A small but significant correction to Book Two

 

Hi folks, here I am again with yet another correction to book two. Those who know about my hearing loss will not find this surprising, but it turns out I've been mis-hearing, mis-pronouncing, and mis-spelling a particular word for decades, and I never noticed until now.

Some of you readers may have wondered about the "Glathe of Krippendorf," a weapon that gets used at the end of the book. My fellow Trekkies would have immediately noticed that it is shaped exactly like the trefoil emblem of the Klingon Empire. But that's only half of the mashup joke. It was supposed to be a variation on the multi-bladed weapon from the 1983 sci-fi/fantasy movie Krull.

Krull fans can already see where this is going.

This Thanksgiving, as I was preparing assorted casseroles the night before, I also engaged in a more recent tradition of watching Krull while cooking. This time, I watched the movie with subtitles and managed to pay a little more attention as I was waiting for the food to cool off after removing it from the oven. 

That's right: It was then that I finally noticed, after all these years, that the word is GLAIVE, not GLATHE!

Oops. [face palm]

The best I can tell is that, apart from the years separating the repeated childhood viewings of the film with the rediscovery of it in my college years, the name of the spinning fictional weapon also became confabulated somewhat with the word "lathe," which is a carpentry tool that spins a piece of wood. This unfortunately reinforced my false concept of the word's pronunciation, and it became yet another thing that I was totally clueless about for basically my whole life. It certainly doesn't help that the word glaive is an archaic term practially unknown to the general public outside of the cult nostalgia fandom for Krull. It's not nearly as iconic as, say, a lightsaber, for example.

Needless to say, I am now preparing a correction to the text, and taking the opportunity to add a couple of paragraphs to the scene to further cement the Krull reference in the description and use of the weapon.

Now I'm starting to get tired of saying this, but I guess it looks like all copies of the book printed before 2024 will be collector's editions due to the mistake in spelling and editing.

This is also going to affect the upcoming audiobook, as I'm basically going to have to re-record the entire scene with the corrected pronunciation of the word, as well as the rewritten lines. Not that I had actually gotten to that point in the audiobook edit anyway (I've been more focused on writing book three as it is)

So, there you have it. We can expect the corrected paperback and ebook to be available by New Years, probably, knock on wood.

New official logo!

 

Here it is, the new official logo for Whomping Angels Press! Created using Stable Diffusion AI and MS Paint. I wish I could have made it years ago but better late than never, I guess.

My first children's picture book is now on sale!

 

I've been stuck at home for the past couple of days due to an ice storm, and I decided to finally finish a children's picture book project that has been a decade in the making.

See the Dancing Animals is an original nursery rhyme that I made up to entertain my older kids when they were still small. We had a little Noah's Ark playset with a fabric ark and plastic Noah and animal figurines. I would wave the little plastic animals in front of them and chant a rhyme: "See the dancing animals, dancing in a row/see the dancing animals, watch those animals go!" 

Eventually around 2014 I expanded the rhyme and set about trying to turn it into an illustrated picture book. The problem was, I never could find an illustrator I could afford, and I'm not that good at drawing cartoon animals. For years, the book languished on my computer as a demo PDF file with terrible rough sketches. In the intervening time, I took up writing as a serious hobby and gained experience in self-publishing with my Jerry Copperpot novels.

When I found out about the new free AI image generators recently, I was finally able to create colorful and cute, albeit somewhat surreal and bizarre, images of what I wanted to see, within my illustration budget of zero. They still needed some work-- I had to remove quite a few extra limbs here and there in MS paint, and add another ear to a very cute one-eared rabbit, and move a misplaced nose and eye on a giraffe for example. For a couple of pages I had to painstakingly copy and paste several of the characters onto a background because I couldn't get the AI to generate them together to a satisfactory degree.

Otherwise, it was a pretty straightforward process of digging up the right Word template and assembling it with the text. Amazon recently came up with a children's ebook creator that allowed me to convert straight from a PDF, making the ebook process even easier. I'm grateful for these technological advancements that have allowed me to create a decent-looking product with limited time and money in just a few days.

The Amazon Kindle ebook is now available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTP518JJ and the paperback will probably be available within the next week or two, after I have a chance to look at the proof copy.

I hope your kids will enjoy this rhyme as much as mine did!

AI-Generated illustrations of characters from the Jerry Copperpot novels

I've recently been having some fun with AI-generated art from sources such as Stable Diffusion and Dall-E. These new AI's are all the rage lately, and have made some really impressive, cool stuff. But they have their limitations. One key limitation is you have to know exactly how to write a prompt for the AI to generate what you want to see, and it seems I'm not as good at that as I'd like to be. Some people go through hundreds of iterations of prompts to get the really cool stuff, but I'm not that patient. 

Nevertheless, I tried my hand at it, and I'd like to share a few pictures I was able to generate of some of the characters and scenes from my Jerry Copperpot books. They kinda sorta resemble what I had in mind, so even though they're not perfect, they're pretty cool to look at.

Book 1:

Jerry Copperpot:

Don Weazer:

Persephone Stranger:

I neglected to specify curly hair in the first one, but it did such a good job of rendering the magnifying glass I decided to keep it.

The Itchblasters:

The library assistant:

Coach Snakeland:

(It worked out pretty well although I think he looks like he belongs in an ad for some luxury fragrance)

The illusion of endless library:

Mulderscull disguised as Mr. Flinch:

Dr. Braingler

Dr. Braingler as a were-minotaur

Principal Rambledalf:

It was ridiculously difficult to get the blue skin color. Different attempts would get different elements of the character and the location right, but I never could really get them all together in one photograph.

Seth Goldbluff in his magic shop:

Tommy Coltstein:

Terry Schogren: 

Yodo:

The Dead Meaters (in a nail salon waiting to get their nails done)

The Super Dimensional Mattress (made by the Macross Mattress Company, spacefold generator powered by a dark crystal shard.)

 (I had to paste in the crystal manually although it was also AI generated)

The Mementoids:

(I had to paste in the AI-generated Polaroid cameras manually in MS Paint)

The Whomping Angels:

(I had to add the AI-generated hammers manually in MS Paint)

One-Eyed Willis:

(I could not get the dang AI to give me a guy with an eyepatch. So I had to paste it in manually from a free clipart.)

Magicternia Castle with the Everything approaching:

The interior of the Everything (or at least an approximation of some of the feel of the environment)

Persephone-Bot and Don-Bot (Username and Password):

Journeyman 5:

The Everything Revealed:

(the AI had a lot of trouble with this one)

Mulderscull:

Book Two:

The Movie Set at Magicternia Castle:

The Dining Hall Scene for the Harvey Totter Movie:

The Bureaucratic Movie Studio Lady:

Drago Falkore:

Drago in costume as Harvey Totter:

Chipmunk:

Prince Capsicum:

(It was really hard to get a chili pepper shaped the way I wanted it)

The Island:

Pretzelstiltzkin:

(This is another one the AI had a lot of trouble with)

Willy-Won Kanobi:

Lieutenant:

(The AI just couldn't get this one right, this is the closest I could get and even then I had to add the extra arms in Paint)

Lodo:

Drago as a Cluck-Dragon:

The Jet-Eye Knights:

Maemerds:

Captain Jack Monterey Sparrkness

(Not everything I imagined it to be but this was the closest I could get when I was trying to make a mashup of Jack Sparrow, Jack Harkness and Monterey Jack)

Mulderscull on vacation:

I hope you all have enjoyed these illustrations as much as I have, they were a lot of fun to create. If you haven't read the books, don't forget to look for the Jerry Copperpot series on Amazon!