Jack of Harts

Lifeboat was a story I wrote for an anthology about families in war, and how different races come together to form odd bonds. The primary characters were soldiers from different races in the middle of a war enjoying a quiet moment for a good natured game of “I Spy” when the spacecraft they are in loses all power. I went into it not wanting to have a fight. A crisis, yes, and to explore how they reacted to it, but I didn’t want any weapons fire or killing anything. I had a plan for it, but the final scene caught me by surprise when I wrote it. I had to go back and slide in references to make it seem like I planned it all along. Authors can be crafty in that way when it comes to telling people we knew what we were doing, when we were really just letting the words flow and finding out where they went in real time.

The background I used for the jackofharts substack was both the most complicated and the easiest one I have made for my substack posts. I went to dezgo dot com like I did with the others, and asked several of the render engines to give me a holographic redhead with green eyes and an alien dress standing in front of a futuristic wall. A few more odds and ends to tweak it, but every single engine I tried failed spectacularly. They could give me the girl, or the background. Not both. Not certain exactly why, but the more arguments or prompts you add to an engine, the more chaotic the results get. I asked them for too much, and they couldn’t give me any of them.

So I went into Flux and asked it for a military themed futuristic compartment with a hatch. A few more arguments, but that is the general drift. Now Flux is one of the most amazingly beautiful art engines. Spectacular results, even if it is harder to focus and more random than others. I ran maybe fifty generations through, loved most of them, saved them, and sorted through until I found one that really did what I wanted. Then I went into Envy and asked it for a hologram of an anime redhead with green eyes and an alien dress with NO BACKGROUND. That is an option at dezgo dot com. Once again, there were a few more prompts, but that is the general idea, and I ran maybe half a dozen images through before I got what I wanted. Envy is real good about that. If you can tell that engine what you want, it will give it to you real quick.

I then brought both images into my ancient copy of Paint Shop Pro 7 that I still use and placed the girl on top of the background, in a different layer so I could manipulate everything. Increased the transparency so you can see the background through her, and added the title and my name. It maybe took a day to generate the images I used. It was figuring out how to get what I wanted that was the challenge, but once I changed my methods, it came easy and quick.