12 Comments

Reads like a charm. Time floats by quite easily. That's what I like about your writing. It doesn't feel forced.

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Agreed!

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Wow! Thank you so much Ben. You made me blush!!!

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The scene in the back garden was written with such wondrous wistfulness that it got me quite emotional reading it 🥹

Really enjoying this, Daniel 🙂

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I’m so happy that the scene in the backyard resonated with you. It’s based loosely on an actual memory of mine that has haunted me at times throughout my life in dreams, or when hearing unexpectedly Journey’s “Wheel in the Sky”. And when the memory gets triggered, there’s always a certain wistfulness that goes with it.

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I’m so excited about this story. 😌

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Thank you, Winston!!! You’ve been so encouraging from the get-go. :)

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I'm really enjoying these characters so far and definitely want to see how their stories continue to interconnect in this unusual world (or is it worlds?)

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That means a lot, Jacquie!! Thank you so much. There’s a little bit of me in all the main characters of this story.

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So mysterious 👀 this is fun to read! Also-- how do you get such great images from Midjourney?! What sort of prompts do you use? I’m inspired to try it for my own story.

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Alexa, thank you so much for the positive feedback! Midjourney is new to me, but it’s become something of an obsession. I’m really fascinated with the relation between the prompts and the output that gets generated. I’ve gleaned a few tricks that seem to be helping, although it’s really unpredictable and the machine has generated some images that are hilariously “off”.

It’s strange because really simple ideas seem harder for it to create. So I tried creating a “1970s wind-chime hanging from a backyard” and I get everything but that...In that example, it created a whole wall of wind chimes hanging from the eves of a house. Or it creates a semi-decent wind chime hanging from a house in an overrun jungle. My favorite though is when I tried to create “an elderly Greek woman smoking a clay pipe in the 1930s” and it created a Greek peasant woman in what looked like 1930s downtown Manhattan standing on a street with a clay pipe hovering in the air next to her and billows of smoke pouring from her skin. 😂

I think a lot of people enter their prompts and use commas. That works sometimes, but I’ve found that Midjourney is capable of understanding some rather complex English syntax as long as the adjectives are unambiguously tethered to the nouns. One technique I’ve started using more is hyphenation (on both adjectives and nouns). For example, “red-orange-white morning mist”. But that only works if hyphens are used sparingly. Otherwise, it wigs out and produces something completely ridiculous.

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Holy smokes, this is sooo helpful. Thank you for the detailed info!

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