Goodbye Greek Goddess
When we have to kill our darlings
I had to kill off a couple of my darlings in my novel. It hurt at first, but I’m really happy I did it. It’s much stronger now. Today, you’ll meet one of those characters. Then, I’m sharing an art program. And finally, I’ve got some questions for ya!
Meet Elpis. She is one of my darlings that I killed off in my novel–at least in this book. She was based on the ancient Greek goddess of the same name. Also known as Hope, she was the last one to come out of Pandora's box. In my story, she lives in an enormous cavern that has pools and a Grecian temple in the depths of Mt. Helicon. She dished out hope and information. Elpis was a little off. After all, she has spent centuries underground with very few visitors.
When I cut her, I moved her storyline to someone else, later in the story. Turns out it comes too late, so I’m bringing up sooner, but not with either character. Instead, I’m bringing in a “family secret” earlier.
Graphic Art
In the art world, I’ve gone back to my graphic roots and created more type more graphic design work. I’m also creating a subset or art gear for authors.
I also discovered Kittl. Kittl has some awesome fonts. They also have some decent font manipulation tools. And they have an AI generator, which I have been playing with. They have challenges you can participate in. Winners get more AI credits. All participants’ work goes into their templates for use by others. All their templates, fonts, and graphics are licensed for commercial use (no limits).
One challenge was for book covers. They encourage use of the AI, and it was a lot of fun. I entered two.
Can you see where I’m going?
I’m terrible at drawing people. It’s just not something I like to draw, nor do I like to manipulate photos of people either. So, I will play and see if I can make my book covers there. If it doesn’t work out, that’s ok. Figuring out how to write the prompts is key and fiddling with them until you get something you like.
*Kittl has a free version and a paid version. The free version is (of course) limited, but it’s let’s you test it out and see if you like it.
Now, Tell me about you!
Feel free to expand on the last poll in the comments!
That’s such a hard thing to do. I applaud you for being brave and doing what is best for your work.
The images you made look cool. I'm not much on using AI for images, especially since some places are perfectly okay to steal artwork to train their AI and there's some lawsuits floating around regarding that.