Midjourney - Forgotten Worlds scenes (Book 14 spoiler)

I have a little time left with a second month subscription for Midjourney. With it, I've been trying to get action scenes for a series trailer.

I also wanted the romantic scenes, and those are probably harder still. I've tried a few times to get a scene of the romantic subplot that came to fruition in Book 14, the final decision of Nya, who hadn't been looking for love. Isn't that the way it usually happens? I had given up when I found the man who became my husband. I've heard the same thing from others. You try to find someone, but it's when you ultimately give up and accept God's fate that you may be single that the right person comes along.

In this case, I brought the same upon Nya. She wasn't looking and she even resisted love. And then it found her. Of course, I knew what was coming and had sprinkled in hints but didn't want to make it the focus of the overall story but incidental. Nevertheless, it was needed for other pieces of the series to fall into place. I could have made things happen differently, but this romance made it undeniable. That's the only hint you'll get. No more spoilers.

Nevertheless, this picture will spoil book 14 for anyone who hasn't read it yet. I fought and fought and fought to get the details at least close in Midjourney, and I still had to tweak in Photoshop for tiny details like eye, skin, and hair color. I still can't get the skin to be colored quite right, but I was able to give the ears the kind of point that I imagined for L'Ni. It's actually barely there. It was never meant to be long pointed ears the way some artists exaggerate with elves, but more like the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movie elves or Vulcan ears.

Working with AI is tricky and frustrating, but once you learn to use it and refine it, you learn that you can get close. Nevertheless, it's never going to be exact, not like working with a human artist. But there are few artists with a style that's suitable and who are available, much less affordable. These images are for my own gratification... and for the hope of developing trailers for the series that are more like movie clips. We enjoy visual stories, and creating snapshots of those stories makes the characters come alive in a different way than mere words.

Truth be told, it helps and hinders me. It's fun to see them come to life, but it also takes away the ambiguity and focus on the internal character that drives me to write them. At least for me, it works that way.

Anyway, here is the image I manipulated in MJ that is a spoiler of Book 14, UNBROKEN BONDS:

My input wasn't for this, but getting characters to look right, much less look at each other is nearly impossible and requires a LOT of work with the AI. But when I saw the expressions on this, it was something else. To me, it seems to be her telling him she wants to help him with whatever it is that troubles him, and L'Ni has a lot on his mind in the series, as Book 13 reveals. Nya is the only person who comes to understand the depth of emotions he feels, which he doesn't typically reveal externally.

I love this wounded and loving connection between the characters. It reveals so much to me.

And I put a watermark on because I did the work with the AI to get this and then still altered it in Photoshop to make it unique and more specific to my characters by touching up certain features.