Hey all you awesome humans out there!
First, let it be known far and wide that I survived my birthday! And I received one of the coolest birthday presents ever from my friend, Janera. My book as earrings! Check it out:
Now, I haven’t worn earrings in something like 14 years or so. I’d been thinking about earrings a lot this past year. Especially since I was on the Star Trek cruise in February, because I saw some earrings I really liked while ashore, and lamented not being able to wear them.
So I did a thing this past weekend. I went to a local tattoo parlor and piercing place and had my ears “re-pierced.” I’ll be able to wear these cute little books in a few weeks! (I’ve never been inside a tattoo parlor before… While I love art and love seeing other people’s tattoos, I’ve never had the desire to get one myself. I just know that no matter how much I love the art, seeing it everyday for the rest of my life would annoy the heck out of me. Maybe when I’m 70 or 80 I’ll get a tattoo… If I live to 90 I’m *definitely* getting one.)
Of course, seeing one of my books all cute in earring form makes me think about finishing more of my works-in-progress.
Which brings me to the “T-Set.”
If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been working on this set of 4 books that come after the Robot Galaxy Series. My plan has been (and still is) to draft all 4 before going back and revising, editing, asking for beta reads, etc. I drafted the first two pretty quickly. I’ve been slogging through book 3. Book 3 is supposed to be “T is for Titan.”
Rush Guerrero, who had a small appearance in Crazy Foolish Robots (Book 1 of the aforementioned Robot Galaxy Series) is the main character in “T is for Titan.” I re-read what I wrote about him and the Titan colony in CFR, which improved my motivation some. So in the last week, I’ve been able to get back on track with my early morning writing sessions, and re-dedicate those sessions to getting this book done! (Then I can move on to drafting book 4, “T is for Toilet!”)
But the rest of the time (outside of work and playing “Uno, No Mercy!” with my family)? This is that “useful procrastination” time. It’s time that I could be writing, but instead, I’m thinking about parts of the book. Like Titan and the “base” or “colony.”
While deep into this “useful procrastination,” I thought it would be cool to ask ChatGPT to make some inspirational visuals of a base on Titan. But no matter how I prompted the system, I kept receiving similar results to what I’d seen in the past — this is not the first time I’ve used ChatGPT to provide me some visuals (and you all know that I use it for some of the images here in the newsletter that go with my flash fiction stories when I write them).
Here was my first attempt:
Cool but… meh. Meh, in this case, means “not terribly inspiring.”
I didn’t give up. But for each attempt, I kept getting only slight variations of the above. Eventually, I decided to ask ChatGPT to look at this video on the real Titan, and use that for inspiration. This was the result:
So many issues with this image! But, if I remember that I’m really just trying to use it for writing inspiration, it’s still… meh. Although it makes me wonder if I was going to architect a base, would I sprawl out, or have multiple stories in a structure? (Answer: I think in this book, I’m going to try both!)
And how much of a base would I place underground? (Answer: I think part of it will be.)
I told ChatGPT: let’s start fresh! Then I added a few other details to my prompt such as: locate the base in a dried up river bed, and it should be raining methane. The real-life Huygens probe, that landed on Titan in 2005, landed in what might have been a dried up river bed.
This was the result:
And you know… I’ll take it. Especially because I’ve procrastinated enough and I want to spend some of that time thinking more about the details of what’s happening on my Titan colony. How many people are there at the start of the story? (Answer: I think about 100.) What are their roles and responsibilities? What is the colony’s purpose and mission?
To answer these last two questions, I’m going to spend more of that “useful procrastination” time going down a rabbit-hole learning about the various bases at Antarctica for inspiration!
The important part, for me anyway, is to separate my writing time from the time I let myself get lost in these world-building details. World-building is fun. But if you’re not writing (or if I’m not writing), it’s all procrastination from writing.
By the way… don’t forget about all my books and stories you can pick up!
Links: Lunar Logic | Robot Galaxy Series | Final Orbit
Enjoy!!
But now did you know that it’s incredibly fun to see your own name in a piece of fiction?
If you become a paid subscriber to this newsletter, you have the option to suggest elements that I should use in upcoming flash fiction stories and get “Tuckerized” in those stories — forever immortalizing yourself as a character! Like I said… fun!
And if you’re a fellow Indie Author, the other content in my “Beyond…” section (aka the paid content) in all about writing and my Indie business — lately I’ve been talking a lot of Facebook and Amazon Ads. More reasons to become a paid subscriber.
But, if you’re not ready to subscribe, that’s cool. Another day!
Yes, there’s still more to read…!
I routinely participate in newsletter swaps with other Indie Authors.
You might enjoy this novella from Dan Daetz:
…and this one by Heidi Skarie:
And sometimes I’m in these group promos with other authors where there’s tons of stuff to check out and read:
As always, for the listeners and podcast lovers among you, our two recent episodes of The BIG Sci-Fi podcast featured actors Tim Russ (who is also a big astronomy nerd!) and Randy James.
Beyond…
Have you been reading all the behind the scenes stuff? Today, I continue my saga with Facebook and Amazon ads — this might be the last time for a while I write about this. I’m also going to begin taking you on the journey of planning my Kickstarter campaign. And say a few things about my recent call for Beta Readers.
Subscribe now if you want to see this content and/or if you want to get Tuckerized or contribute an element to be used in a future story!
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