suspension of disbelief. The world I am describing is supposed to be like a decaying Achaemenid Empire but with Civil War-era weaponry and some science-fiction conceits thrown in. Whether that mishmash is workable remains to be seen.

I confess I’ve been playing around a little with ChatGPT. I fed it some details from this book to see if it could offer any real assistance. So far, it’s sort of like bouncing ideas off a person who is very safe and not particularly creative, though it at least offers a few reminders of things that need to be addressed. I’ll quote some snippets from our “conversation.”

Recently, after I asked ChatGPT about the first time I mentioned the novel, it coyly asked me to “remind” it of what we’d discussed, which indicates that it may not remember past conversations as well as its advertising says it does:

Of course, I’d be happy to help! Please remind me of the key elements of the concept we discussed previously for the novel, and let me know which areas you’d like to refine or develop further.

I then gave a one-sentence reminder to see if it actually remember details. It gave a lengthy answer, none of which suggested that it remembered our previous discussion, but which contained some good, basic advice for a writer. In the midst of it, it asked me to discuss characters, so I described the primary characters of the book:

The characters are 1) The Narrator, who, as his name suggests, is narrating the story. He is a troubadour from a race with highly developed language skills; he can learn languages very quickly and memorize lengthy works, even epics, in order to recite them as he travels the galaxy. 2) Angelica, a human from the future who has augmented her body with cyborg enhancements; her bionic computer is powered by a miniaturized fusion reactor at the base of her spine, and her main weapon is a segmented superstring in her hand, which can open a portal to the mantle of a neutron star and release tiny amounts of neutron-degenerate matter, which will instantly vaporize enemies. 3) Sam, a large, muscular, furry creature called a Feralax; he carries a large machine gun and quite a lot of ammunition. These three are shipwrecked because of a miscalculation while flying faster than light in their spacecraft. After their shipwreck, they travel through a mountain pass that appears to be a former trade route, but has since been abandoned. They come upon an unconscious native, a so-called Gernian, who appears to have been attacked. They treat his wounds and keep him alive until they reach a Gernian fort.

ChatGPT gave a surprisingly lengthy reply to this, mostly recommending conflicts that could arise from the details given thus far. I won’t bother quoting in full, but it suggested:

Angelica’s futuristic enhancements provide her with a distinct set of skills that can be both advantageous and complex. Her bionic computer and portal-opening weapon are fascinating elements that can drive both action and intrigue. Consider exploring her relationship with technology and how it affects her humanity, as well as how her advanced technology might interact with the moon’s environment.

Not bad, but not more than what one could get from a not-very-interested editor. At most, it amounts to reminders of a few basics that an author could forget in the midst of composing.

I tried to get more useful details, so I focused in on one scene: Early in the book, the stranded spacefarers come upon a besieged fort in a mountain pass. Realizing that the combatants have technology inferior to their own, they decide the break the siege in order to ingratiate themselves to the people in the fort and acquire the two things they lack–food and water. Making sure that this sequence is reasonably realistic is a point of anxiety to me, so I asked ChatGPT to see if it had any insights:

The characters arrive while the fort is under siege by hill-dwelling tribes who have access to cannons, flintlock rifles, and rudimentary bombs, but no more advanced weapons. The defenders in the fort have slightly more advanced rifles and cannons of their own. Describe the kind of logistics it would require to besiege such a fort. Suppose the fort is similar in structure to an Urartian fortification such as existed in ancient Armenia, with a similar environment.

The responses I got for this were okay but not insightful. It mentioned supply lines, which I hoped it would discuss in more detail or at least with some comments I had not thought of myself, but it did not. Most interesting to me is that it did not mention sappers, who played an important part in roughly analogous sieges. I then asked it about sappers specifically, and it responded with answers that were, again, okay but vague. It did, however, include one detail I consider useful:

  • Focused Blast: Sappers might aim to create a focused blast pattern that directs the explosive force inward and upward, aiming to break apart the stones and create a breach.
  • Overlapping Charges: Multiple charges might be used in close proximity to create a larger breach or to ensure that a single charge doesn’t leave the wall partially intact.

More remarkably, I asked it how the protagonists could deal with the pickets of the besieging army, and it gave specific (though, again, vague) responses for each character, such as:

  1. Narrator (Troubadour):
    • Language Skills: The Narrator’s exceptional ability to learn languages quickly could be used to gather information about the besiegers’ positions, numbers, and patrol schedules. This knowledge would aid in planning an effective evasion strategy.
    • Disguise and Deception: The Narrator could use his talents to mimic the language and mannerisms of the besieging tribes, allowing the group to blend in temporarily and gather information without raising suspicion.
  2. Angelica (Cyborg Augmented Human):
    • Technological Abilities: Angelica’s cyborg enhancements could provide valuable advantages. She might use her bionic computer to remotely access and disable any surveillance equipment the tribes might be using, reducing the risk of detection.
    • Stealth and Reconnaissance: Angelica’s enhanced senses and physical capabilities could help her scout ahead and assess the picket positions with minimal risk of being detected. Her augmented vision might allow her to spot hidden sentries.

The suggestions here demonstrate the large language model’s difficulty in keeping track of or understanding specific details: The suggestion that Angelica could “remotely access and disable any surveillance equipment” is of course impossible since the invaders have no such equipment.

Picture Book Update

I will have to roll up my sleeves and format my new book in Adobe Illustrator or InDesign. This is something I wanted to avoid, but I don’t think I can hire someone for the formatting, mostly because I want to have the book in a  finalized draft before I hire the illustrator: I need to know the page count so I know how many illustrations will be necessary.

I think I’ll place the text on the left page, surrounded by an attractive border, with a full-page color illustration on the right page. I’ll print the books in 8 x 8 inches via KDP, with bleed, which will make for a small but adequately sized paperback picture book.

I’m frustrated that Vellum, my usual formatting software, doesn’t offer the full range of trim sizes available on Amazon. It’s set up for novels, of course, but I  thought I could make a picture book out of it with a little coaxing. However, none of its available trim sizes are suitable for that, so Adobe is my best bet. I have some experience with Adobe Illustrator but none with InDesign. This could be fun, especially since I will now have to worry about all kinds of typographical things that Vellum handled for me automatically, such as runts and orphans and so forth.

In slightly different news, I noticed that Grammarly has rolled out its own “artificial intelligence” system, GrammarlyGO, which has automatically been integrated into my Word plugin. Although there’s been a lot of buzz about what it might mean for authors to start using AI in their writing, Grammarly, which is hugely popular, already functioned on similar principles, so a lot of us have already been using AI to assist with our writing, at least in a limited fashion, without knowing it. That Grammarly is an “AI” system similar to ChatGPT explains both why it is more dynamic than most grammar checkers and why it sometimes gives screwy, ungrammatical suggestions: I once had it suggest that I write “more bottomless” instead of “deeper,” apparently because it could comprehend how to employ a synonym grammatically but couldn’t understand subtle differences in meaning, and it has recently developed the annoying habit of suggesting comma splices. If it degrades over time as other AIs do, it will probably become useless in a few years.

If nothing else, it is good for catching my spelling mistakes and cutting out unnecessary words, but it is designed more for business emails than fiction writing.

Anyway, GrammarlyGO is interesting to play around with. You can see from its suggestions in the image at the top of this post that it can parse a document reasonably well, but its tips are quite basic. The first of its three recommendations is the standard “show don’t tell,” which isn’t bad in itself but is inappropriate for the present work, which is a children’s fairy tale. The second recommendation is vague, possibly a stock suggestion it gives when it doesn’t know what else to say. Probably, it can’t understand the conflict that’s already present, or perhaps it doesn’t know how to handle a story this short. And as for the third suggestion–that’s already in the story, which is written with a moral appropriate for its young target audience: The importance of gratitude. But I’m unsurprised that an AI can’t pick that up since it’s built into the story’s fabric and never explicitly stated.

New Story Finished

I have finally finished one of the projects I’m working on, the text for a children’s picture book. I wrote it specifically for my first daughter, and it’s based on a story I made up for her one night when we didn’t have a storybook handy. It’s a fairy tale with a whimsical premise, some classic fairy-tale motifs, a climax that might surprise slightly by breaking convention, some action, and a moral I think is not too hamfisted.

Before I hire an illustrator, I’m looking into how exactly to go about producing a picture book, which is quite a different format from the novels I’ve produced before. Unfortunately, my formatting software, Vellum, is not set up for picture books, so I might have to pay to have the book formatted professionally. That will make me nervous because it means that, once it’s formatted, I can’t tweak the text. I’m nervous about the options I see on Amazon KDP, too, which also does not seem to be set up for picture books, but I have several articles open on my browser which claim it can be done.

I also still need to send it to an editor, though the funds are rather short. It’s only fifteen manuscript pages, so I’m reasonably confident in it, but it would still be foolish to publish without a second pair of eyes on it.

Quick Update

I’ve had a heck of a time getting a chance to write blog posts, since our little daughter has hit another phase where she doesn’t want to sleep at night (and she never likes to sleep if “Dada” isn’t in the room). Nonetheless, I’m working on a project I’m excited about. I’ll give updates later, so stay tuned.

New Compy

At last, I have acquired my “new” computer. My old one had become unusable, so it had to be replaced. The new one, which is refurbished, definitely has some disappointments, but it should last a few years, in which time I might be able to save up for something better. One way or the other, the old one had to be replaced, so I can’t really complain.

That being said, I found out that, stupidly, I failed to make sure it has WiFi. I guess I sort of thought everything today has WiFi. As it turns out, it doesn’t have it. Fortunately, my desk is currently close to the router, so I was able to plug it in.

Also, the “free” monitors that came with it are blasting my eyes, even when I turn the brightness down to zero and probably because of bad framerate or something. I might have to replace them with something less cheap just to save my vision.

Also, the computer does not have suitable specs to be upgraded to Windows 11, which surprises me as its specs are mostly decent (aside from the missing WiFi), but Windows 11 is apparently quite specific about what it will run on. I suppose I will plan to replace this thing approximately around the time Microsoft stops supporting Windows 10, or when I want to move my desk across the room.

But the good news is, I can open the word processor without the computer freezing up for fifteen minutes! That is like a revelation. This should increase my productivity immensely, assuming the monitors don’t give me constant migraines. I’m currently copying over all my documents from my backup drive, after which I can get to work. Also, I now have dual monitors for the first time, so I can go all Minority Report with my windows.

Writing Children’s Books

My wife and parents have been urging me to produce some child-friendly writings, and I’ve been thinking I really should, especially since experience indicates that kids show the most interest in my work. Besides, I’d like to produce something I can read to my daughter, who’s currently under two. Since she was born, we have taught her to love books, and now that she’s beginning to form complete senteces, she often brings us books with the command, “Read the book!”

Today is the last day of our Covid isolation, and we’re all just about back to full health. We were lucky not to get sick during the height of the pandemic, and to come down with a mild variant that never went into our chests. I am currently working primarily on two projects: I just finished the draft text for a children’s picture book and am also editing and rewriting a more advanced children’s novel. On top of that, I’m working on the third volume of Jake and the Dynamo, which runs under the working title of The Shadow of His Shadow.

I don’t have experience writing for kids. My wife, looking over the draft of my picture book, immediately said the vocabulary and sentence structure were too advanced. But that doesn’t surprise me; I was already aware that, as I was writing it, I slipped back into my natural style. That can be fixed.

I’ll be wanting an illustrator in the near future to come in on this project. I’m not sure who to pursue as of yet, though I wish I still had contact with Roffles Lowell, who did the interiors of Jake and the Dynamo, and whose style would be great for a children’s book.

I’m Jealous of My Daughter’s New Training Chopsticks

My wife is from the Philippines, so every once in a while, we make a trip to the nearest medium-sized city where she can go to an Asian market and find some of the products she likes.

We’d been talking about getting our daughter some training chopsticks, which come with a hinge at the top and a guide for where to place the fingers. Chopsticks are not commonly used in the Philippines, but I like to use them, and our daughter always snatches them from me and gets upset when she struggles to use them.

This weekend, while we were at the Asian market, she toddled off to explore—and immediately came upon a rack of training chopsticks. I bought her the pink, girlish-looking ones that she grabbed first, and which came with a matching spoon.

The chopsticks are decorated with a computer-generated image of a blond girl in a fancy gown, labeled “Secret Jouju.” After a little searching, I discovered that this is a Korean magical-girl title created by a brand called Young Toys. I’ve found only a little information about it: There are some minimal descriptions on the magical girl wikis, and there’s an English-language site, but it looks to have been written with a meaningless string of buzzwords its writers probably think English-speaking parents want to hear.

There is an official YouTube channel, but it’s entirely in Korean. It’s also on Netflix but unavailable in my country.

Near as I can make out, the protagonist of this cartoon, Jouju, was originally a fairy who could grant girls the power to become princesses. However, contrary to fairy law, she uses her power on herself in order to rescue a prince she loves and is thus banished to the human world where she has to restore the balance of magic while also singing in a rock band. Or something like that—with so little info available in English, I’m fuzzy on the details.

Out of curiosity, I loaded up an episode when we got home and watched it even though it had no subtitles. It’s obviously a glorified toy ad, as the characters wield magical smartphones and watches (collect them all!) and play plasticky-looking instruments (collect them all!).

My daughter was entranced and reacted with enthusiasm to the characters’ actions, though I know for certain she understood none of it—since I understood almost none of it. She swiftly picked up the main character’s name and was calling for “Choochoo” while waving her new pink spoon. My wife laughed and said I now have somebody to watch magical girl shows with.

Ironically, I’ve become less interested in magical girl shows since marrying and having kids, but I suppose I could rekindle my hobby. We’ll need to make it only an occasional thing, though: We try to keep the little girl’s screen time to a minimum, and I believe that’s why she has an enormous vocabulary, excellent fine motor skills, and a well-developed imagination for someone still under two, because she gets books, Montessori toys, wooden animal figurines, and practice gardening instead of television and computer tablets.

Handyman Update

As someone born right on the dividing line between so-called Generation X and the so-called Millennials, I find myself accomplishing things late in life that men of earlier generations would have accomplished by late childhood. Now that we have a house, I find myself thrust into the role of handyman and fixer-upper, a position with which I have no previous experience.

I’m easing into it, however. Last week, I successfully replaced the sacrificial anode in the water heater without even injuring myself. This week, I returned to the water heater closet to rodent-proof it.

We recently had what seems to be a mouse in the house, though it doesn’t appear to have made it out of the walls and into the living area. I traced its point of entry to the water heater, which is in a closent in the garage. The water heater is elevated eighteen inches, as its suppose to be, but the space underneath it offers rodents direct access to the walls of the house. Yesterday, I cut a spare piece of sheetrock and used it to cover the space, and then I coated every visible gap in the closet with foam insulation and left a present of rat poison. Then I went around the house to fill visible drill holes and spaces around electrical outlets with more insulation, which I’ll paint over later this week. After that, I’ll finally start in on re-grouting some of the tile.

I’ve never handled foam insulation before, so I made a mess of it. Fortunately, the stuff can be pared with a knife after it sets. I’m thinking about getting more cans to do the space between the brick and the foundation next, though I need to research whether that’s a good idea first. That should not only help prevent more mice but might cut down the brown recluse and hobo spiders: When we moved in, this place looked like something from a horror movie, and we’re only now getting the creepy-crawleys under control by diligently sweeping out corners, killing spiders on sight, laying glue traps, and using lots of insecticide to cut off their food supply. They have twice colonized the mailbox, but the last time, I nuked the box’s interior with spider spray and left it open to dry, and haven’t seen them since. The garage, however, still looks like the Arachnophobia wine cellar, and nothing I do seems to significantly reduce their numbers.

Selling Out at Nescatunga

My computer is becoming increasingly unreliable, which is one of the reasons I’m not posting as much as I ought. After talking to my wife about it, I’ve decided to replace it once our tax refund arrives (we always get ours late, for reasons not worth explaining at the moment). We wanted to put that money toward the house, but this decrepit machine is making it difficult to write my books or do my other work, and I need to get a new one before it finally goes kaput. Years ago, I had dreams of saving up for a high-end gaming PC, but that’s not in the cards (or the budget), but I can at least get a respectable multimedia laptop similar to what my present computer was before it got old.

Although this is more than a week late, I want to report on my first author’s appearance. Last weekend, I was in a little town called Alva, Oklahoma, which has an annual festival for arts, crafts, and local performers. It also draws in a handful of writers.

I went with the assumption that authors’ booths are desolate places unless the authors are household names, so I didn’t bring much stock. I had a few books printed and brought them along with a folding table and a couple of posters, and I was prepared to spend a solitary day getting minimal attention. Much to my surprise, I sold out before noon. I will probably return next year—with more books and higher prices.

I also found myself wishing I had some books with more toned-down content, as it were. A lot of the interest I got was from children, and I had to tell them, “Um … ask your parents first.”

And speaking of children, my success was likely due to my sales assistant, pictured in the image up top (with her face hidden for safety, of course). She loves reading, even though she can’t do it yet, and is always flipping through any book she can get her hands on. In the days leading up to Nescatunga, I had to keep those two posters out of her reach because she would point at them and yell, “Book!” before trying to grab them. She likes ripping paper right now, so the posters probably wouldn’t have survived if I’d let her have her way.

Speaking of which, you can have those posters if you want:

Rags and Muffin poster.

Jake and the Dynamo poster.

I mocked those up myself in Canva and had them professionally printed. They turned out better than I expected. But as a vaguely amusing aside, the backdrop on the poster for Rags and Muffin is one of Canva’s free backgrounds, “city at sunset,” to which I added more reddish tint. On the computer, it looks like an urban hellscape and therefore an appropriate representation of the book. When blown up to poster size, however, it is obvious there are a lot of trees and parks, so it’s not quite as threatening as it is on the screen.

H. G. Wells’s ‘Short History of the World’

A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells, with updates by G. P. Wells and Raymond Postgate. Penguin Books, 1965 [Original version 1922]. 363 pages.

(A quick search indicates that the version I discuss here is no longer in print. The link above is to a reprint of the original version of this book.)

Nowadays, we mostly remember H. G. Wells as a pioneer of science fiction, but in his own day, he was better known for his nonfiction. Although he had no remarkable academic credentials, he was a prolific writer and a bold thinker, and he set England abuzz with often outrageous ideas, which changed constantly. A few years ago, I happened upon a volume of his Short History of the World, which is his second attempt at summarizing world history, the first and longer being the Outline of History. I finally sat down to read it recently and might as well offer my thoughts.

Wells opens the book by assuring us that this will be a dispassionate review of the history of the world with no personal editorializing, but anyone with a passing knowledge of Wells probably knows that refraining from editorializing was something of which he was incapable, so this is very much a vision of world history through the eyes of its particular author. But Wells is a difficult man to pin down because his ideas changed from year to year: Right at the turn of the century, he advocated the genocide of all non-white races, but a handful of years later, he was reading Booker T. Washington and expressing sympathy for the plight of the American negro. He liked eugenics one minute and later rejected it. He was a member of the Fabian Society but got kicked out when he argued in favor of polygamy. G. K. Chesterton gives Wells some backhanded compliments in his book Heretics, describing him as always growing—but it’s unclear if he was really growing or simply throwing ideas against a wall to see what would stick.

If Wells had any consistent principles, they were his atheism and his belief in the goodness and inevitability of a future worldwide government. The latter appears to have been his guiding light throughout his intellectual life and the reason why he was mostly a socialist and at times (maybe) a fascist. We may take this as his religious belief, something he clung to despite all obstacles and evidence to the contrary. It is remarkable that he could study history as he did and still believe in some far-off utopia: His portrayal of the past is a catalog of folly and duplicity, yet he continued to believe that this foolish animal called man would in the future produce global unity. Therefore, despite his atheism and malleability, we may say that he was a man of deep faith.

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