It's Vampires Vs. Killbots in: Blood and Circuits: Awakening

 

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If you can’t find a Van Helsing when you need one, how about building yourself a Van Helsing?

Aleph was the first sapient combat AI ever fielded by humanity. Designed to be not simply deadly but creative, Aleph would be the ideal peacekeeping and defense system, not simply knowing when to shoot, but able to understand when not to shoot.

But when Aleph discovered a vampire conspiracy that had been victimizing mankind for centuries, Aleph realized he was going to be shooting a lot of things in the near future.

Just not many humans.

Join Aleph and his companion, Diane, as they find out that the best ways of hunting vampires don’t involve crosses and stakes, but the most advanced weapons created by humanity!

Going video--in my voice!

 I'm going to start making videos about both history and writing. I'm hoping that people will enjoy them, because by I am enjoying them big-time. Here's my history channel and I'll have my sci-fi and culture channel coming up. 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw6_Cqt-duoOQiU1G8NvSuQ

Thanks all!

When Science Shouldn't be Your Tyrant

 When to ignore science.

You’re writing a tale about a band of teens turned into miniaturized humans, and there’s a scene where they’re sitting around a fire made from matches, watching as the night wears on. And suddenly, you say: wait a minute! Fire doesn’t last that long! A bunch of matches would burn for only a few minutes tops!

Yes. And?  If you want to go all hard sci-fi, miniaturized people shouldn’t exist. For that matter, even many “hard” sci-fi settings include things like FTL and generated gravity, usually covered with some comments about how theories in the present turned out to work.  But in truth, it’s likely that FTL is just as much fantasy as Harry Potter. 

None of which matters. If people are buying your book about tiny people, they’re buying into the fantasy. As long as you’re consistent, only a very few are going to start muttering about how this couldn’t really happen. The rest will roll their eyes and say: Duh, if we wanted reality we’d be watching CNN. 

To use an example of this: The Cold Equations. Not a single engineer is going to say: that’s realistic. Not even in the 1950s. If the safety margins were that narrow, then the ship would be behind a bank vault, not a little door with a polite: “if you board this ship, you will die” note. The entire plot, looked at with a critical eye, falls apart based on this one, specific thing. 

And it doesn’t matter. There’s a reason why the Cold Equations is in so many collections, and why it sparked a furious response from readers, and why there have been actual remakes, published in Analog and other magazines, finding “a better way.” 

The story wasn’t about the science. The story was about the fact that the universe can be cruel, and as much as we could like to believe that the innocent are protected from bad decisions, they aren’t. The emotional punch, which grabbed many people, was a fundamentally unfair situation that no amount of smarts or courage could fix. And it worked. The Cold Equations are still remembered, while you could fill a library with more scientifically grounded stories that are more or less forgotten.

So remember, unless you’re writing a very hard sci-fi story, don’t let science be your tyrant. Sometimes it’s okay to just wink at people and know that they’ll be understanding of your setting, because they didn’t come to you for an education in science—but to have a fun read. 

Playing with some more AI art.I used a service to "Train up" models of Claire Nunez.

 And I got the following:

Pretty neat!

Blocking out a cover with AI art.

 So AI art isn't great--but it's decent if you have no art budget and can't draw. For myself, I've been playing around with it, and found a few concepts for my next "A Sorceress on EArth" project. 

Very generic, with problems involving the hands. Also, Novel AI has a thing for breasts. That's "Small breasts" on the setting. Normal breasts got me supermodel porn star models, and large breasts... well, I suppose it's one way to smother your enemies.

Which is a note--Novel AI got trained on anime, and of course, anime tends to default to unrealistic body types. Mid Journey is better, but Midjourney has it's own foibles. 

So this bit of art is going to get adjusted--greatly. But even so, it's something to look at if you can't draw your way out of a paper bag, can't pay the needed bucks, and need a cover.

The Evils of AI art.

 Which is to say, I decided to play around with it a little bit today....

And there went my productivity. As was no doubt intended. 

That being said, fears that all real artists are about to be rendered jobless are highly overrated, I think.  You don't just pay an artist to put pent to paper, you pay them to understand what your'e saying and get the intent being your flat words, something that the AI (actually a misnomer, since they're not intelligent, artificially or othewise)  programs fail to do.

Zombies vs. Teenaged Wizards!

 Well, it's coming up to Halloween, and I'm gonna take advantage of my mid-journey subscription to put together a new thirty pagish gamne--Zombies Vs. Teenaged Wizards!  The local mad cultists did something very bad, and now zombies are starting to rise, and since mostly adults get it, it's up to the kids to fight them off! 

But don't worry, the cult sort of messed up and released friendly spirits that will help their friends and allies learn ways to fight off the zombie plague. That's the good news. The bad news is... THERE'S A ZOMBIE PLAGUE!

Looks like Halloween is either gonna be cancelled or get very real...