On Hats, AI "Art," and World Fantasy Con
TL;DR
- Don't use AI Art.
- Hats are cool and maybe magical.
- I will be a special guest at Cat Rambo's Patreon community this Tuesday (Oct 22) at 4pm Eastern to talk about Station Eternity!
On "Art"
I've heard some self published folks cheer about AI (really large language models) art giving them the ability to make their book covers for free. I get it that publishing a book is expensive, but I don't recommend it. For one, these programs are quite bad at getting some details correct. And if you try to correct them, it can just make things worse and worse.
I imagine that happened here:
However, I'm notoriously bad at debating things. I often get so anxious I just freeze. And sometimes I can know something without being able to articulate it verbally.
Thank goodness for my friend Lore.
Lore Sjöberg is a very funny writer who ran the site Brunching Shuttlecocks back in the day, and had a book of his lists, the Book of Ratings, published by Three Rivers Press in 2002. The rights have since reverted to Lore and he's going to re-release the book via self pub. When considering his options for a cover, today he said something in his newsletter that struck me:
I mean, I’m asking people to take my work seriously and pay for it, I feel like it would be hypocritical to not do the same with the [cover] art.
Consider if you wanted people to buy your book, but someone just read the description and then ran it through a LLM to flesh it out instead. Support artists. You want people to support you, after all.
Also, check out Lore's newsletter, Dogs and Sorcerers!
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On Hats
Brief backstory. I used to love hats. Growing up, I would wear hats all the time. Any kind of hat; fedoras, a flat cap gifted by my golf-loving great uncle Bill, berets. Ball caps to a lesser extent, but yeah, I'd wear them.
Then I kind of stopped. I have no memory of why. Maybe I tried to do something more with my hair*. Maybe I got a perm and tried to have bangs. Or maybe when I started coloring my hair, I wanted to show off the color. Who knows?
This past weekend, I went to World Fantasy Con in Niagara Falls. I went for a few reasons, but one of them was to accept the World Fantasy Award for Thornhedge, by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon.) Ursula is known for wearing magnificent hats...
...so I decided to unearth one of my old hats to wear since I was a T. Kingfisher proxy. I figured it would be amusing to accept the World Fantasy Award in a hat like Ursula's as I gave one of her signature speeches.**
But what happened this weekend was, I forgot how much I liked hats. And then there were other things too...
I rented a car so we could go into Buffalo and see my mother in law, and at the rental car desk, the guy upgraded us from economy car to midsize sedan. I didn't request it. It just happened. OK. Cool.
When I checked into the hotel, the woman at the front desk upgraded us to super fancy floor six, and then waived the parking fee when she found out we were with World Fantasy Con but had signed up too late to get into the discounted convention block of rooms. Save us something like $65 and upgrade the room for no reason? Yes, please.
Two upgrades with no reason? Was it the hat? I started to wonder.
I usually have my hair up (see footnote* ) but because of the hat, this weekend I had my hair in ponytails a lot of the time. So I got a lot of comments on my hair, as if the color it is was purposeful.
My husband says whenever he wears any loud shirt, people talk to him more. They see him as a friendly guy--which he totally is. But strangers won't know that, and they still gravitate to him.
Is the hat the same? Do people see someone else, like Confident Mur, when they see me in a hat? While the guy at Alamo and the woman at the Sheraton did not say "what a fantastic hat, Mur! You deserve an upgrade!"I just know I got a lot more attention on this trip than usual. And the notable difference was a hat.
It’s also possible I carry myself differently with a hat. Clothes are so subtle. Every choice we make in life is a subtle message about who we are. It's possible a hat like that gives off a confident vibe that i don't manage on my own. They can give off bad vibes, as I have come to expect any man in a trilby will eventually call a woman "milady" and anyone putting truck nuts on their vehicle are to be avoided at all costs.
Possibly hats do give off confident vibes, or I only say that because Ursula is one of the bravest people I know. I wasn't actively LARPing T Kingfisher this weekend. That would be creepy. But let's face it. The hat had power.
And I remembered that wearing hats is fun. You may see me in a hat in the future.
And to tie this into writing, your characters' clothes can convey messages about them. Think about that next time you get to work. If clothes are oversized or undersized, the character could have recently lost or gained weight, or is wearing someone else's clothes to hold onto them. Remember Winona Ryder's boots in Mermaids? It didn't make a ton of sense, since most kids' feet are still growing at that age, but it was largely symbolic that she couldn't let go of those boots.
This week…
I'm done traveling for a while, which is a relief. I made it through the many cons I had this year with no covid (uh, knock on wood) or any other notable illness.
Boilerplate: Did you know…?
- Mur recently released a novella, The Ophelia Network, available in audio (Audible.com), ebook, and paperback!
- Mur is co-editor of Escape Pod, which will be celebrating it’s 20th year and thousandth episode in 2025!
- Supporters of this newsletter will get early, ad-free, sometimes expanded episodes of both podcasts!
Stay safe, stay kind!
Mur
- Monday- Ditch Diggers with Ursula Vernon 3pm
- Tuesday- Solo RPG Broken Cask 3pm, then I will be a special guest at Cat Rambo's Patreon community to talk about Station Eternity 4p
- Wednesday- Baldur's Gate 3 3pm
- Thursday- I Should Be Writing with Gwynne Garfinkle 3pm
- Friday- Adulting [no online stuff]
- Saturday- Kick in the Pants workshop 3pm
*I hate my hair. Always have. It's super straight and i have never been able to do anything with it that didn't make me look like a girl from the Brady Bunch, only brunette. I have never had the patience to learn how to style it. I don't like it cut short, or long, or middle. I get it cut these ways just for variety.
**Ursula did not win the World Fantasy Award. I am probably more upset than she is.
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