Posts in category: Rambling

Hello everyone,

Personal Stuff

Wow, July was a rough month. I had planned to work hard on my NaNoWriMo novel during the month of July but the world had other plans. My dad was diagnosed with lung cancer on July 1st. Work was going crazy. A couple weeks later I was in the hospital for a week with pancreatitis and had to have surgery to remove my gull bladder. I was in bed for a week after that. My mom is still going through her chemo sessions and has been pretty sick recently. My sister’s birthday didn’t happen because I was in the hospital. I mean wow! What a month…

So, now it’s August…Oh no… Well, so far it’s been a huge improvement. I’m feeling better and will be going back to work soon. My dad got a call from the oncologist and the cancer was misdiagnosed, he is fine! My mom is doing a little better, only has 1 more session of chemo to go! I’ll have to make up for my sister’s birthday party. Knock on wood that everything keeps going up in a good direction.

Novel and other fun stuff

Now while I didn’t finish my Camp NaNoWriMo goal in July, I still plan on working on it. However, I did find some awesome new tool to keep me inspired and motivated to work. There is a new AI system that generates artwork based on text prompts, yes we are living in the future. The main image on this blog post is one I generated by describing a characters in a scene from my novel. How freaking awesome is that?! Now it did take a good 15 tries and lots of refining to get it to generate what I wanted but the end result is stunning.

So, I did what any graphic designer would do… I created cover art for all of my works in progress regardless of their status! So with a little bit of editing, I turned the image above into a 6″ by 9″ novel cover.

The website is called Midjourney and what you do is type in a string of text and hope it gives you what you want. Currently, you have to do everything via a public Discord server. They offer a free trial of about 20 prompts but if you’re like me you are going to blow through that quick. After that they charge $10/month for 200 prompts, $30/month for unlimited. For custom art that is amazingly cheap. I believe with the paid plan they also give you commercial rights to use the artwork however you want. So I could actually use these covers on my published novels!

For me personally, being able to generate visuals/concept art of my novel characters, locations, scenes, adds a completely new dimension of motivation and inspiration to keep writing. I’d highly recommend anyone interested in that to check it out!

I ended up generating artwork/scenes from all of my various works in progress. If you want to see some more just check out my projects page. You’ll get some cool cover art and some minor descriptions on what the novels I’m working on are about.

Well that’s about it for this update! If any of my author buddies are interested in a cover send me an email or a DM on twitter, I’d be happy to make you something! Thanks for reading!

Just as a bonus, here is a scene it generated of the underwater city from my Lies Beneath the Sea novel.

It’s officially the 1st of July! I mentioned it in my last post but I’ve joined Camp NaNoWriMo thanks to my author buddy Freya Winther. If anyone wants to add me as a friend you can view my profile by Clicking Here or just searching for ebalderson.

This is a busy month, like most months, so I set my goal at 20,000 words. However, I’m hoping I can blow past that if I have the time! It took me a little bit of thought to decide what I wanted to write about this month, so I began scrolling through my archive of old stories and ideas. I found one of the first stories I’d ever written (at least that I still have saved), all the way from 2004.

It was the story of a boy, descended from a sorcerer, trying to save his family from an evil monster. It was born from old Saturday morning cartoons and anime. From what I can recall way back then, I loved making up stories. Both my own and fanfiction of my favorite things to watch. Even though I did a lot of it, I was notoriously bad at grammar, punctuation, and so on. That didn’t stop me from writing things and even sharing them back then! Ah to be young and not care so much.

This was my first big story. I was extremely protective of it. Going as far as password protecting the document way back then. As if someone was going to steal it… It was pretty short by my standards today, roughly 6000 words, and sadly I never finished it. That brings me to July 2022 Camp NaNoWriMo! I’m going to take this old story, characters, and ideas of my kid self and rewrite it with… let’s say more precision and experience. I’m going to try to keep it more light-hearted than most of my other work.

For now I’ll leave you with the ORIGINAL FIRST CHAPTER of Pagefinder (Old title, I may be reworking) in all of its terrible glory.

A long time ago, during The Dark Medieval Ages. In a cabin deep in the woods. There was a sorcerer named Durac who had a book; a book of Magic; a book called “The book of Durac”. Durac used this book To Cast his spells. His greatest challenge was stopping the great evil beast called “Revol” he had not slain it but had locked it in his book. He had his book until the end of his time. He took 5 pages out of the book to make sure no bad could ever get the ultimate power, and gave to Four knights each of them hid it somewhere in the world. Durac hid the fourth page where no one could ever find it. Durac also took the book to a secret underground location where he could hide it forever. Because in the book was the horrible beast he had locked in the book. The place he had hid the book became also his final resting place. For Many Generations the book and its pages stayed hid. 

Yep, that was it! A whole chapter in about 200 words. I had different standards back then. Also, with the way I used to write back then… I can’t help but read it in William Shatner’s voice.

Happy July everyone!