Category: Writing

The Princess Who Ate Nothing But Potatoes

I asked ChatGPT to generate a story for me to ascertain the quality of the product. I took inspiration from this picture I generated from open.ai’s SDXL. It’s not quite a literal reading of the prompt I used, which was “a Medieval princess eating a heart-shaped potato.” But it’s unusual enough to serve my purpose. …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 3/6/24: Danish Dog Names

For a change let’s look at dog names rather than people names. Humans love their dogs, and it helps in training if the dog has a name that’s short and easy to say. Tucker, these days, is a popular name, as is Raven, Zelda, and Zeus. Some names don’t mean anything but they sound cute, …

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The Romance Writers Association endorses the use of ChatGPT for writing… or not.

I recently became aware of how far the use of ChatGPT as a writer’s aid has come. NOT the use of it to write a whole book without human aid, because that is very far from the technology that’s available now. But this current trend towards it has a lot of fiction writers upset.

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 2/21/24: Classical Greek Names (Male)

Authentic-sounding (NOT actually authentic, I want to make clear if you’re writing fact-based historical fiction) Greek names for men are just as easy to generate as those for women. And to accompany them, here’s a painting of the most manly man in Greek myth of all — Heracles! He’s pictured in his struggle against a …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 2/14/24: Love Magic

Since it’s Valentine’s day, I thought I’d do a list of spells and magical items related to love, or its lack. Caution, a few of these are NSFW! The fellow above is from Starry AI’s “pinup” art filter. The prompt was a variation of “bearded wizard with arms raised, a cloud of valentine candy hearts, …

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The Romantasy Explosion

Since we’re nearing Valentine’s Day, let’s talk about… Romantasy. As implied by the name it’s a mashup of Romance + Fantasy, a subgenre exemplified, perhaps platonically, by Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series, whose eponymously named first book came out in 2015. Marketed as YA, the fantasy novel was about a …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 2/7/24: Classical Greek Names (Female)

I covered Greek female names before on this site,  in this post about female centaurs. For that I drew on actual, lesser-known names from the myths of Ancient Greece. But since I had researched so much for that, how difficult would be to generate some in a completely random way? So, you need a Greek …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 1/31/24: Shades of Purple

Though the color purple been democratized these days –- almost every mass-produced clothing item and stuffed toy is available in some shade of it –- it was once very rare and restricted to royalty. This was because its dye depended on a rare, arcane ingredient: the slimy secretions of the murex sea snail. For centuries, …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 1/17/24: Hawaiian Cocktails (ChatGPT)

On my own, I’ve done a pretty good job of generating imaginary cocktails, including those related to Christmas and Narnia. Since ChatGPT has advanced to the everyman level, why not see what it can do? I used OpenAI’s version, which is free with registration, and the basic prompt was “Give me a list of imaginary …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 1/10/24: Greek Islands

There are over 6,000 islands in the nation of present day Greece, and to the ancient Greeks they must have seemed many times this number. Their entire world was made of islands, and the sea. From myth we know know the prominent ones, like Lesbos, Naxos, Aenea (home of Circe), Ogygia (home of Calypso), Delos, …

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