Writing The Enchanted Ones

Uploaded a video about writing The Enchanted Ones

The basic concept of this story came together a long time ago but it wasn't until other elements fell into place that I felt I was ready to write it.

I've always been interested in werewolves and shapeshifters but the two things which formed the central idea were, what if an animal turned into a human every night? and what if that animal was a unicorn.

The pieces slowly started to fall into place like a white witch being cursed to age quickly unless she was in close proximity to a unicorn and the enchantment of the unicorn so that it became human in the evenings, allowing them to spend time together.

I needed a protagonist so created a back story with a wicked sister who starts the whole plot rolling and returns to cause mischief.

I normally get ideas about horror and sci-fi so it was nice to be able to explore something completely different from that, which I hope to able to do again.

Until next time.

Comments

Writing How to write an Adventure Gamebook

Uploaded a video about writing 'How to write an adventure gamebook'. Buoyed with confidence after finishing Monstrous Manor, I decided to try to create a useful guide to writing an adventure gamebook. I was and still am clearly no expert in the field but I felt I could gather together lots of useful information into one place to give a useful overview of the process from initial gestation to published book. I had also developed a short lived but rabid interest in AI and wanted to explore its possibilities. To that end, I used Dreamstudio and other AI image generators to create characters and backgrounds for the cover and internal decoration. I experimented with ChatGPT to try to create a gamebook which I quickly discovered was way beyond its capabilities. Nonetheless I expanded some of the passages it produced to create a small gamebook adventure which I included both to illustrate potential AI capabilities and as a bit of fun for the reader. Overall I think I managed to give ...

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...

Martyn Cruise, Author

Search This Blog