While Angel of the Circuit Board is receiving an edit and comments from my very helpful British Science Fiction Association Orbit group, I thought I’d experiment a little with some of the images for my parallel work, The Random Access Memories of Jonny Naylor Cosmic Sailor (yes, I know, it’s a mouthful). This is a collection of sequential short stories documenting the life story of the famous Cosmic Sailor.
Inspired by another writer from my Orbit group, who was using AI to generate images, characters, scenes and worlds, in order to inform and stimulate his own word construction, I started visualising how each short-story might look. I came across Night Cafe, a free to use website that enables you to write your description of what it is you want to generate, and then makes it for you. It takes a bit of time to understand all the settings, models, and how to use key words, but the results are remarkable. I found that I was able to enhance my writing, and take it further, by adding extra detail that I hadn’t considered before.
Some of the images were so good, that I bought myself a copy of Affinity Photo (a much more cost-effective version of Photoshop) to make further enhancements and adjustments, and in some cases, generating additional images. This was incredibly useful at being able to take elements from different images and combining them into one. I was also able to add unique text and titles. It then occurred to me, why not produce a front cover yourself. And then, why not produce a cover image for each chapter, turning it in to its own ‘book’ within a book. Ten or twenty years ago this wouldn’t have been possible as an author might not have been able to afford such extravagant artwork of printing costs. But with this work being aimed at Amazon / the digital market, there’s no limit to your creativity. And it adds another dimension, a bit of fun, and an extra outlet for humour, expression, and story-telling.
Below are five chapter covers, which support the story telling as part of The Random Access Memories of Jonny Naylor Cosmic Sailor, coming soon. Let me know what you think.
