Several swings and several misses, to be brutally honest.
For quite some time I’d been planning to use World Anvil for character profiles and other background info for my novels Game Over and Uncharted Territory and their sequels. When I found out that you can monetize some of the work you post there, I figured it might be another avenue to bring in a few more dollars. And given my financial situation, it seemed worth a try. For almost a year I was overdrawing my bank account multiple times every month to pay the rent and other bills, and only a couple of months ago started getting enough pay from my job to cover everything without racking up overdraw fees.
That lasted a couple of months, then I ended up back where I was before, so I decided to dive into World Anvil and see if it worked out. Spent yesterday afternoon and evening polishing a few articles I’d written for it and posting them, planning to get a nice, big chunk of lore stuff posted before actually publishing it. Late in the evening I noticed a tab on the dashboard for manuscripts and thought I’d post copies of my books there and see if they took off.
And when I clicked on the tab, I saw that I’d have to be a premium member to get access. I clicked on it to see what the pricing is, and … yikes. For the monthly plan, the tiers are $7, $12, and $34. Looks like the highest tier is for professionals, and since the only times I’ve ever gotten a publisher to accept my work, it was largely due to knowing someone who knew someone, I can’t call myself a professional. So. That leaves the other two tiers, and the middle one seems the best fit.
Going yearly would be a less costly option … but that’s $97 every twelve months, and at the moment the rent and utilities will cost at least twenty bucks more than I actually have, which will lead to me taking an additional $20 hit in the form of an overdraw fee. So … it’ll have to wait a month or two, assuming my situation ever improves. There are several other factors as well, including my car needing an axle replaced, so that’ll have to come first … hopefully before the axle snaps clean in half.
It probably won’t come to that … but I’ve learned to expect the worst.
Anyway. So that was yet another huge disappointment in a long string of them going back well over forty years. But I’m still planning to post lore stuff on World Anvil to (hopefully) drum up a little interest in my novels and offer readers character bios and other background stuff. And in a month or two, maybe, I can try out the monthly rate for a couple of months and see if it’s worth continuing, then — if I can afford it — maybe switch to the yearly subscription. What would be ideal is the lifetime membership, just a single payment and that’s it … but that’s $650.
Nope. Maybe someday, if it’s worth continuing to use World Anvil, and if I have that much money to burn. But absolutely not any time in the foreseeable future.
Still, it looks like a good tool for keeping my own lore straight since stuff slips my mind every now and then. Keeping everything in my head doesn’t work too well these days, so this should be a good resource. I already noticed recently, while reading through Uncharted Territory to get back into the flow of the story, that I’d completely forgotten that no one knew where one of the characters’ homeworld was, and had to make a quick edit for consistency. At least with World Anvil, I’ll have this stuff in one place so I can look it up easily.
I’m waiting until I’ve got a decent-sized repository ready before I publish it there, but I did take a screenshot of part of a character’s bio, including an image of one of her early bodies …
While we’re talking about screenshots and images and whatnot … I’ve been trying off and on for several months to use an AI-art tool to get images that are at least somewhat close to what these characters look like, so I could at least point to them and say, “That’s more or less what this character looks like,” in case I can afford to commission art from a real artist someday. And it hasn’t worked out very well, aside from a few successes with characters from a completely different story. The picture of the body Cora used to have in the screenshot above is a stock image from Pixabay. Most of the results from the AI tool are gods-awful or, if they’re not downright hideous, just not even close to what the character looks like.
A while back I hit on the idea of using video game character creators to get a little closer to what I’m looking for. So far, the one in Fallout 4 has worked best, at least for one particular character. Kolya Mason, one of the main characters of Uncharted Territory, was inspired — as I’ve probably mentioned several times before — by an NPC in Borderlands, Helena Pierce. Specifically, the version of her in the cinematic trailer. That moment when she turned to look directly into the camera and I saw the scars on the left side of her face, it was such a striking image that it stayed in my mind all these years.
Kolya’s scars were caused by a shuttle explosion, whereas Helena’s were from a wild animal attack. Kolya wasn’t close enough to be burned, but a hail of shrapnel did a number on her face and blinded her in the left eye. The character creator in Fallout 4 enabled me to get pretty close to the image I had in mind, and I’d planned to take a screenshot of her with undamaged eyes and another with different eyes, then use Photoshop to copy one eye and paste it over the undamaged one … and I discovered later that one of the screenshots didn’t save, so I was left with one shot of her with two odd-looking eyes.
Aside from the eyes, I preferred her overall look here. The shape of her face, her nose, her mouth … and she appears to have a very slight smirk, which fits the character pretty well. The faded-blue eyes were as close as I could get to the white, fogged-over eye she actually has, and the look is quite striking, I think. As I mentioned in a previous entry here, she’ll be getting a pair of cybernetic eyes that can sport a wide range of color schemes, a bit like a Razer keyboard. So this might be a look she tries on occasionally, when she’s in the mood to mess with the people around her.
Last night I made another attempt and this time I managed to get the screenshots I needed. I alternated back and forth between the faded-foggy eyes and a dark blue set, managed to capture screenshots of each with her head at the same angle — which took some doing because the characters are almost constantly turning their heads very slightly when you’re sculpting their faces. Then I opened both shots in my really old copy of Photoshop, copied the eye in one image and pasted it over the other. I expected it to be a pain in the ass, but then I realized all I had to do was line up the scars and the eye would be positioned perfectly.
So here’s how it turned out. I tweaked the hairstyle a bit, having found two that are very similar, and added one or two more scars. The eyes are almost perfect, but as I said above, I prefer the overall look of the previous face. I kept trying, but somehow I just couldn’t get the nose and mouth to look like it did before. I’m also not sure about the hair color. I figured Kolya might go for a brighter color to try to distract people from the scars, but now that I’m looking at both pictures side by side, I’m kind of leaning back toward the more natural shade of brown.
Also, she looks way too serious in the newer image. One of the things I decided early on, while coming up with the character, was that she’d be upbeat and have a healthy sense of humor, at least most of the time. I figured making her dour or angry all the time might be too obvious a direction … and I just like to play with contrasts, anyway. The accident happened almost a decade prior, so that should be enough time for her to learn to live with it, though there are still occasions when someone makes a rude comment or something else reminds her of the explosion and it gets under her skin.
The trauma is still very much a part of her, too. I can’t imagine an injury like that would be something anyone could just get over, no matter how many years have passed. She’s gotten to the point where she’s able to function normally and keep it out of her mind most of the time, but she still has occasional nightmares and a tendency to start panicking if something blows up near her or she’s too close to an uncontrolled fire.
Maybe tonight or tomorrow I’ll fire up Fallout 4 again and give it one more try. Maybe third time’s the charm … but I’ll probably find some other way to screw it up.
Another thing I thought I’d try, at least for good images of stars and planets to use for articles on World Anvil, is Space Engine. One of the cool things about it is that it uses real stars, planets, and whatnot, and also procedurally-generates other celestial objects. I figured I could at least use it for inspiration for some of the worlds in the setting, especially once the characters venture into the far side of the galaxy, where it’s hard to detect stars due to gas and dust and the galactic core getting in the way. At least generated stars and planets can provide cool screenshots and help me keep the expedition’s path straight in my head.
When Space Engine actually generates objects, that is. I messed around with it a little this afternoon and several of the stars I “visited” didn’t have any planets, even though I’ve already mentioned those locations in both Game Over and Uncharted Territory as the homeworlds of several alien species. For instance, the oldest civilization in the setting is the mulathi, who originated on a planet orbiting Zeta Orionis, aka Alnitak. I went there in Space Engine and … found no planets or even asteroids. What I’ll have to do eventually, at least for a cool image to use as their home planet — which they call Izanakha — is to grab a screenshot of some other planet and just say, “Okay, this is what their world looks like.”
I got a bit luckier with one of the mulathi’s biggest colonies, Tevsa, which is located in the Alpha Ceti (aka Menkar) system. If that sounds kinda-sorta familiar, it’s the stellar system Khan was sent to in the TOS Star Trek episode, “Space Seed.” Except the script called it Ceti Alpha for some reason. Maybe the writer just thought it sounded better. I dunno. But the actual Bayer designation is Alpha Ceti. Probably easier to just call it Menkar, but I’ve always thought that Bayer designations just sound really cool.
This time Space Engine generated seven planets and an assload of moons and asteroids. Most of the planets were terrestrial but scorching hot and didn’t have an atmosphere we could breathe — or any atmosphere at all, in some cases. I took some screenshots in case I need them for anything later.
I did find one planet in the system that at least looks habitable. The fifth planet from Menkar has a purple color, which could be explained by the plant life there absorbing other colors and reflecting purple … though I’d have to research Menkar and find out if its particular spectrum would work for that.
The climate, gravity, and other info generated by Space Engine rules it out for habitation by humans or mulathi or anyone else. Way too hot and the gravity would flatten us. But I figure I’ll just tweak the details to make it habitable.
I looked at another stellar system where a lot of the action in Uncharted Territory takes place, Gamma Orionis/Bellatrix … and again, the software didn’t generate any planets. Same with Alpha Ophiuchi/Rasalhague, where the characters are headed next to get some less-than-legal modifications to their ship — and, in Kolya’s case, cybernetic eyes and maybe a few other mods. And yet again with Lambda Scorpii, or Shaula, where the crew is going next to meet up with the rest of the expedition — also where the discovery that led to the expedition was discovered with a gravitational-lens telescope. For each of these, I’ll have to swipe some planet images from somewhere else within Space Engine.
Oh yeah, and for Alpha Scorpii, aka Antares, the home system of another alien species, the mekharans. Their home planet of Duthora orbits that star, but Space Engine didn’t generate any planets there. So, once again, I’ll just have to wing it.
But at least it resulted in some cool images …
Anyway. I was planning to go into a few of the ideas I have for the expedition once it’s underway … but it’s past dinner time so I need to whip up another bowl of ramen to get me through until morning. It’d probably end up being long enough for a whole other entry, anyway, so I’ll save it for another time …
Fred T. Kerns, Sci-fi Writer 