Back in 2016 I purchased a couple of photos from iStock and edited them in my ancient copy of Photoshop to approximate what I imagined Amira and Darragh looked like, mostly for personal reference but also potentially for the book cover. By then I'd been writing Just Like You Said It Would Be on and off for seventeen years. At one point it was a trilogy and the first novel in the series was called The Start of Something. I even placed top ten in Writer's Digest Best Writer's Web Site competition way back in October 2001 with www.thestartofsomething.com. I probably should've held on to the domain name as it's for sale for $9888 USD as of July 2026! If you're curious, you can have a look at bits and pieces of that old site by doing some archaeological digging via the Wayback Machine Internet Archive.
I Know It's Over was the first novel I finished after The Start
of Something trilogy and there were many C. K. Kelly Martin YA novels published after that, but I never forgot about Amira and
Darragh (who in fact started out as Aziza and Conor). Over many years, and in between working on other books, I rewrote their
story as a single novel, then rewrote it again and again, each time out
gaining a better understanding of what the book was meant to be until
it truly felt finished and wholly itself in 2017. If you happened to purchase a copy of Just Like You Said It Would Be close to ten years ago you might recognize the above young woman from the cover. Inside the book contents are the same as they were in 2017 but the cover
has changed multiple times, as has been the case for most of my
novels. I enjoy the cover creation process too much to leave them alone for long and a couple of extensive desktop publishing courses I took in the late 90s, in what was then known as the Dublin Institute of Technology (but has since evolved into Technological University Dublin), gave me a solid grounding in desktop publishing skills and Photoshop.
Much later, when Microsoft Designer was in free preview in early 2024, I fooled around with the software—purely for my own amusement—and fell down a rabbit hole generating AI photos of Amira and Darragh. I wouldn't use them professionally in any capacity for ethical
reasons concerning AI's impact on the arts. Nine of my books were ripped
off to train language models without my permission—something
I would never in three thousand years have actually agreed to had I been
asked and will probably be furious about until I die. I firmly believe that AI shouldn't be used in professional or
academic writing (whether we're talking about penning essays, music,
prose, non-fiction or movies), and in terms of fiction research, that AI
should only be utilized sparingly and with extreme caution, with any
information obtained from AI double or triple-checked against human
sources. Similarly, AI should never be used to substitute for
human-created visual arts, but I'll admit the Amira and Darragh photo exercise felt like an entertaining time sink for a short period in early 2024, before AI slop started to show up everywhere, like ashtrays and litter in the 70s.
There were ALOT of the usual issues with the way the fake couple in fake Dublin locations looked as well as some not atrocious results, but the two images below are my favourite AI created Amira and Darragh pairings.
I see more than a hint of early Jenny from the Block in this incarnation of Amira on the Trinity College grounds.
In Temple Bar at night. Pretty cute and with fairly natural looking expressions.
