“Whale Meat,” Second Edition

Amazon has just approved an update to my ebook novelette “Whale Meat,” which has been available on Kindle for 99c since 2011. Some of you have probably read it. Why did I update it? Glad you asked! There’s a story about the story. Here goes:

I was enthusiastic about Kindle since Amazon first made it available in the late oughts. I was already publishing paperbacks of things like Carl & Jerry via lulu.com, but ebooks finally seemed to be coming into their own. I needed a story to test how the Kindle system worked. I would be creating book-length ebooks soon enough, but the first one would ideally be shorter than books, and not one of my best-known works. “Whale Meat” shook a fluke at me to get my attention, and so it was that the story became my very first Kindle publication.

The story itself was not new. In fact, I wrote the first draft in early 1971, when I was still 18 years old. It was the first fantasy story that I had ever completed. I was trying to write something that didn’t reek of King Arthur or the Tolkien/Lewis canon. I made it contemporary, set in urban Chicago, and whereas it was about two witches, they were not wart-equipped elderly women in pointy hats riding brooms.

No. They were hippies. Or that’s what they wanted to look like. It was a tricky business, as they were born in the 1300s and were immortal. So in pondering what it might be like to be immortal, I hit upon a possible story gimmick: Telling the story in present tense. If you’ve been alive for centuries, maybe you see the world as a perpetual Now. And that’s how I told it.

I had not yet sold a story into a professional market, but I had a book by Writer’s Digest and knew how it was done. I sent it out to several magazines, including, sheesh, Analog. It came bouncing back from all of them with little or no delay. After five rejections, I started wondering why nobody seemed interested. Maybe it was that weird way of telling the tale in present tense. So I rewrote it in conventional past tense, and a few years later sold it for $35 to Starwind Magazine, published by Ohio State University. It appeared in their fall 1977 issue.

Now, I wasn’t the first to invent present tense in storytelling. John Updike generally gets that honor, beginning with his well-known novel Rabbit, Run. But as weird as it seemed in 1971, in 2026 it’s used by a great many authors, and sounds modern and savvy. So last summer I rewrote the story, top-to-bottom, in present tense. I cleaned it up and fleshed it out in other ways as well. My intention was to replace the 2011 “Whale Meat” on Amazon with a newer, present-tenser edition.

All I needed was a cover.

So I attempted the obvious: Get an AI to draw a cover for me. I subscribe to X, and get the Grok AI as part of the package. So one afternoon a few days ago I gave Grok a prompt: Draw a scruffy middle-aged male witch in modern Chicago, summoning a whale through hyperspace.

It drew me a scruffy man…in a black robe and pointy black hat. Heh. No sale. I took a breath and gave the prompt more thought: Draw a scruffy gray-bearded middle-aged sorcerer wearing a floppy work-cap in modern Chicago, summoning a whale through hyperspace. It drew pretty much what I’d asked for. I saved that image to disk and asked Grok to regenerate using the same prompt. I got another image much closer to what I wanted. I spent some fascinating minutes regenerating images, all of which were different, and saving them to disk until I had about 15. After a certain amount of staring, I chose the image you see above. Ok, the prompt is a spoiler, but I’m guessing whoever might have enjoyed “Whale Meat” among Contra readers has already read it.

Now, this was an experiment. I’ll gladly pay a human artist for a cover on a novel-sized book. This was a 9,000 word novelette that I sell for 99c. I wanted to see how close an AI could come to something that resonated with the story. Grok did pretty well. When I uploaded the new text and cover, Amazon asked if any part the ebook was generated by AI. I clicked Yes. Other writers I know are doing this. I think Amazon is just gathering stats, and they approved the new edition a couple of hours ago. The first edition sold 55 copies across 15 years. This one may do better. We’ll see. If you read it, please drop a review on Amazon. Thanks!