More Changes

I know, I seem to be talking about nothing but my novel, lately, and with good cause. Ever since I lost my job, working on my crime story has been my new day job and I sit at the same desk over the same daytime hours as I did when I was working from home.

I just don't get paid to be here.

Putting in close to 40 hours each week writing Dark Water is what allowed me to finish the first draft in such a short period of time. And, unlike my old job, this book has given me a great deal of joy. I had a lot of fun putting the story together.

(I was really good at my old job but to say I had fun or that it gave me joy is a stretch. It paid the bills and allowed me to enjoy the rest of my life.)

I'm now at a point in the writing process where I've started reading my book and making corrections to the grammar, spelling, and other errors. In reading just the first two paragraphs of the prologue, I realized that I had left out something from the epilogue, and used that morning to add the new content. I then started from be beginning and read through the story.

By the end, I had cut some material, added new material, and corrected existing material. I also made notes of things that I needed to research more and made sure I had followed all of the clues that the detectives discovered.

And, after reading, I walked away from the book for the weekend.

As I wrote, a couple of days ago, I made some changes to one of the detectives, Erin Hayes. Using an advanced AI search engine, I was able to make her more believable, even if that meant she was knocked down in rank.

At the beginning of this week, I started reading Dark Water a second time, and by the second chapter, I decided to make a major structural change. And this change took me the entire day.

When I started writing the outline, I wanted to structure the book so that each chapter was an entire day, with the exception of the prologue, which spans two days (it's short), and the first and second chapters, which were one day but from the perspective of different people.

The problem with keeping one day per chapter was that the chapters became very long. Some were as many as 60 8.5 x 11 pages, which translated into 80 paperback pages or more. I used asterisks (*) to denote scene breaks, hoping they would make it easy on a reader, but I decided that I need to give up my one-chapter-per-day structure.

So I went through each chapter and broke it up where I thought the scene change warranted a new chapter. Some chapters are as long as 14 pages while a few are as short as one or two pages. After I restructured the book, I've ended up with 58 chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue.

I'm hoping that it is now easier to read: I'm currently going through my first reading with this new structure so I hope I made the right decision.

When I demoted Erin Hayes, I made her a Detective Sergeant, which is still a fast track for someone her age, but I thought I'd need to create a backstory that explains her rise in the ranks. This involved me creating another crime story, which actually came pretty quickly, though I find the crime-fiction genre to be my calling (more on that, tomorrow).

Without giving too much away, Hayes is known as the Detective Constable who cracked the Jackpot Kidnappings case, which had reached international recognition. By the time she is promoted and transferred to the Ottawa Police Services, Mickey Calloway had heard of the Jackpot Kidnappings.

While I was brainstorming for Hayes' backstory, I took a look at the image that I had AI generate, a few months ago, of our two detectives. I had already generated a new image of Hayes, alone, which I used for my blog post about her demotion. It's perfect in its depiction of my "ridiculously beautiful" detective and I won't be generating any more.

The new Calloway (Perplexity)

But I've always thought that the AI image of Calloway was too 'Hollywood' in its portrayal of my lead male detective. Calloway is huge (two metres tall and broad) and has an imposing look about him, but he can be as gentle as he is tough.

I wanted to create a less-perfect image of him, so after attaching the old picture of Hayes and Calloway into Perplexity, I asked the AI tool to make him less 'TV-ready' and to give him a more human appearance.

The image gives him a softer, more rounded face, though I believe that when he wants to look intimidating, he can. The new image also has him appear like he would be a good dad, and that's how I've written Calloway.

So this picture is also a keeper.

Someone asked me, in an earlier Comments section, if I would not use a human graphics artist for my book cover, and they are right. When Dark Water is eventually published, I will seek out a graphic designer (or the publishing company will).

When I had Songsaengnim: A Korea Diary published, the publishers offered a few cover designs from which I could choose. I assumed they had a few stock covers and suggested the most suitable ones for me to inspect. I chose the cover it ended up getting.

I've created these AI images to use as ideas for a cover, and I would show them to the graphics designer as a template. In the meantime, I've created them to use in my blog posts. They were never intended as a final book cover.

I continue to go through the manuscript and make changes as needed. I'm still several weeks away from submitting it to an editor, so there's lots of work ahead of me.

I hope you're not bothered by me sharing my thought process and status of the book. In fact, I hope that I'm building anticipation, so that when Dark Water is finally published, you'll be interested enough to want to buy a copy.

Happy Thursday!

A Demotion

Now that the first draft of Dark Water is done, I've started looking at the story and the characters with a more critical eye. I want my eventual readers to believe that the story is plausible.

For the first draft, I did a lot of Googling and asked ChatGPT a lot of questions. In roundabout ways, without sharing excerpts of scenes, I would describe scenarios that reflected the content of the story and ask the AI tool if what I described was realistic.

More times than not, Chat GPT would chime in with a positive assessment of that scenario, to the extent that I thought it was a yes-bot. Its responses would be encouraging, starting with a "that's a great idea and really develops your (character/plot) well."

If there was something that didn't go well, the AI tool would still give me encouragement but would offer a suggestion that would "tweak" my scenario. Never once did it tell me that I was wrong or unrealistic.

Now that I'm trying a new search engine, Perplexity, I'm being given a dose of reality.

I've been told that I'm not being realistic on one important piece of my story and that my audience would have a rough time believing it, especially if the reader knows anything about the police.

As you might know from following my posts about Dark Water, the two main detectives in the story are Inspector Michael 'Mickey' Calloway and Inspector Erin Hayes. What you may not know is anything about the characters, themselves, as I have kept most of the story out of my blog posts (I've shared the first chapter and the story synopsis in other blog posts but want to keep the overall story quiet).

But I feel I can tell you about the main characters without spoiling anything.

Calloway is 50 years old and a seasoned veteran in the Ottawa Police Serious Crimes Unit. He's lived in Ottawa his whole life and is married, with a teenage daughter.

Hayes (image: Perplexity)

His partner, who is a hard-working officer, was steadily promoted up the ranks from the Niagara Regional Police. When a vacancy opened at the OPSCU, Hayes was recommended by the NRP top brass. Hayes is only 28 when she was promoted to the rank of Inspector.

When I developed Hayes, I did searches on the rank structure with the OPS, checking Wikipedia, Google, and ChatGPT. I learned that making Hayes an Inspector at 28 was a steep climb but possible.

Now that I'm going through my book with a more critical eye, I thought I would test out Perplexity by describing Hayes and giving her the rank I have written. And Perplexity was brutally honest.

It told me that there's no way that a 28-year-old, even joining a police force at 19, would reach the rank of Inspector in that timeframe. It worked out what would be needed to get to that rank, and the youngest that Hayes could be was in her early to mid 30s.

I then gave the search engine more to work with. I told it the age that Hayes finishes high school (18) and to map out what she would have to do to get hired at the Niagara Regional Police. I also asked it to figure out what rank she could be in order to be brought on to the OPS as a highly recommended candidate to join the Homicide Unit.

Perplexity showed me the sources that it accessed to glean the information and I was impressed. It accessed the OPS Web site as well as the NRP site. It looked at sites that support Ontario Police Officers Association. It referenced various news articles from across the province.

Hayes would have had to go to university or college to obtain a three-year degree or diploma, preferably in in criminology, psychology, sociology, or policing studies. While in university or college, she would volunteer with community organizations (such as police auxiliaries and victim services) and/or work in security and crime prevention to gain relevant experience.

I'm not going to list everything that Hayes would have to do, but she'd also have to attend Police College, get hired after graduation, be on probation for a year, and then go through the ranks. Assuming she's a hard-working, dedicated officer—and I've created her such that she becomes a rock star at NRP—by the time she reaches 27, she could plausibly earn the rank of Detective Constable (a rank I didn't see in my previous searches of OPS ranks, though I recognize the rank in many detective novels I've read), also sometimes working as an Acting Detective Sergeant.

By the time she hits 28, when she applies for the position at the OPS Homicide Unit and receives glowing endorsement from the brass at the NRP, Hayes could be promoted to Detective Sergeant.

That's where I'm going to put her in my re-writes. And while I made up the Serious Crimes Unit for the OPS and named other divisions by their real names (the Drug Unit, for example, comes up), I may use the real name of Homicide Unit in the book, to distinguish it from the Guns and Gangs Unit and other departments that handle other serious crimes; though, in doing so, I'm going to have to make other changes to Calloway's past cases (one, that haunts him through this story).

Yes, it's a demotion from the rank I gave her but Google and ChatGPT didn't give me the depth of ranks that Perplexity gave me. DS Hayes has a certain ring to it, anyway.

I have ideas for Calloway and Hayes, and I've written a post for Friday that will explain what I have in store. While Calloway is exactly where he needs to be, hoping to someday become the Superintendent of his department, giving Hayes the rank of Detective Sergeant allows for a lot of growth of her character.

Stay tuned.

Perplexed

AI really struggles with direction. And it can't count.

Months ago, when I was playing with ideas about a cover for my crime novel, "Dark Water," I described the Vimy Memorial Bridge that spans the Rideau River in Ottawa's south end and wanted ChatGPT to create the image such that there was a woman in the river, floating face-down.

The AI tool created a random bridge, crossing the Ottawa River, below Parliament Hill. Buildings in the background didn't match Ottawa's downtown core, but most importantly, the woman was floating face-up in the river.

I wrote about this struggle with AI when I was still just sussing out my story.

It took some time, between breaks in my writing, to come up with an image that was passable, though I wasn't sold on it as a possible cover when it came time to publish my book. And every once and awhile, when I took a break from writing, I'd experiment with other covers.

When I finished writing the first draft of "Dark Water," I wanted to wait a few days before I would read what I had. I wrote the final sentence in the epilogue on a Thursday and started the reading and editing process on the following Monday.

On that Friday, I thought I'd have another go at designing a cover, using ChatGPT. Here's the information that I gave it:

Create a book cover for my murder mystery using the bridge in the attached photo. The angle of view would be below the water, underneath the bridge, looking upward. In the water, floating on the surface, is a woman who is dressed in blue jeans and a black jacket. She has long, red hair that partially hides her face. She is faced down in the water.

I gave ChatGPT the following attachment photo:

Here's what the AI took came back with:

It wasn't even close to what I had described. First, it made up a title that I hadn't provided (ant the kerning sucks). Also, the woman is lying on the shore or on a dry river bed (I admit that the photo I provided shows the water at a low level). I gave the prompt more instructions.

Remove the title. The angle of view should be underwater, looking up at the woman. It's morning, so light shines down, placing the woman in a partial silhouette.

The result was better but Vimy Bridge now only had two arches that were more round. The woman was fine but for a body floating at the surface, her legs seemed to be too low (I've luckily never seen a dead person floating in water, before, so I don't know how accurate that angle is).

Once more, I gave ChatGPT more instruction:

Much better. Make three arches on the bridge and make the angle of view such that the audience is below the woman, looking up at her. The bridge is visible through the water. Have the woman laying more prone on the surface, such that her legs are closer to the water surface. She should also be wearing shoes.

Okay, so the victim now had shoes. And was more prone. But the bridge still had two arches. Also, for the character of Emily Fraser, I imagined her hair much longer.

I decided to go into a much longer, detailed description of my image idea, so wrote this:

Create a realistic, cinematic-style murder mystery book cover for Dark Water by Ross Brown. Underwater view, looking upward toward the water’s surface and a large steel bridge with three arches. The arches are elongated (more stretched than semi-circular) and clearly visible through the water, above. Morning light streams down through the water, casting soft beams that illuminate the scene. Floating face-down on the surface is a woman with very long, flowing red hair that spreads out in the water. She is wearing blue jeans, a black jacket, and shoes. Her back and most of her legs are close to the surface so they catch the light, creating a partial silhouette effect. The camera angle is from directly below the woman, looking up toward her and the bridge above. The water is a deep, clear blue-green with gentle ripples and light shimmer on the surface. The cover should create a tense, mysterious, and haunting mood, blending realism with cinematic drama.

There, that aught to do it. I pressed Enter and got the following message:

You’ve hit the free plan limit for image generation requests, so I can’t create that cover right now. Your limit will reset in about 23 hours — once it does, you can paste the exact prompt you’ve written and the AI should render your scene exactly as described.

Ffff... !

Fine, I thought. I had been spending too much time on this and it wasn't productive. I moved onto other things around the house telling myself I'd try again sometime on Saturday night.

On Saturday, I worked on my Peru video, which ate up most of the afternoon and evening. But I did take a break, late in the evening, and posed the same query to ChatGPT. It responded,

I still can’t generate it yet — your free plan image limit hasn’t reset. Once it does, you’ll be able to paste that Dark Water prompt directly and get the cover.

If you want, I can keep your final prompt and have it ready so you can drop it in the instant your reset hits. That way you don’t lose time retyping everything.

Do you want me to store it here for you in a clean, copy-ready format?

Bloody hell. I told the AI tool to store the prompt and told myself that I'd try again on Monday.

At the start of the week, I prompted ChatGPT once again, copying its clean copy into the prompt. I still wasn't able to get my image. Nor on Tuesday. Nor Thursday.

On Friday, I received an e-mail from Bell, which informed me that it was offering me a free one-year subscription to the AI-powered search engine, Perplexity Pro. It was a $249 value.

I thought, what the hell, why not, and downloaded the promo code. I entered a reminder at the beginning of August, next year, to cancel the subscription.

By then, I thought, ChatGPT might let me generate an image again.

I copied the prompt from ChatGPT and entered it into Perplexity, with a few changes and a new image of the Vimy Bridge. I also gave a suggestion for the font style for the title. Here's what the new AI tool gave me:

Honestly, it wasn't bad for a first attempt. But Fraser's legs were still too low for my liking, she seemed to be much deeper in the water, and she was facing away from the viewer. Plus, it seemed as though Fraser had two right hands. Also, I didn't imagine Fraser's hair in a ponytail, so I added the following suggestion to the AI tool:

Place the bridge such that it doesn't look like it's underwater and is diffused by the water. Make the woman more prone, as she is floating on the surface of the water. She should be facing the camera and her hair is not tied back, but is floating wildly about her head.

Here is what Perplexity gave me for its second attempt.

Obviously, there are a couple of issues with this image. Vimy Bridge has only two arches, just as ChatGPT had given it. Fraser was floating on her back with her face visible, and was viewed from the side. Her hair was also shorter than I wanted for my character. And what happened to the title?

Admittedly, I didn't specify to hide Fraser's face so I added a new prompt:

Turn the woman so that she is face-down in the water. Make her hair longer. The back of her head touches the water surface, such that someone who sees her from above the water believes that she could be an animal. Also, you have changed the bridge such that it is now missing an arch: there should be three. And place the title and author as described, above.

Everything about this image is perfect, except for the subject. Fraser is not at the water surface and she is twisted in a bizarre way: her legs and feet are facing in different directions such that it's hard to tell which way she is facing, and she has two right legs. You can't see all of the arches of the bridge but from this angle, it doesn't matter.

Growing frustrated, I tried one more time:

Keep everything in the last image the same but start over with the woman: she is floating face-down at the surface. She has very long, flowing red hair that spreads out around her head. She is wearing blue jeans, a black jacket, and shoes. Her back and most of her legs are close to the surface so they catch the light, creating a partial silhouette effect. The camera angle is from directly below the woman, looking up toward her and the bridge above.

AI struggles with direction and can't count. Fraser is facing away from the viewer. Also, the bridge doesn't have quite the right amount of arches.

Last chance:

Keep everything the same but move the woman so that her head is toward the camera, her body trailing off behind.

I give up.

When and if my book gets published, I'll let the publisher worry about the cover. I'll have some mock-ups prepared but I can't rely on AI to give me a good cover.

I don't know if I'll keep Perplexity, though I have ideas for more Calloway and Hayes books, so I'll see about using the tool to help me with enhanced searches and whether it's any better than ChatGPT.

Happy Monday!