Reality is weirder than fiction...

The weirdest thing happened at church this evening. (One of the parishes in town has a 5:15 pm weekday mass that I attend.)

Two of my characters walked into real life! Raea and Elis

Okay, so they weren't exact matches, but I had to fight to keep my attention on mass when I saw this young couple who couldn’t have been older than preschoolers when I wrote the first Starfire Angels book. The young woman had long brown hair and the man had black wavy, shortish hair. He wasn’t tall and skinny like my dark angel of the books, but close enough to make me question what reality I was in.

I posted this on Substack and had a comment about my characters going to mass. That isn't much different than the Dark Angel Chronicles books, however. As I replied, "One of them does in the books too. In the series, an old Catholic widow provides a home for the young man while he’s on earth and knows his secret, and he drives her to mass and helps her like an adopted son."

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In other news, Book 21 of Forgotten Worlds is almost done! I thought it was done until I started noticing I was still making cuts, so I decided to read it one more time to make sure I don't leave any mistakes. All the major edits are done. This is the final round. I can't do more.

Within the next week, I will publish this one and get back to writing.

Thanks for reading.

God bless!

Playing with Midjourney - including Forgotten Worlds characters Nya and L'Ni

I signed up yesterday on Midjourney, against the advice of my artist oldest child. I finally bit the bullet and paid the pro fee so I could keep my images private. Except I'll share them here.

First off, I wish I'd had this fourteen years ago, when I released Starfire Angels, the book that really started my writing career to the point of meeting the indie requirements to join SFWA, although I've quit that organization after just a few years since it wasn't serving me.

Anyway, Midjourney gave me Elis (pronounced EE-lis, not El-lis) after all this time of wishing I could get a good picture of him. The fans back then swooned over his description. I made this promo for the series with the image Midjourney gave me:

And for Legend of the White Dragon, I managed to get princess Istaria with the white dragon, even though he should technically be a ghost:

Last of all, I started my dive into the AI with Forgotten Worlds characters. They're not quite right but as close as I could get Midjourney to give me so far. I also haven't played with all the characters yet. I think readers can figure out who these are meant to be.

(See my post from October 15, 2023 for a better rendition of Nya.)

And he looks an awful lot like Henry Cavill's Witcher, imo; but it's as close as I could get when the AI made hair grow out of a hood on the pictures that would otherwise be perfect:

Of course, I started with Nya and L'Ni. I've tried Zaer, but it comes out as an anthropomorphic cat with a tail. The cat I can live with, but she doesn't have a tail.

Unfortunately, the more iterations one does of women, the less clothes they end up wearing on Midjourney. I'm not crazy about that. 

ps--I may keep trying for a better version of Nya and L'Ni, but these are good starts.

Writing Status

Starfire Angels: Forgotten Worlds Book 17 is moving along, and my goal is to finish by the end of this month, but we'll see what life throws at me.

It's been strange to go back to revisit old characters. Along with Raea and Elis (Starfire Angels: Dark Angel Chronicles), I've also dived into the lives of Valdas (Dark Angel Chronicles & Revelations) and Leksel (Dark Angel Chronicles & Revelations). An update on them came about as a natural part of the events of the story.

I mentioned some time ago that I couldn't wait to get L'Ni and Leksel together. Well, it's been interesting. They're far more alike than I expected, yet different in many ways.

And I was a bit surprised by Valdas yet not. I guess I had things in the back of my mind for certain events in her life and also events in Leksel's life that would happen in the nearly eleven years (plot timeline) between Nemesis and this book. They've changed, but at the end of Nemesis, they were already much different from where they started. In that light, not much has changed except personal events in each of their lives and the choices that put them where they are to be involved with Nya's mission. It should be interesting for those who have stuck with the series. I've tried to fill in gaps for those who haven't so events and decisions make sense, just like I would for any book.

I won't give anything away, but I can say their present circumstances may not be what some expet. I have had to go back to the original Starfire Angels series (Dark Angel Chronicles) and the first expansion of it (Revelations) to check facts. In doing so, I see all the more that I need to refresh Revelations with new covers and maybe another editing pass. (I found a typo of the kind that spellcheck wouldn't catch.) So, there's another project to take on, probably prior to publishing this book when the time comes.

For now, I can also say that Book 17 is just a hairsbreadth from 30,000 words. I expect this to finish around the 40K word mark by the end of the first draft. The last few books have been creeping over 50K, so it's good to get back to my original length goal for these books.

That's all I have for now, but it's enough. I can't believe I've been writing the Starfire Angels series for fifteen years! (And it started with an idea for a YA science fiction that seemed to be an urban fantasy type story based on an old novella with changes inspired by an anime series I liked.)

Thanks for reading!