I last posted at this blog a year ago. At that time, I said I was starting to use generative AI (specifically the program Stable Diffusion) to make pictures to illustrate my story "Dating Maggie." (Actually, long-time helper Yami is doing the generative AI while I do the Photoshop clean-up work.) Unfortunately, that effort petered out after illustrating about a dozen chapters. We found we could do it, but it was really hard making pictures from scratch that showed the same consistent faces each time. I still plan on posting what we did soon though, since some illustration is better than none.
But more importantly, Yami and I have a new target: a revision of Six Times a Day! This is a truly massive story, with three millions words and 4,000 pictures. I realized it would be a lot easier to take the existing pictures and use generative AI to update them. They're pretty simple 2D pictures for the most part that were made ten to twenty years ago, when standards were different. They look pretty crude today. But thanks to all the new AI technology of the last couple of years, they can be updated to look much, much better.
At the same time, I'm rereading the entire story and making a lot of changes, including entirely new scenes. Those will be illustrated by new pictures. So the story will be even bigger, but also hopefully much better.
All of this updating is going to take a lot of work. If you want to help with the art and/or editing the revised text, I would love it. A lot of what needs to be done with the AI art is very basic and most anyone who knows how to use Stable Diffusion could do it. Basically, we're doing lots of image to image processing, where we put in the old 2D image and tell the program to convert to it to nine 3D ones. Then I pick the best out of the nine and make Photoshop tweaks to get it just right. But to do that processing for four thousand images is a ton of work and is the main thing slowing me down from posting the revised parts. So help for that would be really key. But proofreading help is important too.
If all goes well, I'd like to start posting the revised first parts in the next month or two. As the text and updated and new pictures get finished off, more parts will get posted. If you want to be involved, please contact me at: paul_t_22 @ yahoo.com (remove the spaces). I'd especially love to hear from proofreaders and other supporters from way back when. Thanks!