In today’s so-called “in-between-isode,” rather than talking world-building or providing story narration, we discuss some updates in our lives. Specifically, my planted grape seeds, the ongoing saga with our Airbnb property, and designing a logo for Grendhill Media.
My grape seeds aren’t sprouting. 🙁
Our Airbnb saga continues – they’re offering a low-ball payment that doesn’t cover the estimates we were given by contractors, let alone our labor, the mortgage and utilities while the property sits vacant due to their delay, lost profits, and of course,
Seriously. Lots of anxiety and life upheaval. They’re offering 82% of our plain-and-simple expenses to remedy the situation. Add our labor, mortgage and utilities, general contractor overhead and profit, and what they’re offering is about 50% of what appropriate compensation should be.
Now we have to decide – it’s a bird-in-the-hand-vs-two-in-the-bush situation. Do we capitulate, or hire a lawyer to push on them harder to bring their number up? What do you think?
The years ago this month I left my family behind in Virginia and attended six months of training for work in Georgia. Due to COVID hitting at the same time I couldn’t take the odd weekend to travel back home to visit my own wife and children, which makes me feel quite isolated.
Despite this I made the best I could of the forced separation. I roomed with some cool coworkers, did a lot of running, and a little bit of kayaking on some nearby lakes in my free time. I also pulled my Grendhill work-in-progress off the shelf, and while I didn’t write that much more of the story, I did create. I started the Grendhill Chronicles Podcast during this time, composing into/outro music, “advertisement” background music, and several conversations with my cousin and sister, most of which have yet to be edited into podcast episodes due to the amount of time it takes to produce each one.
I was able to attend church services in the home of fellow believers local to me. They were very inviting, allowing my buddies and me to shoot their pistols on their land. They also shared… Drumroll! … Some grapes with me from their vines in their backyard!
I’ve been bouncing around for last 2.5 years since then, unable to plant them. Now we have specific plans to stay in one place, we have a yard, and I got a little bit of time to get them started.
I found this page that talks about how to grow grapes from seed. Last month I started following the instructions, but not with intent to follow 100% precisely, since I started too late to “winter” them for three months in the fridge. I pulled them out this week and didn’t warm them up before putting them in soil.
Seeds are still in this plastic bag after spending a month damp in the fridge.The grape seeds! Well, 5 out of the 6 of them.The seeds are planted!
You can read that web page for yourself if you want to see what I’m looking at. From this point, I’m keeping the soil damp with mist. Hopefully they will all sprout and grow. I know just where to plant them, at the front of our yard, next to the driveway, providing structure for them to grow across and form a kind of hedge at the front of the lawn to make the yard feel more private.
Then later, yum! Grapes!
…Oh yeah, I mentioned G.R.A.P.E.S. That’s a guide useful for world building. I haven’t used it yet per se, but it’s an acronym that can be useful to help cover the various aspects of a society and its surrounding environment.
Geography Religion Achievements Politics Economics Social Structure
It may not cover everything. For example – magic system? – but it’s pretty good. But what I’m really getting at is that my wife and I were talking and I think we will employ this acronym and produce podcast episodes discussing the different factors and aspects of the worlds and peoples we create in our stories.
…Yeah. I was going to elaborate a bunch, but it’s late so I guess I’ll just let the discussions speak for themselves. Patience, they’ll come eventually!
Below are my notes-to-self created before recording this episode:
This will be a narration episode!
GCP – S2E4: Story! – Я-BOT … as well as life and creative work updates.
(Click here to watch on YouTube) I haven’t recorded one in nigh on three years. Expect a worldbuilding episode next month, probably an old conversation recording from three years ago that never got released. But today, I will read to you.
I’m going to try to do this episode in one take for the updates and back matter discussion after the narration, but I’ll record the narration once the kids are in bed to prevent extra noise on the recording.
Today’s narration won’t be a chapter from The Grendhill Chronicles. Today I’ll be reading to you something I’ve been calling a short story, but it’s more of a concept flash fiction. It’s barely 1200 words, and no action actually occurs in the window of narration, but it takes an idea I had in 2021 and tries to make you feel what the narrator feels. I hope I can make you feel something interesting while you listen.
But first, our updates!
Updates:
-Declined Career Designation
-recent birthday
-daughter’s artwork
-card from aunt
-pen from parents
-some time to myself
-T.S. Pedramon: The Grendhill Chronicles
-Continuing to publish Grendhill Chronicles chapters on Wattpad and RR.
-Created Substack page and publishing there. – The current existing content for TGC is perma-free. To clarify, free access. I still retain it as my intellectual property. What I am currently first-draft reviewing is hopefully getting better, but this portion of the story will remain free to access and consume. I intend to write further in the story, entire books, which will probably not be perma-free.
-Published R-BOT (as T.S. Pedramon)
-on thorn.link w/ password
-on Substack
-on ko-fi.com
-on Patreon
-on Vella – Vella is actually for serials – explain.
-GOHOMUSP progress – 15,500 words, but I have more news about GOHOMUSP.
-AI
-Stable Diffusion – hilarity and awesomeness. Cats and parrots in dapper 3-piece suits or wearing armor, a house in the woods. It also spits out some disturbing images – just look at the hands. It often doesn’t know how many fingers people are supposed to have, and it has no idea what a clarinet is supposed to look like. But it makes some pretty cool images.
-ChatGPT – blurb
-Seasoned author said he would offer some help; asked for a blurb. Life was busy, I was sick, and in the end I took a shortcut: ChatGPT. I had heard AI could be pretty good at blurbs. So I described my story, ChatGPT spat out a blurb, and I gave that a makeover.
– I told this other author exactly how I had produced the blurb. He gave me feedback, annotations and corrections to show me how to improve it further. Then he said:
“Don’t use AI…AI providers are all being sued. I wouldn’t want to have stuff that was AI assisted that would have to be pulled down and reworked because the court ruled that it was a copyright violation.”
-So, there’s that. Now, I have not used AI to write any of my actual content, nor do I have any intention to do so. I think that even if there is no copyright concern, we will still need human-to-human communication for it to be truly relevant. But marketing copy is copyrightable material as well.
-So copyright is a definite concern. I wouldn’t want that to happen to me. I don’t know who will win the lawsuits. Having worked with Stable Diffusion, it can often take a deal of human creativity and intent to extract exactly the image you’re looking for. But the computer is able to do what it does because it ingested tons of material – much…most?…of which is copyrighted.
-So, Stable Diffusion. I prompted the AI to give me a picture of a robot. It took a few dozen tries to get what I was looking for, tweaking the settings. In the end I found something that I could call an R-BOT from my story. I think it looks pretty cool…and menacing. That was the intent. But I posted R-BOT on these different platforms with that image.
-Oops. Now, to play it safe, I will draw my own robot, and replace that image with my new one. I do not wish to have any of my works pulled due to potential copyright infringement. So you’ll see that change.
-I have some more to say about GOHOMUSP, but we’ll leave that until after today’s narration segment.
Thank you for listening to my recording of R-BOT today. I hope you enjoyed it.
If you liked that, you may enjoy some of these books by other authors. Disclaimer – I haven’t had the time to read these myself. However, they do sound interesting and I wouldn’t mind cracking one open. If you’re watching on YouTube you’ll see these book covers appear on screen. – newsletter swaps!
Now –
I shared RBOT with my newsletter subscribers – wait! I said subscribers!
-If you’re on YouTube, click the bell to subscribe to this channel.
-If you’re listening to audio, subscribe if you haven’t already, and please rate and review the podcast. Share it! Let others know; it will really help me out.
-And go to thorn.link/Grendhill/newsletter to subscribe so you can catch little freebies like this. When you subscribe, you will be emailed the password to read R-BOT online. Plus, you’ll be in the in-group to learn when I publish anything.
Okay, so I shared R-BOT with my newsletter subscribers a few days ago, and my Dad said he liked it. He texted me asking for more. That, coupled with what I’m going to say next, got me thinking a bit.
…The seasoned author who critiqued my blurb also critiqued its genre. In short, nobody’s looking for misfit superheroes. – Ben Stiller’s Mystery Men, different flavor…. I’m different….but he’s right
-So, what should I write? I dunno.
-R-BOT full novel? – had sequel idea yesterday
-Dive into TGC?
-Nightshade Unicorn?
-MG -kid who sews superhero costumes that impart power to the wearer?
-others?
…-I should start how I want to continue seriously, so…RBOT, Grendhill, or a space sci-fi, I suppose What do you think?
