Imagine a world without art
Recently, I spent ten weeks editing my Science Fiction series, Memoirs of the Grey Ranger. Memoirs is a six-volume series I began writing in the 1980s; I never anticipated that I would still be writing about those people and places in 2024. Because the series has lasted so long, many details in the earlier stories needed to be better coordinated with facts or events or people in later stories, and much of the science and technology required updates. Imagine it! When I began the stories, we didn’t yet have cell phones, or as they were referred to in Star Trek, handheld communicators. We had never heard of dark matter, or dark plasma. I had some work to do to make this series shine for a 
contemporary reading audience.
I intended to spend four weeks in January correcting, editing, formatting, updating, working on spelling and grammar, and doing some minor rewriting in the six existing volumes, but as it turned out, that wasn’t enough. The first time through, I closely reread all 250,000 words of the six volumes, and made changes to language, science, details, word flow, spelling, formatting, and even storyline. But it wasn’t good enough. I did enough, I could have just left it at that stage, and called it done, but I am too meticulous for that kind of a job. Why do something at all if you’re not going to be thorough and do it right? Furthermore, why do all that work on books that have been published already?
One reason to not half-ass the job is that I am a perfectionist. Additionally, this is my legacy, these stories, and books are what I will leave behind when I’m gone, for my children, and grandchildren, and their descendants. I want what I have written to be the best it can be. No one else is going to do it, especially not for free.
Why do I care right now? I am seventy-three, and since it’s only logical that my time left on this earth is short, I want to leave art that my family can be proud of. And I want the readers to get the best story I can give them, even long after I am not around to tell it. We often spoke in writing classes about “when a work is finished.” Everyone agrees that as long as the writer is alive, nothing is finished—it’s just a draft. There are many people who subscribe to the idea that even after the creator is gone, a creative work is never done. I am not in that camp. Writing is done when the writer dies. Art begins and ends with the artist. The original piece, anyway. Would it be okay to edit a painting, the Mona Lisa perhaps? No. Nor does Shakespeare need to be rewritten. Off-shoots of those creations can be interesting, and even inspiring, but the original work is done when the artist leaves us.
When I began this writing and editing work in January of 2024, the six books were not in a hardbound version, only soft cover. Since Kindle Direct now offers hardbound options, I decided while I was at this project, I would also create hardbound editions of each of the six stories. Thus, each time I worked on a volume, it was times two, since hardbound is a different ISBN number and has different formatting. Additionally, I made the decision to put black and white illustrations in the hardbound versions, so it was impossible to edit the softcover manuscript, and just copy and paste the stories to the hardbound manuscript. I had to edit each book, page by page, since each volume had a different formatting and page numbers upon going from softcover to hardcover.
Once I decided I had completed the editing, I submitted the updated MS to KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) and request a proof copy of each approved volume. When those proofs arrived four weeks later, I re-read all 250,000 words again, times two, and made corrections and more changes. Then I submitted all 12 volumes again, and asked again for proof copies.
During this second edit period, I recreated the interior illustrations. The first time I added illustrations into the hardbound versions, I went out to the free internet image sites, and grabbed illustrations that seemed to be compatible enough with the stories that I thought they would work. They were all sorts of sizes, and of various styles. When the first set of hardbound proofs arrived six weeks later, many of those illustrations were not a high enough resolution to print well, or even be recognizable. At that point, I decided to make my own illustrations, with help from an AI program.
I chose Playground, because many of the better images I previously found were playground images, and it is a Microsoft program, and I am a Microsoft user. I tried the free version. It worked, sort of, but limited me on how cooperative the resulting images were and how many images I could generate in one twenty-four-hour period. It took a lot of images to get the single illustration I was aiming for, and have it be one that wasn’t weirdly surrealistic, with extra hands, or disconnected heads lurking in a corner, or under someone’s foot. In the end, I paid for a year of Playground, and spent another four weeks learning to use it to create and re-create every image in the six hardbound volumes, as well as the six hardbound covers. It turned out to be about sixty finished images.
When you hear artists talk about AI, where do you weigh in?
At first, I was very negative about using AI. Once I used the program, I realized it is neither automatic, nor self-actuating. Mind you, I am the daughter of two artists, and I have a minor in Fine Art, which means I am not completely without artistic talent. I just happen to loathe painting. My art genre of choice was and remains photography. I could spend hours in the dark room developing photos, but I do not have the time nor patience to create sixty black and white illustrations for those books, all by myself with—cosmos forbid—paints. So, AI was the answer.
However, in order to collaborate with Playground AI, I had to have a vision of what I wanted and be able to clearly explain that vision in language to the AI—language that the program understood. Now remember, I’m a fiction writer and poet, not a programmer. The AI uses English, but not the sort of English I employ to write a story. It took me weeks to learn the language of AI cooperation. Then, I had to have endless patience to keep creating images over and over and over again until I got even close to what I wanted. It literally took me ten to twelve hours a day, for more than a month, to finish six hardbound books and their covers to my satisfaction.
The books are gorgeous now. The stories are brighter and more polished than before I spent hours updating science and rewriting the lyrical passages. It excites me, how beautiful they are.
What do you think? I would love your feedback. Your reviews on Amazon would be even better.
Once I was finished with the Memoirs of the Grey Ranger, I went back to my silver bench to work on the silver and copper creations I’d begun a year ago. Two months after the book project wrapped up, I made a couple break throughs on my soldering techniques, and applied the tricks to making the set of four bracelets that I posted on Facebook last week. It took me two years of work to get to that point. I was pretty excited to arrive at any place I wasn’t completely frustrated by a bezel. I cursed a lot over bezels.
Afterwards, a few local people I’ve known for a while, contacted me to express interest in buying a bracelet. This is a great thing, since I have spent hundreds of hours working on technique and designs, and many, many thousands of dollars buying tools and supplies; I am at the point now, if I don’t sell something, I won’t be buying anymore silver supplies or tools. Or making very many more bracelets, which would be a shame, because I have had a breakthrough on my metal techniques, and want to keep going.
This brings me around to maybe the point of this entire discussion. Audience. What kind of an audience are you, my friends? Are you just sort of distantly watching while I stumble through life, getting old, which is a distant concept until you try it, trying not to be useless, hoping to be productive? Or are you a reader, or maybe an art aficionado? If you are a reader, have you read any of my stories? Not to sound overly braggartly, but I did win a few writing awards, such as three Dell Awards, the Boise State University Fiction award, the HP Future World Writing Award, and an Anderson Award for fiction. For poetry I gotten a few awards here and there, as well as a Pushcart nomination. I am not just a backyard memoir writer. And if you have read my stories, have you left reviews? Reviews are the thing that gets a writer their greater audience. They are almost as important as spelling and punctuation.
For someone to be successful as a writer, or as an artist, there has to be an appreciative, engaged, participating audience. And reviews. I’m not talking successful like Shakespeare, (who is dead), or Stephen King (who is famous), but successful in that there is a supportive audience, even a small one, that engages and gives back. I love what I do, of course, but I don’t want to do it just for my own entertainment. If I just wanted to be entertained, I could read, or watch TV, and not have to go through the editing process, which is a bitch, let me tell you. I want an audience. Readers. And that audience begins with my friends.
In 2018 I gave a local reading at Rediscovered Books. A number of good friends came, quite a few from out of town. Even though many of them aren’t readers, and they all bought a book for me to sign. Two of my writer friends came. There are at least a dozen writers in the Boise area I would call friends. I go to every reading they give, and I buy a book that I make certain they sign. Some of them write things I’m not all that interested in, but still, I support them. I buy their book. I engage by reading it, and responding. That’s what artists do—support each other. And, better still, those writers are local, so I support LOCAL artists.
To have art in the world, and art in your life, you have to support the people who make that art. When I had my single solitary reading, some friends didn’t come because they had to work late, or ride their horse, or go to a track meet. Ten or twenty years from now, all those things we do every day, and regularly every week will be completely forgotten. A reading however is a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
I repeat, I am old. I may never have another reading, or write another book, or make another bracelet. If you are waiting until the horse is too lame to ride that day, or for a time you don’t need groceries, or for a week there isn’t hockey practice, or for a day you don’t have someone who wants you to work late, or any other reason that might stop you from attending a reading or an art event, or prevent you from reading a book, or buying a bracelet, then you might just wait forever.
If you want art, buy art when you see something you like. If you want to support your artist friends, support them while they are still alive, and even more, when they have a special moment. For some people, especially for artists, those moments might only come once. And if you really want to “support them,” the time to do that is the present. Once they are famous, or dead, they don’t need your support.
I shared with you the lengthy, and frustrating process of editing and publishing in order to show the amount of work that goes in to finishing a creative project. The unique thing about what an artist, or creative person does, is that those creations, those projects become their job. Yet, they are working for free. They do those things because it is their passion, because they have a vision, or a calling, or a dream, or a voice speaking in their head that they can’t ignore. Many of those people have no other income, or like myself, live on a three-figure social security that doesn’t even pay the mortgage. Those are the people who create things, lasting things, that make our world bigger and wider, and our lives richer and more beautiful. Perhaps it’s because they do it for love that those things are so memorable and special. Or perhaps artists truly don’t fit into a normal social mold.
So, remember when an artist places a value number on something they have created, it is difficult to measure all that time and investment. An artist gives up a lot—new cars, dinner out, vacations, even relationships, a healthy bank account—to spend their life creating. Furthermore, you might look at the book, or the piece of art and think, wow, that’s expensive, I can’t pay that much for that right now. Or you might think (as I may have done a time or two) maybe I can make my own. If you want art in your life, if you want stories, and beauty, and magical things, what price do you put on that investment? Can you invest the time to do that yourself? Or is five hours, or five weeks, or five months of an artist’s time perhaps worth just a little investment of your own to keep art and beauty and magic in both your life and present in the greater world?
Thanks for your time.
