Monstrous Mythology ebook now available

I've finally published Monstrous Mythology as an ebook, available to purchase from Amazon or read if you have Kindle Unlimited.

The software I usually use to create books, Vellum couldn't handle the amount of links inside my book and slowed to a crawl. I use an M1 Mac so I haven't got the slowest computer out there but every mouse click or key press took a couple of seconds to register. It's great for editing a book with no links but once they start to add up, everything slows to a halt.

So I decided to see if I could edit it in Sigil and was pleasantly surprised. Because I was just editing the underlying HTML files and the software wasn't trying to do any fancy formatting tricks, I was able to put a basic ebook together in a relatively short time. Granted it's as basic as they come with each section on a separate page and extremely basic formatting but the book is still playable.

If you are creating your own adventure gamebook, it is worth experimenting with the different software available to see what works best for you. For the time being this works for me.

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Making book covers with Stable Diffusion

I made a short video explaining how to use Stable Diffusion to create ebook and print covers I used Krita to edit the photos but pretty much any image editor would do, you just need to be able to make selections and erase. Here are the steps - Step One Go to https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion or https://stablediffusionweb.com/#demo and enter a prompt for the image you want. For this tutorial, I wanted a space scene so used the following prompts to create four separate images that I would edit together. "Lunar lander in space realistic" "Astronaut tabletop miniatures realistic" "Star field with galaxy realistic" (this gave me two images with prints hanging in a gallery, so maybe try different words) "Realistic lunar base with stars in background" Use the guidance scale at the bottom (if available) to tweak the settings. I normally try to keep it between one and nine but experiment and see what you come up with. After anyt

Just a quick update

Two more stages finished on my current gamebook. The Lake - An opportunity to earn some money and go for a little swim - if you dare. The Mountains - Two deadly adversaries. Will you prevail? Just two more to go!

Using Stable Diffusion to create simple illustrations for print

I made a short video explaining how to use Stable Diffusion to create illustrations for print books. I used Krita to edit the photos but pretty much any image editor would do, you just need to be able to make selections and erase. Here are the steps - Step One Go to https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion or https://stablediffusionweb.com/#demo and enter a prompt for the image you want. For this tutorial, I put "monsters black and white hand drawn illustrations". Use the guidance scale at the bottom (if available) to tweak the settings. I normally try to keep it between one and nine but experiment and see what you come up with. After anything between 30 seconds and a minute, you should get your generated pictures. If you don't get anything you like, keep trying! Add more keywords and move the guidance scale until you get something you are happy with. When you are done just right click or hold the image to download it. It gave me a image filled with h

Martyn Cruise, Author

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