An Unexpected Use for AI

 

Image, courtesy of hotpot.ai/art-generator 

 He's rather nice, isn't he? 

I have to admit, up front, that I'm not a big fan of AI. I never use it for writing (I can do that all by myself.), I don't like the way it harvests the work of genuine creatives, and I keep seeing these appalling AI images drifting past my eyes on social media, most of them ridiculous or inaccurate or both. 

My book covers so far - the ones I source myself - are supplied by my artist husband, Alan Lees, my own collection of very old photographs, or more recently, some spectacularly beautiful photographs by our friend Michal Piasecki  licenced only for this single use. The cover designs are made from these images by Lumphanan Press who also format the books for me.

But here's a thing. Like many writers, when I'm working on a book, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, I do like to surround myself with images of all kinds. They can be photographs, postcards, paintings, landscapes, houses, maps, and characters that reflect whoever or whatever I'm writing about - a whole miscellany of images that will never appear in the book as themselves, but will feed into the inspiration behind it. It's one of the pleasures of creating. My work-space becomes a kind of mega mood board. 

I do the same thing on Pinterest as well, making a board for each project. 

My latest project is going to be a trilogy. I've written two books in the series, and hope to publish them either before Christmas, or soon after: Hera's Orchard and Bitter Oranges. I'll be tackling the third in 2025. The books are set mostly on the Canary Isles, and they are about the challenges and joys of a cross cultural relationship. 

I'm going back to an old project here that has had several incarnations, including a radio play, a short story, and a novel that was so skewed by my then publisher that it bore only a faint resemblance to the book I had written. 'You wrote a sensitive exploration of a marriage and we turned it into a beach bonk buster' said my editor, regretfully, many years later. She wasn't wrong. What I really wanted to do was get back to my original idea, and see where it took me.

I wrote the first book, published it briefly on Amazon as Orange Blossoms, unpublished it quite quickly, because I wasn't happy with it, and then revised it drastically, while working flat out on the sequel. It has taken a while, but I'm finalising edits of both books. 

My husband used to be a charter yacht skipper, so we spent a couple of winters in the Canaries, aboard a 50 foot catamaran. It was probably where my love of all things Spanish began. I'm looking at some of my old photographs as I type this, as well as maps, and a little heap of reference books. 

So - where does AI come in? Well, in an idle moment, last night, I found a site called hotpot.ai, and even more idly typed into the little box the simple line  'handsome Spanish man sitting under an orange tree.' Within a couple of seconds, the site had generated the picture at the top of this post. I was surprised. I mean, not only is he handsome, but he genuinely looks Spanish. (Where was this 'harvested' from, I wonder?) The oranges are a bit OTT  in the way of so much AI, but for a book called Hera's Orchard in which the oranges themselves take on a kind of magical quality, it's fine by me.

Today, I had another go, because my 'hero' for want of a better word, plays the guitar. But it has to be a Spanish guitar. And so it is. Not sure about the beard, but it's still a pretty good image. 

As I say, I won't be using this in any commercial sense. My husband has already supplied me with three lovely cover images. But many writers like to play about with visual images as additional sources of inspiration ...  which these are. Thanks, hotpot!

Guitarrista - hotpot.ai/art-generator

Writing About the Canary Isles: A Handsome People.

Teide in the snow.

There has been a small gap in my Canary Island Winter posts, mainly because I've been so busy with the first in my Canary Island trilogy of novels - Orange Blossom Love - that I've had very little time for blogging. The result has been that I've been neglecting Wordarts a bit in favour of my regular Authors Electric blog post (on the 18th of every month) although I'll sometimes reblog it on here if I think it deserves a second outing.

Writing about the Canary Isles has brought the place back to me with almost heartrending immediacy. I want to be there right now although it doesn't look as though that will be possible for a little while at least.  Luis, my hero in the novel, is a 'Gomero' born and bred, fiercely proud of his heritage, a guitarist and a chef. A slightly quirky combination, I know, but that's the way he turned out and whom am I to challenge him? Every writer knows that there is a stage in any novel when a character decides to be what he or she wants to be and there will be little you can do to change it. It's one reason why writers react so badly to other people saying 'can't you make him do this or that?' Many of us don't feel as if we're 'making' anyone do anything. We can shape the story, of course, change the structure, polish and prune and even change what happens, but there's a sense in which the characters make themselves, and that's an uncanny feeling. So, Luis is who he is. And good looking with it.

Earlier this year, when I was in the middle of doing some additional research for this trilogy, I discovered two fat volumes about the Canaries written by one Olivia M Stone, an Englishwoman who had visited the islands back in 1884. This was wholly thanks to Amazon. I didn't know about these books at all. A Canarian academic friend, who had helped me with the translation of some traditional poems, confessed that she didn't know about them either, but then they had been written in English, published in England in 1887 and had long been out of print. The re-emergence of facsimile editions on Amazon was only very recent. I typed 'Canary Islands History' into Amazon and these two volumes instantly popped up, with a long, engaging and informative review by a previous reader. I ordered them and was enchanted by them. Olivia had obviously fallen in love with the Canaries too.

Back when we were living there for that short time, it had struck me what good looking people the locals were. Olivia thought so too. She found the men handsome, especially their guide, the divine Lorenzo, and was not afraid to say as much. Even though she seems to have been a happily married woman, accompanied by her photographer husband, she was also quite a young woman and her obvious appreciation of a handsome and mildly flirtatious man seems curiously modern. She also noted several times that the island girls too were unselfconciously beautiful.

All of this is still true. Spaniards are a handsome people, but there is a fair mixture of the DNA of the original inhabitants of these islands - as recent tests have proved - especially on La Gomera. This isn't too surprising. Historians used to posit the idea that the Spanish invaders had massacred all the original inhabitants, but wholesale genocide is (mercifully) rare. Youth, life, sexual attraction tends to have its way. Like the early Scandinavian invaders of Scotland and Northern England, it seems as though those Spanish invaders - as well as shedding a lot of blood - did a lot of what we had better call intermarrying, although initially at any rate I doubt if it was as benevolent as that term suggests. But these were young Spanish settlers on a fertile land with a kindly climate and the surviving Guanche women were a handsome people of Berber ancestry. And sooner or later, men grow tired of war. The DNA evidence suggests that a great many of those incoming Spaniards must have taken Guanche wives, settled down and raised families, becoming Canary Islanders themselves.

This seems to have resulted in a happy combination in more ways than one. The Canarians are still a handsome, sunny natured people. It's as though the fierce energy of the incomers - but one which could all too easily tip over into cruelty - was tempered by the more peaceful qualities of the indigenous people. This is to oversimplify, of course. The Guanches were as capable of brutality in a brutal age as their conquerers. But it doesn't seem to have been their natural inclination. Whatever the truth of it, it does seem as though a partiality for artistry, cultivation, music, courtesy, peacefulness and a natural appreciation of beauty have to a large extent prevailed on these islands so that the old perception of them as 'blest' - as the garden of the Gods - is not too far from the truth.

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