As weekly updates go, this one might be lean. Not lean like last week, but lean as in fewer words. For a change. Maybe. New Series Progress. Progress continues, though perhaps not the pace I would like. I have a 4+ page Treatment for the first novel, 1-page synopses of the other three. I’m putting the main character with a group of friends, so I have their characters all roughed out for the series, as well as the characters for the first book. However, I would like to spend more time developing their relationships. I would be pleased if I could start on the first scene this week. I also mocked up covers for all five. Maybe I will keep them, or hire a cover artist. I’m rather fond of the artist I have. We shall see. Bridging tech and fiction, I moved my tools off of my website to a GitHub site. The Move from Apple. In March, I said I was going to go Apple-free for a month. Six weeks later, where am I on the journey? Well, last week I had a Frameworkcomputer delivered. Not particularly cheaper than the XPS was, but it boasts promise of modularity and upgradeability that I’ve not seen in a laptop yet. The question is whether a laptop would survive me long enough to need its guts swapped out. I upgraded to a 32” 4k monitor since I’m getting older. I still drive an iPad, but I see a Galaxy in my future. Running Windows with WSL for Linux gave me everything I used Apple for. All the applications I relied on were not in Apple’s walled garden. I gave my wife...

I hope this update finds you well. The Eclipse of 2024 nearly brought an end to all mankind. This was my third eclipse, though there might have been a fourth that I don’t remember. I remember the 1984 eclipse in part because it happened around the time of my Papaw’s death. The last one was just a few years ago when we were moving between homes. What have I been up to? A new series idea. The reason I mentioned a series notebook last week was because I started tinkering with a dark fantasy setting. Since there aren’t different grades of dark fantasy, and since this series might not be dark enough, I’m thinking it will be more milk chocolate fantasy (as opposed to dark chocolate). There, I’ve made it a thing. Okay, maybe I should have thought about a flatter image. But if you’re curious how I organize my thoughts, that’s as good a graphic as I can share. Don’t let the length of it fool you, there are a lot of blanks in the outline. But sections like 22.04 and 22.08 are well developed. 21.01-03 are summaries, with 21.03 (mis-identified and obfuscated) being the placeholder for a four-book outline. [notebook-2024-04-09.png] I spent a lot of time this past week using ChatGPT and Claude AI with research. I could spend my days trolling through Wikipedia, which is its own time suck. Or, I could ask AI to give me a summary in a format that was useful to worldbuilding. Having once tinkered with developing a tabletop role-playing game, I incorporated the magic system. I used AI to strip away the game mechanics and help me think out implications of...