✮ Pre-order on Barnes and Noble
Anyone interested in speculative fiction might want to check out my upcoming sci-fi novel, Rise, Tomorrow Girl, which I'll be releasing as Cara Martin. In the near future seventeen-year-old Canadian Leanne Khoury watches a second twenty-first century global pandemic—this one highly fatal in young adults—steal the life of her best friend. When Leanne is stricken ill too her affluent parents have her cryogenically frozen in a facility performing experimental procedures. Reanimated and cured of virus years later, Leanne isn’t the same. Her awareness intermittently ‘disconnects’, stalling her body and mind. But it’s more than that. Snatches of memories from evolutionary ancestors bleed through her consciousness, leaving her feeling as unnatural as Frankenstein’s monster on the inside.
Over a billion people perished during the pandemic, decimating a generation, and when Leanne's released from the cryo facility she struggles to integrate into a Canada and world that has technologically and socially moved on without her. Although the virus is no longer a threat, Leanne is far from safe. In the United States organized extremists threaten legitimate government, regularly committing attacks on U.S. soil. Then radical American expansionist soldiers invade parts of Canada and Leanne, along with others not accepted by the radical invaders, must fight for her survival.
Book release date: June 21, 2024
ISBN-13: 978-1-7383458-0-9
EBOOK: 978-1-7383458-1-6
The below entry has been cross-posted to my www.justlikeyousaiditwouldbe.com site. With Microsoft Designer in free preview I recently fooled around with the software—purely for fun—and ended up falling down a rabbit hole generating AI photos of Amira and Darragh. I'm not going to tell you how many pictures I ended up with (a completely wild amount! Also, a bizarro image of a 60s glam rock band fighting off a bunch of shark men and one of a delicious looking spaghetti and meatball cake, but let's leave those aside for now). The first problem was that Dall-E obviously didn't know what Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge looked like and in response to my entered description continually offered up a slew of other bridges that sometimes weren't even footbridges instead. There were also a few issues with unusually large, weird-looking eyes and the well-known problem that AI often has generating hands. Other times the couple (or sometimes half of them) simply didn't match the images of Amira and Darragh I have in my head. Quite often the couple simply looked far too shimmeringly sophisticated, or unnervingly resembled Sims characters.
If you've read Just Like You Said It Would Be you've probably formed your own images of the characters which might be a little different than mine, but here are some of what I consider to be the most convincing Amira and Darragh in pseudo Dublin locations pairings generated by Dall-E. You might notice I relocated the couple to Grafton Street then Trinity College and Temple Bar for several of the below images, at first hoping to avoid bridge weirdness and then, well, getting carried away. I've started with Amira and Darragh in the rain, but there were a bunch of cute results amid the slew that didn't match my criteria.
Sometimes Dall-E randomly decided to hand Amira the guitar instead of Darragh despite my prompt description. Maybe in a parallel universe I wrote a version of this book where Amira was in a band and Darragh was a screenwriting student?
Is it just me or does this guy look a little like young Hayden Christensen? Maybe a touch of Torrey DeVitto to this version of Amira.
Young Rupert Friend?
A and D on Grafton Street. Hand weirdness alert in the next picture, but otherwise a faithful rendering of them.
Below caught in a sun shower when I started directing the weather. You can see Dall-E doesn't comprehend that the pedestrian portion of Grafton Street (which I specified in the prompt) has no curbs. Other than that the general architecture of
the Grafton Street setting has the right look in these.
A few nicely realistic looking images in the Trinity College grounds. Anyone else seeing a bit of Jenny from the Block in the next incarnation of Amira?
In Temple Bar at night
Below is a prime example of all the things that can go awry with AI imaging. Here we have a serious case of guitars gone wrong (disappears right into his neck—ouch!), hand weirdness and Grafton Street pedestrian fail but if you're somehow able to ignore those things, it's a decent Darragh.
I wouldn't use these images professionally in any capacity for ethical reasons concerning AI's impact on the arts but it was certainly a fun experiment and I'll be posting a few other photos relating to Shantallow on my Instagram soonish. Now how about a slice of spaghetti and meatballs with green olives cake?
