Oh, wait, I have a blog?

Oh, yeah.  THAT blog.

I seem to be writing a science fiction novel.

I like writing dialogue.  I'm loving worldbuilding.  I keep developing odd aliens and--to be honest--most aliens are not exactly compatible with humans.

Why should they be?

I mean, imagine sharing a dorm room with a dolphin.

In spite of being from the same planet and being an air-breathing mammal, imagine the difficulties in day-to-day life sharing a living space.

One of you is going to be miserable.  

Not just that, dolphins can function 24-7 by letting one hemisphere of their brain sleep at a time. They also have, let's call it, "an alternative morality," different senses in some situations, a tendency to excrete wherever they happen to be at the time, and some challenges operating human technology.

And that's a species from the same planet.

So, aliens will exist, there will be a few interactions, but the ideas of "humans with odd body colors and bits glued to their foreheads" and "snake women with breasts" are not my thing.

I like stories that make sense to me.

So, the rough draft is probably way too much detail, too much backstory involved, intricate plotlines considered--as much as possible--from both sides.

The challenge will be paring it down in the edit to have it make sense, stay detailed enough, but not drag on.

In the meantime, I keep doing side notes on worldbuilding including histories of planets, systems, people, and tech that might show up in a sequel/prequel if the first one works out.

As far as AI goes...

I hate AI text.

I'm using the hell out of AI images that I won't publish for two reasons.

One, I like having a touchpoint for physical descriptions I can work off.

By generating an image, I can go back and redescribe that element without having to use the same words, and there's an honest narrative there.

Second, I like to take descriptions I make, plug it into several AI image generators and see what "garbage in-garbage out" AI generation comes up with.

When it comes up with something that looks like what I'm after, I know I'm in the ballpark.

If it isn't, I know there's a difference between the image I have in my head and what I'm communicating on the page.  It tells me to revise what I have on the page.

Now, I'll also use AI for stuff like "Give me a list of 20 Latin/French descriptor words for planets that don't appear in other major works," and "Explain how commas work in quotes again?" because I had always thought of quotation marks like I did parentheses and brackets in math...

What's inside is its own thing; what's outside is its own thing.

Which, of course, is not correct.

Overall, though, I don't use AI writing or text and--if it's AI art--I'll either not share it or tell you exactly what it is.

Wish me luck!