Amazon just approved my latest published item: An 11,000-word novelette that I finished in 2023 and didn’t publish then because I couldn’t get an AI to help me create a cover. You’ve seen those posts on my early experiences with generative AI: pictures of people with four fingers, six toes, or only one eye. I’ve played with the Grok AI every so often since then, even though Grok was the AI that summarized my biography and then told me I was dead. Well, Elon must know what he’s doing, because a week ago, Grok and I had a 20-minute conversation, and the cover image that resulted was damn near perfect. Certainly perfect enough for a shortish piece I’m selling for 99c.
The story itself has an interesting history: I began writing it in 1985, not long after I moved to Baltimore to take a job with Ziff-Davis for PC Tech Journal. I found Baltimore quirky but interesting and set the story there, even though I’d had the idea for it a year or so earlier when I still lived in Rochester NY. I wanted it to be a love story—something I had never written before 1985—but I simply didn’t know how to write one. So I threw it in a box, about a third finished, when I moved to Scotts Valley CA to work for Borland on Turbo Technix. It stayed in that box—my “trunk,” as authors call it—until 2023, when I was sifting the box for usable material and ran across “Volare!”. I’d written some secondary plot love stories by then, and finally decided it was time to write what I had planned way back in 1985. It’s still set in 1987, for reasons you’ll understand once you read it. In 2023 I finally finished it, rewrote the 1985 material, and polished it. All I needed was a cover.
So about a week ago I told Grok I wanted a cover depicting sunrise in Baltimore, with small figures of people flying in the background. The foreground should show a smiling woman in her PJ’s sitting in a basket of dead weeds holding hands while flying with a fully dressed man having a slightly apprehensive look on his face. I was surprised then when instead of instantly creating an image, Grok began asking me questions, like: Title of the book? Author? What is the genre? What is the mood? The genre is soft science fiction, the mood, well, whimsical. It took four iterations, but #4 was damn near perfect, considering my history with generative AI. And that’s what you see above. I asked for “apprehensive” and I got it. I wasn’t expecting that. Grok chose the font, one with a definite touch of whimsy. And the process took twenty minutes from start to finish.
It’s not fantasy. Flying in the story isn’t magic, but—well, no spoilers here. It’s a 99c read, designed to be whimsical fun and yes, a love story, now that I know how to write them. I couldn’t have written what I did in 1985. But 40 years in a box gave it the seasoning that it needed. Have a look. write a review if you like it. And ponder what it means when a generative AI actually gives you what you asked for. I asked. I got. And the future is gonna be interesting indeed.
