What happens when the world’s most powerful magus falls in love?
Ainmire has long since lost his connection with his humanity, existing as more of a shadow that looms over the Order of the Magi, focused more on doing what was necessary rather than on what he wanted. However, after the Order gave the orders for the assassination of the Red Magus, Ainmire has a chance encounter with the Red Magus’s beautiful and vivacious daughter, Lily … and changes his mind. He refuses to follow through with the assassination, and instead pursues Lily with the intent of marriage, rediscovering the human side of himself along the way.
It doesn’t matter how many enemies he makes with his change of goals, because no one comes even close to matching his ability to wield magic. After all, who’s going to stop him?
Base image generated with Stable Diffusion, and everything else added using Canva.
Redesigning the covers for my novels.
Still feeling rather insecure about the process, particularly since I’m not as visually motivated as everyone else, so I don’t really know what it is about covers that scream, “Buy me now!” (Same way that I don’t really understand why arranging food in a fancy way makes people think it tastes better). But I’m perfectly aware that covers are what initially hook people into cracking open a book, so I’m doing my best to learn.
One of the nice things about being a writer is that I can step outside of myself and ask, “How would a confident character handle this situation?”
Then I give myself guidelines to follow, and do my best to emulate how my imaginary character would be navigating my real life.
For example, I’ve given myself the very strict rule of no rebound dating. At first I felt done with relationships altogether, so it wasn’t really that big of an issue … but as time wears on, I find myself missing simple things like hand holding more and more. But since the last thing that I want to do is drive off a perfectly good partner with unresolved emotional baggage (or pick a bad one because of said baggage), I’m holding fast to my rule. This time is for rebuilding myself, and that’s what I’m going to do! Even if it leaves me feeling lonely.
Back during the summer, I told my domestic violence class that I was going out of my way to do one fun activity a week, outside of the daily grind and responsibilities, to remind myself that life still had a lot of enjoyable and beautiful things to offer. And I meant it. I was — and still am — doing my best to engage in some small activity every week, like hiking and baking.
But here’s the dark side to trying to emulate a fictional character: I felt like an impostor after saying that.
Despite the fact that my actions were true to my words, inside I didn’t feel like I was having all that much fun. Inside, I had days where I kinda wanted to step in front of a moving train. But I didn’t confess that to anyone, because I didn’t want anyone to stress and worry over me. I was already suffering from enough guilt over the events that landed me in a domestic violence class in the first place, and I didn’t want to add to it. I didn’t want it to turn into a Big Deal. So instead, I took my kids to the zoo so that they could have something exciting.
Enough time has passed now that the painful emotions are settling down, but the habits are still here. Still eating ice cream every Sunday, and going on long walks by the river. Still taking the kids to the park, and still looking for shapes in the clouds. Still watching the sunset.
My heart isn’t back yet to where it used to be. I’m still grieving the loss of the life I thought that I would have, and still trying to wrap my mind around what my future is going to be like. But it’s okay to feel a little bit like an impostor because my insides aren’t matching up to my outsides, because as long as I keep doing my best I’m sure that they’ll synchronize once again. One day I’ll see rainbows and feel the beauty with my entire soul.
I got him primarily for emotional support, since I had sunk into the despair of, “I can’t do anything right,” but couldn’t shake the idea that it would be good for me to get a dog, so that I could learn assertiveness and have a constant companion. So, when I came across *the puppy* that felt right for me, I took the gamble.
I affectionately refer to him as my “spaniel mutt,” because deep down inside I don’t really understand why everything has to have some cutesy mixed name, like “spadorkadoodle.” I guess I’m still fundamentally a cat person.
First, I did not anticipate the puppy biting being as big of a challenge as it is. All of those online videos make it look so easy to correct, but instead my puppy would get more riled up whenever I tried to use those tactics and bite even more, go figure. To make it more fun, there was a wide range of advice on the topic, ranging from, “Dogs need to learn the difference between soft biting and hard biting somehow,” to, “Any amount of teeth is bad bad bad.” So, we keep toys scattered through the house for some quick re-direction, and he bites way less than he used to, so he’s probably outgrowing it? I know that people can get quite passionate about dog training, so maybe I’m opening myself up to criticism here, har har. Be nice to me, I’m going through a hard time.
Potty training, on the other hand, was much easier than I expected. Maybe because, as a mom, I’m already used to directing small creatures to go pee, and it’s second nature to me now.
The biggest surprise about owning a dog is the social aspect.
I’m not referring to the fact that dogs are pack animals, but rather how much of an ice-breaker they are for socializing with strangers. It turns out that people with dogs are much more likely to stop and chitchat when you also have a dog.
I’m going to take a moment here for a bit of a soap-box rant: It seems like I’ve spent a long time surrounded by general negative attitudes towards strangers, with people complaining about randos smiling and saying “hello,” just because they happen to pass nearby, but I always liked it — I’m the weirdo who enjoys feeling like I exist in society, I guess. As I’ve been reevaluating my life, it’s occurred to me that maybe socializing with strangers isn’t such a faux pas, and that all of those Negative Nellies are the ones with the problem, not me. I can smile and say hello to whoever I want to, thank-you-very-much! In the culture I grew up in, we referred to such things as, “Brightening someone’s day,” and that’s how I’m going to see it until the day I die.
Anyway, obviously not everyone with a dog wants to stop and chat, but generally speaking the more outgoing the dog is, the more outgoing the owner is, and people really love talking about their dogs. It makes it easy to establish those brief connections.
The thing is, when everything in your life is unexpectedly turned upside down, it’s the small things that provide the best anchor points to keep yourself grounded. Impromptu conversations help provide a sense of normalcy and acceptance, even when it feels like everything has gone to pieces. They aren’t that magic elixir that makes the emotional pain stop hurting, but they still help.
I’m not some guru who has it all figured out. I can’t tell you any steps to make life instantly easier, since all I know how to do is drag myself out of bed even when I don’t want to. Sometimes, all it takes is getting up to let the dog outside to do his business, and from there the rest of the day will fall into place.
I want to add that my children thoroughly love having a dog, and still often talk about how awesome it is. They spend lots of time playing fetch and tug-o-war, and enjoy helping with the puppy’s training.
A divorce was a huge blow to my philosophical foundation.
For my entire life, I was unapologetically a believer in Love. After all, I had Venus in Pisces in my astrological chart, so there was no chance that I wouldn’t go through life full of whimsy and romance. If you do your best to be good to someone, then they’ll be good to you in return, right? Cue happily ever after?
Except … no.
Maybe the world isn’t full of people who are trying to do their best. Maybe there are too many personality disorders who are all too willing to exploit others. Maybe selfish transactional-ism is the law of the land, and you should never believe anyone who claims otherwise.
And maybe there is no such thing as partners for life anymore. Maybe society is just too broken.
Throughout the entire process, I stated repeatedly that I didn’t want a divorce and that I opposed the idea, but he had done something back in April (that I haven’t the guts to talk about) that resulted in an enormous amount of social pressure on me to go through with it. From complete strangers, to boot. And given that he was solid in his decision to dump me, there wasn’t anything to fight for. Everyone around me said that it was for the best.
Worldview be damned.
But then, what do I believe in now?
One of my biggest fears is to end up as a bitter old woman, that people get together and blow off steam about over coffee because I’m that difficult to put up with. So eventually I have to find a new purpose — that is my end goal here.
And it dawned on me that my philosophical foundation was bigger than I had previously realized.
I’m still a mother, still doing my best day after day to love and support my children, homeschooling them, sharing in their interests, and cleaning up after them — my first duty is to them and their well-being.
I still have an image of the sort of person I want to be, full of life and optimism, wise yet forever untainted by the hardships of life.
Maybe my happily ever after doesn’t include a male partner, but I’m not lonely. I still have people to love, and who love me in return. I can still have an open heart.
Life doesn’t run a clear course It flows through from within It’s supposed to take you places and leave markings on your skin
I’m still pretty scared to talk about specifics, so suffice to say that I had a plethora of brand new experiences, met a variety of people, and stepped well outside of my comfort zone in ways that I never would have imagined.
Oh, and I’m also now divorced.
Turns out that you can spend years working your butt off to love and care for your soulmate, only to have it turn out that you’re the wrong “context” for them and they don’t want to be with you anymore. Oh, and they also loathe the way you state the obvious. And the way you associate concepts together. And, and, and …
Maybe one day my heart will stop hemorrhaging.
You know all those statistics that claim that women fare better emotionally after divorces? Not true in my case. Aside from the soul-crushing devastation, there’s the intense feelings of betrayal and rejection, as well as feeling like a defective failure at life. Did this happen because I’m too fat? I dunno. Better stop eating just in case.
Only I know I’m not fat. It’s the stress and pain triggering body dysmorphia — my subconscious attempt to take control of something that’s completely out of my control. Even if I weighed only 90lbs and had the flattest abs in the world, I’d still be discarded. I’m still “that” woman.
So I’ve spent hours and hours crying until I was too dehydrated and exhausted to keep crying. I’ve had numerous meltdowns, and moments when it felt like I didn’t have the strength to keep living. Life doesn’t come with a pause button that lets you get your feet back underneath you, it just keeps plowing ahead no matter what’s going on, and getting dragged along leaves you feeling even more banged up.
Then one day I woke up and I felt like eating again. So it is true that time does eventually heal some wounds.
Though I am now dirt-eating poor.
I looked into getting a job or attending an online community college, but those options didn’t feel remotely right for me. You know how it is when everything you built up over the years gets abruptly yanked out from underneath you, you feel trapped in an aimless free fall where absolutely nothing could possibly get worse than it already is, and you say to yourself, “Well, I did always want to earn a living as a writer.”
That’s what I’m going to do.
I’m going to earn a living as a writer. It’s not just about getting by, but finding a new purpose in life — a reason for everything, and a means to express the hurt.
When I feel sad, I can research and implement marketing tactics to keep myself distracted (especially now that I know that I can survive far outside of my comfort zone). I can write about how much I hate men in my novels (facetious exaggeration, don’t take that seriously). I can start churning out as much fiction as I can possibly write, and I will build a new life for myself that can’t be unraveled so easily. And I will do it all while still cooking delicious dinners and homeschooling my children, because I can be that awesome no matter how hard it is. Sleep is overrated anyway.
I’ve spent the last few months telling myself over and over, “If you want things to be different, then you have to do something different.”
And I’m starting to feel ready to do something different.
April ended up turning my life completely upside down. I keep asking myself, “Do I want to talk about it publicly?” and the answer is no. Not really. Maybe in the future, but not right now.
So, I’ve been keeping myself busy with deep cleaning my house. I also have plenty of responsibilities to get through and appointments to keep. Those cupboard doors aren’t going to scrub themselves!
However, I do feel that I have been absent for long enough, especially with how bad I’ve been at blogging for the last … two years. It’s time for me to get back to the things that I enjoy, even if I don’t feel like I have all that much to say yet.
But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have plenty of AI art to share! As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Or maybe pictures are just soothing to look at.
Lyra found herself looking eagerly for Master Malachi every time the chime to the door rang, but as the afternoon dragged on, the Runemaster never appeared. There was the usual flurry of women full of the usual flurry of gossip, and Lyra felt like she spent half the day on the floor carefully ensuring that all the skirt hems were pinned to the correct length, doing her best to focus on her job and dismiss the cloak from her mind.
She was proud of her work. She had made sure that her stitches were strong and subtle, and a wave of joy had cascaded through her when she had spread out the cloak after she had finished. The trim accented the velveteen fabric beautifully, and it looked like a garment fit for a king. However, she had also been quick to dismiss the thought as hubris, since someone of her status had no business serving the royal court, and she couldn’t let herself get too egotistical.
The hours dragged by, and Malachi never appeared to see what she had done – the disappointment was almost unbearable. As Lyra worked on closing up the dressmaker’s shop, an idea came to her and she pulled out a sheet of brown paper, then carefully folded up the cloak with tissue paper and wrapped it up in a parcel, which she tied shut with twine. She would drop it off at the Taylors where Malachi was lodging, she told herself, so she could mark it as delivered and get the weight of it off of her mind.
After locking the door, Lyra set off, trying very hard not to think. She was torn between wanting to imagine Malachi’s reaction when he opened the paper and examined her sewing, and feeling utterly terrified that he would hate it. Ultimately she resolved that she would leave the package with Mrs. Taylor and avoid Malachi altogether.
It wasn’t a far walk, but as she dragged through each step, she was anxious that she would accidentally bump into the rune master, either coming or going from his lodgings, but he was nowhere in sight. She reached the Taylors and knocked on the door.
“Hello, good evening,” Lyra said pleasantly when Mrs. Taylor opened the door, smiling but doing her best to not come across as eager. “I have a delivery for Master Malachi.”
“He’s not in right now,” Mrs Taylor replied, wiping her hands on her apron. Lyra could smell onion on the older woman, and she wondered what it was that she was preparing for dinner. Would Malachi be eating it, or had he made arrangements to dine elsewhere? A little awkwardly, she held out the parcel and chirped with excessive cheer,
“It’s from Mrs. Elwood. Could you give it to him?”
“Yes, I’ll put it in his room for him. Have a good evening.” Mrs. Taylor took the package out of Lyra’s hands, then disappeared inside as Lyra echoed “good evening.” Relieved, she began walking home, though her feet were even heavier than before.
That had gone exactly as she had wanted it to. The cloak was returned to its owner, and Master Malachi was not around to make her feel embarrassed or self conscious … so why did she feel so disappointed?
The big criticism of AI art is that by plugging in an artist name, it can quickly copy their style. However, AI art has tons of benefits — as a writer, for example, I enjoy being able to generate pictures of characters and scenes that I can use to supplement my descriptive writing; this is especially useful for me, because I have aphantasia and can’t conjure up mental images.
Truth is, as Stable Diffusion continues to be refined, it is actually becoming more of a burden to use artist names, since they cause it to throw in random artifacts like signatures that are extremely difficult to get rid of. Plus, the artist community is pretty pissed about it.
So, for the sake of ethical AI use, I quit using artist names.
To cover our bases, my standard negative prompt is: signature, text, fonts, words, watermark, badly drawn, bad composition, boring, collage, surreal, nonsensical, incoherent, ugly, disfigured, deformed, beginner, amateur, asymmetrical, low contrast,
I customize this as necessary for the specific images that I create.
I also include standard at the end of the positive prompt: professional quality, well drawn, attractive
So, let’s see what we can do with the prompt, “Cherry blossom”. Same seed and other settings.
As you can see, specifying medium alone makes a huge difference in the type of images that are generated — no artist names necessary.
As I’ve said before, AI art appeals to me because I think so strongly in words. I enjoy the process of crafting out prompts and put a lot of thought into writing them, and I hope that one day AI art is viewed as a legitimate form of creative expression — alongside traditional and other digital mediums.
I’ve referenced this before, but the reason I was all but absent for most of 2023 was because there was a lot going on. I got my kids started on a new online school program, and while we’ve been very happy with it, we still had to adjust and figure out what the heck we were doing. It’s taken up an enormous amount of mental energy.
There was also a big 5000-mile road trip across the US with all of our kids. It went pretty well for the most part, with only one heart-stopping moment of our van dying at a gas station near the SC/NC border — but it turned out that the battery terminal had wiggled lose, so it was a quick and easy fix. Phew.
And my 16-year-old cat died. Two days afterwards I came down with one of the worst sinus infections that I’ve ever had in my entire life, and my sinuses still aren’t 100% recovered from it.
The cherry on top was that with everything going on, I forgot to hydrate adequately and got a small kidney stone. Such adventures!
Anyway, that’s enough of that. I could say a lot more, but I don’t want to sound all complain-y and negative. Let’s just say that if one of my future novels includes a wasp attack, it is 100% based on real life.
On the brighter side, I have put in a lot of effort to expand my culinary experiences, and have even tried my hand at sous vide!
I suppose that one of the perks about being a writer is that I tend to view the events of my life with a sort of detached amusement after all is said and done. Don’t get me wrong, I struggle through like any other person would, but eventually it comes to an end and I think to myself, “I could put that in a story.”
Unfortunately, I seem to be quite rusty with creating graphics for my blog. Like, wow, I used to do this all the time, and now it’s a little weird and confusing. Heck, I even looked at Canva to see if I could simplify the process (I currently use GIMP), but that site wanted me to pay to use anything remotely appealing, and I’m WAY too cheap for that. I’ll stick with open source, thank-you-very-much!
With so much of my energy going into my kids’ online school, I’m not anticipating being able to update more than once a week. However, I will announce that I currently have 25,000 words written for a new novel, so pretty soon here I’ll start posting that. You know, when I get my graphics figured out, lol.
Always let something petty stop you from following through! It’s called procrastination. 🤣
Phew, the long nightmare of 2023 is finally over! Bring on the nightmare of 2024!
Joking aside, I have made it my goal to get back into regular blogging this year, since even just one post a week is better than nothing. Blogging is something that I like to do to organize my thoughts, and it sure is helpful to have some organization.
I can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but I’m putting a temporary pause on writing The Scions. After all of the events of 2023, that sail no longer has wind behind it, metaphorically speaking. My heart isn’t in it anymore. So I’ll finish it later, when the timing is better.
I’ve begun a new writing project that heavily uses AI as part of the process. Not only am I using Stable Diffusion to generate character portraits and concept art, I’m also using language model AI to help with the writing itself. I feel obligated to point out that AI is not to the point of being able to spit out a coherent novel, so while the process is different, it’s still very time consuming.
Essentially, my visual imagination is very weak, which makes describing visual things very difficult for me. AI has been enormously helpful in bolstering this weakness for me, so that I can focus more on writing how everything feels instead. To put it as a simile, it’s like switching from using a needle and thread to using a sewing machine.
I’m looking forward to sharing this new project with you.
By Autumn Rain 