Happy Labor Day to all of you.
Especially a Happy Labor Day to you who are laboring on labor day.
Not everyone gets a three day weekend for Labor Day. Not everyone gets to BBQ hot dogs on Labor Day. Not everyone gets to go to a Labor Day protest.
The world we live in is built on those people who labor on Labor Day, just like any other day.
Happy Labor Day to all of you.
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.
The Storm Breaker background I created for my Jackofharts substack was another case of a long and relatively difficult process. As usual, I wrote a series of prompts that fit the story. My original prompts were trying to get all four characters in the story, but those created wildly unusable results. Most render engines break down when you attempt to use more than one character. And the more characters you add, the more the results break down. So I settled on just showing a cowboy wearing a brown duster and cowboy hat walking away from the camera in Texas, into a hurricane or a storm in the background. Abstract art with large brushes.
I tried numerous engines and derivations on that general prompt at dezgo.com until finding that Dreamshaper XL Lightning would get the closest to what I wanted. As I found when doing the Goblins in the Marketplace background, it really liked to show the face, even when I told it not to. So I went through hundreds of generations where it simply ignored every derivation I could come up with of “don’t show a face” to get down to around a hundred that were passably what I asked for. I cut those down to around forty that I liked, and then down to around four finalists that I thought would look good as a cover image.
It is ironic, considering how hard I worked to get images that did not include the face, the one image I kept not deleting even though it showed a profile of the face was the one I picked in the end. It had a storm background that would be easy to put words over, and it carried the energy I wanted. Captain William Carter, hunter of otherworldly creatures and threats to mankind, walking into a storm.
Raconteur Press has published a charity anthology, Hairballs, Hiccups, and Hope, to help and Lori Janeski with medical expenses due to a serious auto accident. A number of very good authors donated a story to the anthology, and many more offered their story for it. They did not pick my offering, but I hope you give it a shot. Help an author out, get some good stories to read, and feel good about the whole endeavor.
People in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland are telling us that immigrants brought in from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, and other nations have been coordinating rape gangs for years, and the government has been refusing to stop them because it would be culturally insensitive. But it’s worse than that according to reports.
Firstly, the Islamic rape gangs focus on girls that are fifteen an under. Yes, they’ll rape any woman they can catch, but they really focus on the under fifteen girls. They grab the girls, drag them into houses, and then a whole gang takes their time with the girls. Worse than that, when the men in the area, including the fathers, find out their daughters have been kidnapped and are being raped in the house, when they go to pull the girls out like any dad or man should, the police will arrest the father and leave the girls in the house to continue being raped.
The image that is going around the social medias right now is of a sub-fifteen year old girl protecting herself from that. With a knife and an axe because in Scotland they actually do still have some of those. No guns because most of those have been outlawed. And of course the police arrested her, not the grown man trying to abduct and rape her and the girl with her. They charged her with having a knife. Now outrage is enough that they pulled those charges back. The citizens of the UK are done with this, but I don’t know what they can do to stop it now. They’re asking for help on every channel they can access, but I don’t know how much they will get.
At the same time, we have yet another medicated up, chemically destroyed, driven insane by the Leftists man going off to shoot a bunch of kids in a church in Minnesota, an hour away from where I live. Because he wants to kill Trump but can’t get to him, so he goes for the nearest kids he can find to kill them. Because the Leftists have taught him that those people are the enemy and must be killed before they kill him.
And the instant response of the Leftist leaders in America is to ask “How many children have to die before you give up your guns?” That is not an idle question. They really are trying to find out how many children they have to drive so insane that they kill other children before we give up our guns and ask them to pretty please stop killing our children. But when we do, they will just do what the Leftist leaders in the UK did. But then we won’t have guns to stop them anymore, and we will be in the same boat the UK is.
Let England and the United Kingdom and the messages we are getting from the people who live there be our warning not to let the Leftists get the same opportunity here. Look what they did over the last four years here. They did try to swamp us with illegal aliens. They did send men to jail for trying to defend our women and children against threats. They will do this again and worse if they get the chance. Look to England. They are a warning to us all.
Forge of War on Amazon
Angel Flight on Amazon
Angel Strike on Amazon
Angel War on Amazon
Wolfenheim Rising on Amazon
Wolfenheim Emergent on Amazon