Hello Tiger, Wherever You Are

I'm still digging through my archives (Read: unsorted piles of papers stuffed into cupboards, blanket trunks, suitcases under the bed and any shelf space not already fully occupied by comics and books.) in search of the zines I produced during the eighties and nineties. So far I've found... some of them.

How many there were and how many remain to be found is an open question. I can't remember when I joined BAPA although since I first met many of the people who later went on to be mainstays of the cult project while I was still at university and I graduated in 1981 or 1982 (You'd think I'd remember but I don't.) and I didn't quit the apa until pretty close to the millennium, I guess I must have been in it for more than a decade, possibly quite a lot more.

The mailing frequency was mainly, if not entirely, bi-monthly and I doubt I missed many mailings. I also frequently submitted more than one zine at a time so that suggests I must have produced somewhere between sixty and a hundred zines. So far I've found less than half the low end of that estimate. 

Given that I'm certain I'd never have knowingly disposed of any of them, they almost have to be somewhere in the house. My fear is that they're in the loft. I put a lot of stuff up there when we moved in, thirty years ago and I had trouble getting up there even then. Access is through a very small trap door in the ceiling of the bathroom and I haven't attempted it for about ten years. I'm not keen to try it now but I suppose at some point I'll have to.

But not today. Today I managed to find all nine issues of the other long-form fiction piece I was working on back in the nineties, which goes by the provisional title An Outside View. I also found a separate zine in which I go on at some length about how it's finished and the next stage is to submit it to publishers. 

All the covers. Not as well-preserved as the Final Line ones.

I don't sound at all keen and my estimate of my chances of attracting any kind of interest is highly pessimistic. In the end, I never did send it anywhere.

But... I do still have the revised, completed text on floppy disc and by some miracle the other day I managed to get Windows 10 to read that disc and copy it onto hard drive. That means I now have both of them digitized in a modern, useable format. One is 45,000 words and incomplete, the other 55,000 and done.

I've re-read the unfinished one and I love it. I thought it was great at the time and I'm very pleased to say that it completely stands up to both my memory of it and my original estimation. That said, the main reason I love it is because it's exactly the sort of prose I loved to read then and love to read now and judging by the careers of the authors I know who write that way, it is a niche market to say the least. 

The next step is to re-read the other one. The finished one. That one I was not all that happy with back when I wrote it so it'll be interesting to see if I like it any better now. I suspect I might.

Either way, I have no intention of reviving my plan to send it to anyone for consideration. That seems like very pre-millennial thinking. If I do anything, I'll either get it converted into an e-book or just host it online somewhere. No rush. It's waited three decades, it can wait a bit longer.

More interesting for the blog, today I found an old zine from the late '90s where I go on a bit about the prospects of doing exactly what I just mentioned, namely putting the work up online. That appears to have been a possibility I was considering even in 1998. 

I also speculate about the entire apa moving online and suggest I would prefer it if it did. Given my recent comments about what we've missed by moving away from the scissors and paste, that does seem like some heavy-handed ironic foreshadowing. 

I also came across some reviews of gigs I'd been to that I rather like. Four separate evenings out get the treatment and three of them I remember fairly clearly. One, though, I had absolutely no memory of whatsoever (Although it has come back to me a bit since reading the review.)

If you'd asked me if I'd ever seen Prolapse or Urusei Yatsura I'd have said I'd never even heard of either of them, far less seen them perform. Shows how much I know.

Hello Tiger - Urusei Yatsura

That's them. And that's the single of theirs I'd bought that made me think they were worth going to see live. It's pretty good, isn't it?

I guess we should take a look at Prolapse, too. Especially since - spoiler! - it seems I liked them better on the night. Hmm. And quite possibly still do.

And here's the proof. (Well, down there's the proof. Blogger didn't want to center it properly, so I had to move it. Never had that problem with Spray Mount.)

If the image is too small to read, never fear. It's embedded in the full text as transcribed the truly excellent Image To Text Converter. 

 
Prolapse/Urusei Yatsura - Bristol

I meant to see UY last year but didn't get round to it. I bought the sharp recent single, Hello Tiger, and thought I'd better make more of an effort. It was only a day or two before the gig that I realised Prolapse were supporting. I remember Andy Roberts talking them up and taking me to task for calling them "ordinary". By now I couldn't even remember what they sounded like.

There was a third band on the bill, Magoo, who I'd never heard of, so I reckoned I'd be safe getting there about nine. When I arrived the place was packed and there was a band on stage, nondescript, no singer. I guessed it would be Magoo and put them down as Mogwai wannabes. They finished the number (can't call an instrumental a song, can you?) and two singers walked on.

One, male, was tall, had out-of-control curly dark hair, looked raddled, old and maybe a little touched. He prowled and stalked and fiddled with the mike stand. The other, female, was small, blonde and picture-perfect. They began a fast, staccatto attack and didn't let up for half an hour. 

I liked them, then I liked them a lot. It was obvious who they were like. They were like the Fall, like the Beatnik Filmstars are like the Fall - a friendly Fall, one that doesn't take itself so very seriously. They were also not unlike the Gang of Four. The musicians were apparently from the same institute of higher education as the Replicants, while the male singer could have been the Replicants' singer's edgier, dissolute brother. Neither he nor the girl could sing, or, if they could, chose not to: Mostly, one would talk while the other shouted. It worked. The girl looked surrealistically pristine centre-stage, while her co-singer messed with her hair, put her in a headlock, tried to wind the microphone cord round her head. She looked pissed off, but didn't try to stop him.

Thirty minutes and they were gone. They were better than the Fall, last time I saw them. I wished they could have played longer.

A fast change-over and Urusei Yatsura push past me in the middle of the hall as they come to the stage from the back of the crowd. (Bands do this occasionally at the Fleece, but since most of them don't, I assume it's an affectation). They look like an indie band - there's a curly haired one, a lanky, limp-haired one, a dark-haired girl, a drummer. I'm looking forward to this...

After four numbers I'm seriously considering going home. They are pedestrian, unoriginal, dull. The limp-haired guitarist sings lead and he isn't very good. The songs plod. Even the band don't look interested. I decide to wait for the single, at least. Then the curly-haired guitarist takes lead vocals, and it's as if a different band has come on. Suddenly the air crackles with energy, the lyrics are clear and the guitars are electric. At the front, the crowd begins to move, to surge and leap. The lanky guitarist moves to backing vocals for the rest of the set and every song is fun again. The curly haired singer has a knack of sounding as though he's singing through a distortion pedal even though he's not.

People are stage diving and crowd-surfing which, in the Fleece, is near-suicidal. "We should be paying to watch you!" the lanky guitarist comments.

They end with a number where the curly guitarist jams a drumstick behind the strings and beats it with another until the strings snap. Then they exit swiftly through the audience, pushing past me again while the crowd goes wild.

No-one plays encores anymore, it seems.

And since I'm in a bit of a rush this evening, I'll leave it there for now. There may well be more from the archive, especially if I run short of ideas. 

Five Characters In Search Of An Illustrator

If you're going to carry on reading today's post, I'm afraid you're going to have to indulge me. There's no purpose to it other than for me to create yet one more self-indulgent reflection of myself I can gaze into, lovingly, which seems to be my main occupation these days. Also, it's mostly about AI so that's always welcome, isn't it? Anyway, consider that a trigger warning and act accordingly.

I have mentioned, repeatedly, that I've been spending a lot of time (A lot of time...) working on making artificially-generated music from various organically-generated sources. Most recently, and very definitely most successfully, the source has been a novel I tried to write in the mid-90s. 

It was (Still is, I guess...) called The Final Line and it revolves around a chosen family - not an expression in common use then, I don't think - of four youngish adults and a close friend or two as they deal with the typical concerns of any group of friends in their late twenties or early thirties - death and resurrection leading to demonic possession, mass murder, general mayhem and being hunted to extinction by the provisional wing of the Roman Catholic church. The usual everyday stuff we've all been through, I'm sure.

It's a bit like the plot from This Life grafted onto the characters from Twin Peaks but in an episode of the X-Files, I suppose. It was the nineties, after all. 

It's also the sort of thing that everyone in in my own friend group back then was doing. I don't mean we were all hanging out together, drinking and smoking in the day and going out murdering people at night, well not the last bit anyway. No, I mean the construction of extended narratives focusing on that kind  of behavior. I think at least half a dozen people in the Amateur Press Association I belonged to back then were doing something similar. Maybe more.

I hadn't read my story for a good, long while before I picked it up again a few months ago. I'd run out of songs I'd put down on cassette in the eighties and I was scratching around for something to use to keep my Suno addiction fed. God forbid I should actually have to sit down and write something original. I'm far too old for that.

Johnny Paradigm

It occurred to me I might be able to extract a paragraph here and there from something I'd already written, just to keep the hobby going a while longer. The obsession, I mean. Let's call, it what it is.

Being my own #1 fan, I'd always thought it was good but re-reading it after a long gap I was astonished just how good. As I've often aid, I had no idea at the time how I wrote it other than it involved what I like to think of as a fugue state, like I know what that means. There are many passages I can't imagine having written but apparently I did. I mean, there was no-one else there at the time so it must have been me, right?

I'm the worst person to assess it anyway, so I'll stop going on about it and get on to the point I was going to make. Two points, really. 

First, it turns out descriptive, poetic prose is a really good source for song lyrics. Barely needs tweaking. It took me a while to get into the swing of hacking it up thoroughly enough to make it flow properly but even from the start it was clear it was going to make for much better songs than I used to write, mainly because it forced me out of the usual, rigid, traditional structure I always thought songs demanded. Anyone would think I'd never actually listened to any.

This isn't a post about songwriting or using AI to make music, though, believe it or not. I'll do one of those soon I expect. Or maybe I won't.

The second point about the story was how much of it there was. I never finished the draft that I was embarrassed to call a "novel", which is probably why I'd always thought of it as being quite short but I've now transcribed it I find it comes to more than 35,000 words. 

I haven't done a final word count because I only have it in the seventy or so original pages, as it was published in the apa. I need to proof-read it, edit it and collate it into a single file before I'll have an exact count but it's definitely pushing the accepted boundary of a novella - forty thousand words - and it's not even finished.

I was dreading getting it onto the PC. That would be a lot of typing. Fortunately, this is the 21st century and no-one needs to type anything twice any more. I couldn't find a readable file for the original draft on any of my old floppy disks but it occurred to me there was probably some free website that would turn an image of text into a text file for me. And there was. There is.

There are loads of them in fact but the one I used, the best by far of the several I tried, was the no-frills and proud of it jpgtotext.com. If you ever need to convert a Jpeg into a text file, I thoroughly recommend this extremely simple option. It allows you to upload ten images per day for free, although one day it let me upload twice as many for no apparent reason. If you need more than that, the pricing is extremely cheap but I just did my free allotment every day and had it all done in a couple of weeks.

Cado Babe with Cathy

It produces a very accurate text file in seconds, even from some pretty dodgy thirty-year old photocopies of dot-matrix print-outs. None of the other websites I tried came anywhere close to doing as well. Most of them were next to useless, in fact. Some couldn't read the images at all and those that did garbled so much it would have been quicker to r-type the whole thing than correct the errors in the edit.

Some of those failures claimed to be "AI driven". This seems to me to be a very good example of one of the problems with what we're calling AI these days. Most of it isn't AI at all. I bet those weren't. People slap "AI" on the front of all kinds of apps and programs and utilities that would just have been called algorithms a couple of years ago because they think it's the way to get customers. Get them, maybe, but not keep them. For that, you need a service that works.

The number of songs you can get out of even thirty-five thousand words of prose is finite and I must be getting close to the limit now. I've done over fifty already so I really can't complain. I love almost all of them, too. I listen to them all the time, to the exclusion of just about anything else. How long that will go on will be interesting to find out.

It could be a while. At present, I'm making them so fast I forget the ones I did a while ago, so when I listen to playlists I've made I keep surprising myself. I also have a second, longer, completed novel from the same time that I will almost certainly start mining when I'm done with this one, so I'm good for a while yet. 

Just to make it even less likely I'll stop, Suno recently added a feature that's absolutely perfect for me. It lets you direct the AI to make new songs using only the songs on a given playlist as reference. That means you can control the outcome with a great deal of precision and end up with a whole lot of songs that sound like they were made by the same imaginary people. 

I'd probably never take the headphones off again if the damn thing worked. It's in beta and so far it works just well enough to let me hear how perfect the output would be if it didn't glitch and scratch and skip and pop constantly like a vinyl album someone dropped into a deep fat fryer then tried to play. God willing they get it fixed soon. It's so frustrating it makes me growl.

Working with The Final Line so extensively over the last few weeks, though, has made me keener than I was back when I wrote it to do something with it. What, I'm not sure. These days, it's incredibly easy to self-publish but I'd have to finish the thing for that and the main reason I didn't do that the first time was because I have no idea how it's supposed to end. I have a slightly better idea now though...

Buddy. Last name pending.

Other than actually publishing it, I could put it up on a website or a blog or turn it into an audio book with AI reading it. I did once try to read it myself. I have a couple of chapters on cassette. It's very hard work, though, reading that much prose aloud. No wonder people get AI to do it. 

There was a very revealing article at GamesIndustry.biz yesterday, quoting extensively from voice actor Jane Perry's keynote speech at Develop:Brighton 2025. I recommend reading the whole thing but I was struck by her observation that generative AI has already taken a big bite out of voice actors' potential employment because the profession isn't all about exciting movies and games. A lot of it is less  romantic and most likely quite tedious work on things like "audiobooks, narration, corporate videos, e-learning, localisation".

Leaving aside the enormous amount of very badly voice-acted "localization" I've suffered through in various F2P imports, something for which AI replacement could only come as a blessed relief, that's a pointer to the kind of work that won't just be taken by AI tomorrow but that's already being taken by it today. I believe in the realms of self-publishing, authors quite commonly read their own work if they want to sell an audio version, though, so using AI would only be taking work away from themselves.

It won't be any comfort to anyone who used to make a decent living voicing incredibly boring corporate videos but in this respect AI isn't so different from the endless march of technology through the ages. When I got my first job working for an insurance company back in the early 1980s, if I wanted to send a letter, which was a big part of my job, I had to read it into a Dictaphone, walk down the corridor, hand it in to the woman in charge of the twenty typists sitting in the typing pool then wait a day to get it back, typed up, occasionally with errors that needed a second stroll up the corridor. 

By the time I left that company two or three years later, I had a PC on my desk and I was typing my own letters and printing them out on the printer next to me. The typing pool was gone. Jobs, like games, have their time then leave. Or they would if no-one kept making petitions to stop the flow of entropy. 

One thing I won't be doing is getting ChatGPT to give me some ideas, as Jeromai has been doing with one of his old stories. He's been writing a fascinating account of how he's been getting on, which I recommend to anyone curious about the process.

I'm far too prissy about my own prose to let any AI get its chrome paws on it so I'm stuck with doing it myself. We'll see how that goes. I have no such compunctions about the illustrations, though. I'd like there to be some pictures and I can tell you no-one wants to see anything I'm ever going to draw so it's either pay someone or get an AI to do it.

Cado Babe Under Glass

The idea of paying someone is intriguing. I've seen a few examples of illustrations various bloggers have commissioned and they've been pretty good, by which I mean they seem to realize the intentions of the commission quite accurately. I wouldn't rule that out for the future but for now, while I'm just in the playing around with ideas stage, AI is the inevitable answer to my curiosity about what my characters might look like, outside my head.

I am lucky enough to have one superb illustration already. Back when I was serializing The Final Line in the apa, one of the other members, professional comics artist and colorist Steve Whitaker, now deceased and very much missed, was so taken with one of the characters, he drew a picture of her and gave it to me. I've had it on my wall for thirty years.

This morning, I tried uploading that image as a seed so I could get an AI image generator come up with some variations. The results were not impressive. In fact, they were awful. I should say upfront that I was so annoyed with the first two that popped out, I gave up on the idea immediately, so it's very possible some more effort on my part would have seen some improvements but really I couldn't bear to go on.

Instead, I went back to the good old ways and did some text prompts instead. I wrote some character descriptions, used those as prompts, tweaked them a little as I went along and ended up with a set of images of the five core characters I'm fairly-to-very happy with. You can see those here today.

I won't go through the entire methodology in detail. I may do a separate post about it because I find it interesting even if no-one else does and it would be good to have a record. What I will say here is that I get by far the best results from the cheaper, supposedly less-sophisticated models than the expensive state-of-the-art super versions.

NightCafe is a website I often mention when I'm talking about AI and it's another I very much recommend. It has a generous free option, which is all I've ever needed, but it also regularly hands out free tokens for the upmarket AIs that otherwise require you to subscribe. Not that I recommend those, for the reason I just gave...

NightCafe has always handed out five tokens a day just for logging in but they recently gamified that into something any MMORPG player will immediately recognize as "a daily". Now, you still get a minimum five free tokens a day but you have to "create" something to get them and now you get an RNG roll to see how many tokens you've won. Five is guaranteed but you can get all sorts of numbers above that. And you get a fat reward for completing a "streak". I got 25 tokens for doing seven days in a row recently.

 Because I've been diligently collecting my free tokens every day for ages, I have almost three thousand in the bank. Again very generously, they don't expire, so there's no pressure to use them and I only bother with making AI pictures when I have a reason these days, not for fun like I used to. The fun in doing that wore off a long time ago.

Rachel Sunday and Sheba

I spent about two hours at NightCafe this morning. That's how long it took me to get satisfactory images of five characters. The time wasn't spent evenly across all of them. Looking at the images, all of which are handily stored indefinitely on my account, I see the first character took me just four tries, the second twenty-two, the third five, and the fourth and fifth both four goes each.

Guess which one took four times as long as any of the others? Yep. The one I already had a picture of, done by a human artist. Using that as a starter was a complete disaster but trying to get anything even a tenth as good by creative prompting wasn't much better.

And that's because I had an actual image with which to compare the results. Benchmarking the output of an image generator against a mental image is a lot more forgiving than comparing it to a real, high-quality picture.

Even leaving aside the personal connection, which honestly did color my reaction a little, the hand-drawn image just has something none of the AIs have. Life. It doesn't even look all that much like the character I had in my head back when I created her but ever since Steve handed me his idea of her, that's who she's always been.

Which isn't to say the AI versions of the characters are bad. Not at all, They're pretty good and I'm pleased with them. They're satisfying because I was able to nudge the AI into giving me something that closely resembled the image in my head, though. Steve gave me something he saw in the character and made me see it, too. AIs can't do that. Yet.

Which is why I don't think artists have much to worry about, aesthetically. They're always going to be preferable to and better than AI, at least until AI becomes truly sentient, at which point I would guess it will have better things to do than knock out commercial art samples and pictures of waifu by the gazillion.

At this point the post started to spiral into a general rant about AI and we've surely all had more than enough of those by now. I exercised my right as a human writer and deleted the rest of it. Another thing we can do that AIs can't. Exhibit judgment. 

I'm off to play with that potentially game-changing, practically infuriating new feature in Suno for the rest of the afternoon. Wish my blood-pressure luck!

PS. That's Sally Mandragora at the top, in case you were wondering. 

Return To Port Silo

I was looking at my stats this afternoon, something I very rarely do any more, when I noticed something odd. This year, which is as far back as I looked, posts about music or AI or the two together seem to be getting slightly more attention than posts on gaming. 

Portmanteau posts, the grab-bags where I jam in whatever I've got lying around, also seem to be doing a bit better than average, regardless of whether they cover games or not. What aren't going as well are posts about specific games, unless the game happens to be one that's in the news at the time, like Defiance or Stars Reach. And even then, I need to put the name of that game in the title to see an uptick in views.

Bottom of all, and quite consistently so, come posts about Wuthering Waves. Even posts about EverQuest II do a little better, although admittedly not by much. That does seem odd, considering WW has millions of players and EQII probably barely makes six figures but I guess it's hardly surprising not many Wuthering Waves fans are into long-form blogs, let alone ones as obscure as mine.

At this stage, I really should clarify that the so-called "statistics" I'm referring to are the ones I see next to each post in the Blogger console itself. I long ago gave up even opening the emails Google sends me, telling me I should break out the bubbly because I had "800 clicks in 28 days" and I never bothered to swap over to the newer version of Google Analytics when the old one died.

Supposedly, those eight hundred monthly "clicks" come solely from Google Search, whereas the order of magnitude higher page views, generally settling somewhere between 200-300 per post after a couple of weeks, reflect the number of times someone has loaded the page in a browser, regardless of how they got there. (That explanation, by the way, comes from ChatGPT because I've never been able to find a clear, straightforward explanation anywhere else. Treat it with the caution it deserves.)

However the page views are tallied, as Wilhelm often says, even bad data can be useful if the source is consistent (Well, something like that...). I guess on that basis I can say some of the posts I thought were self-indulgent and of interest only to me might well have been of at least some interest to others, quite possibly more so than the gaming posts I used to assume were the main reason people came here. 

Good news for me, I guess. The blog has always reflected my current interests and I'd like to keep it that way. For a long time that meant all MMORPGs all the time here but  my main leisure activity was playing MMORPGs but I'm just not putting in the same hours any more. I still like to write about the games I do play and the ones I'm interested in but if I'm honest, I get a lot more excited about other things right now.

Anyway, that's a long pre-amble to what I hope is going to be a fairly short post (Spoiler: It wasn't!) on what I've been up to these last few days. I'm sure it won't surprise anyone reading this to hear I've been fiddling around with Suno some more but the exact details may not be quite what you'd expect. Not what I was expecting, that's for sure.

As I wrote the other day, the AI got an update, which gave me a burst of fresh interest. I was looking forward to trying the new model but the problem was I'd already made far too many versions of the thirty or so original songs I had available. I knew I probably ought to start over again and run the whole lot through the upgraded model but fun thought that might be, it knew it wouldn't be nearly as much fun as creating some entirely new ones.

Except I didn't have any new songs. In the fifteen or so years I was musically active I doubt I wrote more than fifty altogether. The ones I haven't used by now got left out for very good reasons. They're no good. Embarrassing, some of them. Possibly actionable. You really don't want to know...

That only left me one choice; write some new ones. Except that's really not as easy as it sounds. You do kind of have to have an idea, just to get started and I stopped having ideas for songs in the late 1980s. 

I strongly believe there's a very, very good reason nearly all good songs are written by people who... well, who aren't old. There are exceptions, of course, but even those rare songwriters who still turn out good work in their later years rarely eclipse or even equal the songs they wrote when they were young, when everything just mattered so much more. It gets harder to take all those desperate emotions seriously after you've felt them a thousand times. Or harder to convey them to others, anyway.

So, if I was too old to write any new songs and I'd run out of old ones, what was I going to do? I'm so glad you asked!

Remember five years ago, when I posted a couple of fragments of fiction from my apazine days? No. I thought not. I'd forgotten it myself until, for whatever mysterious reason (I have genuinely forgotten how it came about, even though it was only the day before yesterday.) I ended up looking at it again. And as I was reading it, finding myself surprised by it once again and thinking how I definitely wouldn't be able to write anything like it now, I had an idea.

What if I cut it up and turned it into song lyrics? I mean, there's a grand tradition of that sort of thing in rock music, isn't there? Well, there's Moonage Daydream... although I never did like that one all that much... and Kurt Cobain apparently did it too. (And Thom Yorke but I'm going to pretend I didn't know about that.)

This wouldn't be full-on cut-ups, anyway. Leaving Port Silo is a coherent narrative (Oh yes, it is!). I could take a few, short sections, change them as little as possible. Just reframe the prose as lyrics, switch a few things around here and there to make it scan. Maybe add a line or two to build some structure...

It certainly helped that the prose style is imagistic, non-syntactical interior monologue. It comes as close to poetry as prose and poetry is first cousin to song lyrics. So, is that second cousins or once-removed? Close enough for rock and roll, anyway.

I wasn't really expecting much if I'm honest. At best I'd have the words but words aren't songs. The lyrics are important, sure, but you have to have a tune. 

Suno would have been more than happy to come up with a tune, of course. An infinite number of tunes. Two problems with that.

First off, in my experience, Suno's own tunes aren't all that great. Second and more important, for me at least, the whole Making Music Using AI As An Instrument trick only works if I feel like it's me doing most of the creative work. There's a huge, existential difference between hearing an AI turn the song in your head into an actual song coming out of the speakers and listening to some words you wrote being sung to a melody you never thought of.

Only way to find out if something works is to try it, though, right? So I picked a couple of paragraphs and got to work. 

When I had something that looked like a song lyric, I read it through a few times to see if I could hear the music playing. And I could, if faintly. So I messed about with it some more, moved a few things about, tried some tentative vocal runs, whistled a few melodies... then I recorded a guide vocal and uploaded it.

I wasn't expecting a lot. I got a lot more than I expected. This is what I got, first time out:

 

 

Those may or may not sound good to you but let's just say I was extremely happy with the results. Although not so happy I didn't try a whole bunch of times to do it again only better still, if only because neither of the first two versions follows the lyrics exactly. 

Unfortunately, neither did any of the others. Why, I have no idea. It's never happened before or not to that extent, anyway. The odd word, sure. Whole verses missing? Never! I wonder if it has something to do with the structure, which doesn't conform at all closely to the conventional pop/rock song format? Or maybe it was all the repetition confused the AI, the way someone will trick a computer into considering a paradox in an old movie, to make the reel-to-reel tapes catch fire. 

I did eventually get one take that had all the words in the right order but it wasn't as vibrant as the first two and I prefer those by a long way, so clearly style really does beat content, the way we all know it does, if we're honest with ourselves. Still, it would be best to have both. Not being able to get the AI to redo the same version to correct its mistakes is possibly Suno's weakest point just now. 

The first run was so overwhelmingly successful, so much more than I expected, I spent the next two days doing pretty much nothing else. I've finagled four songs out of those two prose fragments so far and all of them are good or at least I like them a lot. So does Suno, apparently. I've got some cracking versions already. 

I'm not sure how many more songs I can dig out of the two short fragments but I'm happy to push it as far as it'll go. I always loved those Leaving Port Silo, which is why, when I found a way to recover all my old fiction from floppy discs back in 2020, it was what I chose to publish here. I never had much of a clue what to do witit , though. The two pieces were only ever meant to be fragments. We used to write a lot of fragments back in the apazines. No-one really felt the need to finish anything.

Now I finally know what it's going to be: a bunch of sonically and thematically linked songs. The big thing about songs as opposed to stories is they can be purely impressionistic and still carry a narrative. They don't need plots. I was always really bad at plots. 

Anyway, that's what I've been up to and what I'm likely to go on being up to for a while. I'll watch my Blogger stats on this post with interest. 

 

Notes on AI used in this post:

The music, obviously.  

Three images, all produced at NightCafe. The first two use the same model, good old Flux Schnell, my go-to. They also use the same prompt, three lines from the lyric  ("Walking through corn fields/Covered in dust/Lost in this dustbowl) plus a style note ("young female figure, old, worn clothing, line art, color, retro-futurism")

The only difference between the two is that the first one was generated using the "Short" duration and the second used "Long". I'm not remotely convinced I can tell the difference, which is concerning because the Long one costs twice as much. Apart from adding those weird hairy semicircles and tubular husks, neither of which I asked for or wanted, everything else looks about the same. I like both images but the first is by a distance the better, which is why it got the prime spot at the top of the post. 

The slightly worrying thing is that, whatever I used to think the unnamed girl in Leaving Port Silo looked like, now she looks like the girl in picture one. An unrecognized danger of using AI, that is. You may find it knows your mind better than you do.

For the the third picture I gave Gemini the full lyrics to the song and asked it for "a prompt for a generative AI image that would produce a suitable illustration for the cover of a vinyl album featuring this song". I did that because I was already there, trying to teach Gemini to mimic the prose style I used in the original fragment. After a few tries it was getting better at it but that's a post of its own...

Gemini took an extraordinarily long time thinking about the prompt. I was expecting something lengthy, verbose and highly detailed, like the ones it gives me for Suno, but in the end all it spat out was this: "Image Prompt: Dusty fields, a lone figure walking away from a desolate town, vinyl album cover".  I was not impressed. 

I was even less impressed when I handed that prompt over to one of the Pro models at NightCafe. I used one of my five free Pro credits to generate an image using HiDream1Dev and the results were disappointing. For a start, the central figure is clearly walking towards the town, not away from it. Also, she seems to have quite short legs. Not unnaturally short but her proportions look a little odd.

 

Thinking Too Much

I'm writing this on April 27. If and when I get the call to go back to work I should get a minimum of three days notice. That means the beginning of May at the earliest. Can't be too much longer than that, now.

By then it'll have been four months since I last did any work. I haven't been idle. All this enforced leisure has done wonders for my productivity in the things that matter, not least among them this blog. 

So far in 2021 I've failed to post on just four days. I'm not about to go back and put every post through a word-counter (I did run a few samples...) but at a rough estimate I've turned out something between a hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand words so far this year.

That's two novels. Three, if you're writing Y.A. It does occur to me, now and again, that maybe I should, in fact, write a novel. I did try a couple of times, long ago, but although I was quite pleased with the result (I'm disturbingly pleased with most things I do) I found it incredibly difficult. Much, much, much harder than any other kind of writing I've ever done. 

There were two major problems. The first was knowing what to write about. I had no idea. Literally. 

I do not "get ideas" for stories. They don't "just come to me". I can't work them up out of sheer energy and willpower. If I do think of anything it invariably turns out to be a pastiche of something I read, once. 

Characters, settings, dialog? All of those come easily. Plots? Never.

 

Still, I was determined to try so I sat down and stared at a screen and started typing. And that kind of worked, for a while. I found that if I let the characters talk to each other, eventually they'd come up with plots of their own. Most of it didn't make much coherent sense, no more than real life ever does, but unlike life I could fix that in the edit. (Or I thought I could. I never got that far to find out).

Tough as it was, plotting wasn't the worst thing. The real killer was the fugue state. 

It turns out writing fiction is like taking bad drugs. You lose your sense of self. You even black out for a while and wake up with no memory of what you've done. Or I did, anyway. 

Sometimes it wasn't like that but on the bad days (or maybe it they were the good ones) it felt like spirit-writing. I don't even mean that as an analogy. I would read back a couple of thousand words and have no memory of having written them. It was as though someone else had channeled through me and left me with their thoughts to interpret as best I could.

When I finished a chapter I'd look over what I had so far and find myself unable to imagine any of it being something I could have written, far less had. There never seemed to be the least chance I'd be able to repeat the trick (because it did seem like a magic trick) and yet somehow I almost always could.

So, that was weird. And exhausting. And a tad bit scary. It took so much out of me there was never much chance I'd kept it up long enough to hit my 80-100k target. And I didn't. Both the pieces I was working on faded out about half way through. Neither came to any real conclusion but I did. My conclusion was I wasn't ever going to finish. So I stopped.

And then I bought EverQuest and didn't need to think about anything else for a decade. But that's another story.

Cut to today. I still have no ideas for fiction. No plots. Only now it does appear I can spit out all kinds of stuff in gobbets of several thousand words a time, without any difficulty at all. I mean, look at what you're reading now.

Is that a transferable skill? Would it work for fiction, too? Should I try to find out?

In ten years of blogging I've racked up something like two million words. That's a lot. If it was novels it would be two a year, every year, for a decade. Halve it for the edit and it's still a book a year. That has to be my 10,000 hours right there and it's not even counting all the writing I've done in the forty years before that. 

You might think I could parlay all that experience into one finished work of fiction. Yeah... but no. I'm still doubtful. I'm pretty sure that's what I thought last time and that didn't work out so well.

Then, there's the question of motive. Why would I even want to write fiction? Isn't the point to have the idea for a story first and then want to tell it? Having an idea that writing a story might be a nice thing to do and then looking for a story to tell is getting it all back to front, isn't it? If you have nothing to say, why say anything?

I know a lot of people think if they can just bang out a novel they'll be rich. I talk to people like that alogether too often. I'm under no illusions there. I know how little authors make, nearly all of them. And it's not about posterity or leaving a mark, either. Almost all the fiction ever written was forgotten long before the authors put down their pens. That's if it was ever noticed at all. It's about as likely that anything I've written for this blog will have an afterlife as almost all the fiction ever written.

Still, it can feel a little self-indulgent, spending so much time on these snippets of prose. It's like living on snacks. It keeps you going but eventually you start to wonder if you shouldn't stop and have a proper meal, just once in a while.

What I'd probably be better advised to consider than fiction would be some kind of long-form version of what I already know I can do. Five or ten thousand word essays on the kind of topics I keep coming back to, for example. God knows there are enough of them and I never feel I've even scratched the surface most times I circle round.

Only that really does sound like work. And work's something I've never been keen on.

Nope, on reflection I think I'll just stick to this for now. I reckon I can keep it up for a fair old while yet. And I'm finding the diversification that's been trickling into the blog to be quite energizing. Surprising, too. It's not quite the spirit-writing I was talking about but some days I really don't know where I'm going with a post until I finish and read it back.

Take this one, for example. It started out as a couple of introductory paragraphs for the monthly music post and look where it's ended up. That's what happens when you let your mind wander. Now I suppose I'm going to have to come up with another way to get that one started.

Good thing I never get tired of writing, isn't it?

Leaving Port Silo Pts. 1 & 2

 

A while back I mentioned how I'd been able to lift a few things I'd written back in the nineties off some old floppy disks I found. I was wondering if I should tidy some of them up and post them somewhere. Here, maybe, or on some notional new blog. And then, of course, I did nothing about it.

Well, not exactly nothing. I did create draft posts for all of them, just as another means of having a back-up on hand. I'd forgotten I'd even done it until I happened to be glancing at my drafts this evening. Most of them are far too long to post here, even if I ever thought that would be a good idea, but there were a couple of very short pieces I wrote as a kind of five-finger excercise back when I was trying out different voices.

I read them through again, two short chapters, fragments, really. A project that never came to anything. And something struck me. Something I'd never realized before. This poor girl, she's living in an mmorpg. And she's just left the tutorial.

See her check her inventory (just the one bag). Go through her minimal checklist of basic skills. Worry about what might be out there in the dark. It's one of those mmo/survival hybrids. She needs food, she eats nuts. She needs fire, she picks up sticks.

Even the part where she imagines what life might be like if she ever makes it to civilization, how she could earn a living. That's a quest hub.

The thing is, I wrote this several years before I ever played EverQuest. I'd never even heard of an mmorpg let alone imagined what it would be like to play one. And still, this is the world I imagined for myself. The world I wanted.

I'd play the game this girl lives in. For certain sure. She just doesn't know how lucky she is. Yet.

 

LEAVING PORT SILO

 

Two hours out of Port Silo and I’m all over dust. My bag’s covered. I hate this bag. It looks like cow stuff. I hate dust and cows. I hate Port Silo.

I sat fourteen hours in grain today trying to keep the grain dust out of my mouth out of my nose out of my eyes. Wasting my time. I hate grain. I hate dust. I hate Port Silo.

I hate travelling from one shitty little backwater Port to the next up to my chest in grain up to my chest in cotton up to my chest in rags, in-between boxes and crates and machine parts and keeping my head down keeping my head down keeping my head down. I think if I keep my head down any longer I’ll drown underground under the mudwater or the dust where the scratchy things scrape and scut.

Who makes all this dust grain cotton rag scutting scrapy scratchy things? Who wants them all? Not me. God, Pastor Tot says. Said. God should have more sense. 

God wouldn’t sit on the deck of a diesel barge that has the pumps running pumping water every hour of the day or it sinks. God wouldn’t squat in the shade of a crate full of parts full of rust that no-one wanted when they left and no-one wants when they get where they’re sent if they ever do arrive if the Goddam barge doesn’t sink. God wouldn’t say Goddam either, I suppose, and neither would I if Pastor Tot was here.

Pastor Tot would say yes God would sit on that barge in that grain and rag and rust and dust and let the sun or the shade scab and scar and freeze him and he would care and he would love and he would because he’d be everywhere, all at once. That’s what Pastor Tot would say. I hate dust.

She tugs at the knotted drawstring of her khaki canvas bag.

I’ve got an apple in here somewhere. Fruit. I guess fruit is okay just about okay, when there’s nothing else. It’s better than fish and that dried stuff, better than grain. I can’t believe I tried to eat grain. Next time I’ll eat the dust or the scuts.  

She bites the apple. 

This is gross. My guts ache. When’s something going to come down this road? It’s been two hours and what’s been by? Nothing’s been by that’s what’s been by. Nothing is going to be by that’s how I see it. I should have stayed in Port Silo.

Worms have had the best of this apple. I bet worms have had the best of Pastor Tot too. They haven’t though. I have. Those worms just get the husk like the skin of this apple dried up like I get. I got the best of Pastor Tot.

Sun’s nearly down. Stuck there like a great blood tick. What does it think it’s looking at? Cows and dust and stunty trees and me all over dust carrying this stupid cow stuff bag. Cow shit. Said it. I hate cows.

Where am I going to sleep? It’s going to be oh mighty cold when that sun goes oh mighty cold. Can’t see anything but this road going and going and nothing coming on it not a pick-up not a truck not a car. No. There won’t be a car. Not a horse or a mule or another sad me walking to Port Silo to say how far to Port Silo and for me to say not far enough not far enough back.

I used to think it was pretty, the sun shadowing me all the way back down the road. The dust has shadows, I used to think. Then I didn’t even hate the dust. Pastor Tot used to say the sun and the dust was people all the people of the world the old world ground up and blown away flying on God’s good sunlight around the world and every time we breathed we were taking someone in and making them part of us, carrying them along their road. 

Pastor Tot’s not in any dust. He might be dust by now if the worms have left any of him but he won’t be scutted up yet. The wind and the sun will have to push and scrape and shove at him for longer than I’ll be alive and God that won’t be too long I’m mostly about sure, before anyone gets a breath of old Pastor Tot.

I wish I was going to get a breath of him, though. That would be something, I suppose.

I guess I’d better find some cover some dry culvert or the crook of some stunty crab tree. When the sun’s gone there’ll be ice on the ground and when I wake up there’ll be ice on me. I hate ice on my eyes waking up with my eyelashes frozen together thinking I went blind in the night or got buried alive or died and this is it under the dust buried and dead and blind and still knowing. Jesus I don’t want to sleep out here alone.

There must be somewhere I can go to get out of the cold. Why didn’t I start looking sooner while it was still light? Oh why am I so goddam stupid? Maybe I should just keep walking until it gets light then sleep in the sun. Least I could be warm and if I get out of sight I could be safe, could be.

This  always happens. Paster Tot would have had us in a roadhouse or under a tarp in some quiet port corner an hour before dark and something hot to go with it. I can’t carry it can’t look after myself can’t look ahead, I just keep walking and walking and riding and hiding and walking, sleep where I land eat what I find and I’m getting thinner and tireder and I don’t have any plan don’t have any plan don’t have any plan.

 

 

 

LEAVING PORT SILO #2

 

The sun goes down. The moon rises. Stars come out.

This is hopeless. I’m never going to get to sleep. It’s too cold too too cold. Oh hell have I got any matches or my lighter? I should have got some wood when it was light there’re enough dead trees around here for God’s sake. This place is never short of dead stuff dead trees dead animals dead rivers dead land dead me if I don’t get warm. 

Moonlight is so not good for finding stuff. Everything goes flat and grey. Pastor Tot said that’s how the world looks when God’s sleeping because God never really sleeps he always sees always knows. God could find wood  by moonlight I bet and so could Pastor Tot. Well I damn will too.

The girl rummages in her bag. 

 Matches matches matches I know there’s some matches in here there’d better be some matches or I’m in big trouble bigger trouble. Always in trouble anyway. I’m so used to being in trouble if I wasn’t in trouble I’d think I was in trouble. What’s this?  Cowries. Damn. Too much stuff in this bag don’t know why I lug it all over but you never know what you’re going to need when.

Oh, hey! Hey! My Macadamia nuts! Oh this is brilliant this is so brilliant! My Macadamia nuts! I forgot all about them and after what I had to do to get them! Oh this is all coming good it’s all coming good.  

She executes a graceless dance, then stops suddenly.  

I heard something! Oh hell oh hell ! She crouches. Listen. Listen. No, I can’t hear anything. Maybe it was me doing my stupid dance maybe I stamped on a stick and it snapped. Oh, what if something’s crouching out there in the dark listening to me listening for something in the dark. Now I can’t eat my Macadamia nuts. It’ll hear me crunching. Maybe I could suck them, grind them a little with my back teeth if I’ve got any back teeth left after that damn corn.  

She stuffs macadamia nuts into her mouth. 

Now I can’t hear anything but me. I can’t see anything, only shadows.

If it was a stick if I broke a stick then there’re sticks. I could light a fire with sticks if I had some matches. I could shove a burning stick in a wolf’s face if it’s a wolf if a wolf’s out there listening to me. Oh God what if it’s a wolf a wolf listening listening to me listening to me out there in the dark? What if it’s a bunch of wolves? Got to find those matches. 

She rummages through the bag.

Here they are here they are. How many left? Two, four, six, seven. Seven. Seven’s enough. I can light a fire with seven. I can. Pastor Tot could light a fire with one. He could light a fire with none no matches at all. I saw him do it. Why didn’t I listen when he was telling me how? 

She strikes a match.

Grass. Grass burns.  It’s so hot every day grass has got to be dry enough to burn. Here’s something. And a stick. And another. Oh yes this is good this going to do it this is going to scare that wolf this is going to keep me warm, I’m going to do it. I’m going to be okay. I’ll get through this night and tomorrow that damn sun will come up and I’ll walk until I see a good place well a place there are no good places no good places left not places like there used to be like Pastor Tot told me about. Not places where there’s food right out on the streets piled up on carts and people give it to you if you do something for them or if you do something for someone else they give you money and you give it to the people with the food on the carts and there’s places to sleep indoors not in ditches or under tarpaulins on cruddy scutty boats.

The grass flares.

Yes! Oh yes I’ve got it. Now we’re doing it. Burn stick burn. That’s it. I can see what I’m doing now. Goddam stunty tree you’re going to lose some branches tonight old stunty stunter stunty tree.  

The fire grows. 

Warm warm at last. Oh I love fire. It’s the only clean thing in this scutty dusty world. If fire burned dust it would be perfect. I hate dust.

Last of the Macadamia nuts. I’m going to roast them. I’m going to roast them in my fire and have a hot meal like Pastor Tot would have had. Wonder what this tree is. Old stunty tree might be a nut tree, might be a Walnut tree or a Pecan nut tree. If they grow on trees. Or it could be Apples. Only one way to find out.  

She takes a burning branch from the fire.  

No, nothing. Only a tree a dry barky knotty tree. All you’re good for is burning old dumb tree. Couldn’t get any shade out of you in the day but I’ll get fire from you in the night.

I’m tired. Just eat the last of these then I’m going to sleep right by my fire. No damn wolves would dare come up to my fire and no other fool’s going to be wandering about here under the moon. Wolf moon, should have thought of that before. Oh what if I forget everything he taught me? What if I forget everything  Pastor Tot taught me? That’s all that’s going to keep me alive he’s all that kept me alive all this time. I’d be clearance in Port Silo by now if it wasn’t for Pastor Tot. Well, no-one’s going to clearance me. Not now. Not wolves not Port Authority not anyone.  

She curls up beside the fire and sleeps. Nearby, wolves begin to howl.