After what seems an interminably long length of time, I’ve finally rediscovered the writing “bug”.

It turns out that I have a couple of connected stories, written some years ago, which are just waiting for some real hard editing and finishing up.

Of course, that means first proscratinating a lot to come up with a cover design. This being 2024, I’ve moved away from using stock photos (as nice as they were) and I’m playing about with those AI image generators you’ve seen all over the place.

This latest potential cover consists of three AI generated images, the figures have been through Adobe’s free online background removal service, and the whole put together using Serif Affinity 2.0. Previous covers were made up from purchased stock images, painstakingly removed from their backgrounds using a very old version of Macromedia Fireworks 4.0 (remember them?) and layered together. That took a long time, and didn’t always produce a quality effect.

One annoyance I have right now is that Affinity doesn’t play too nicely with the text / typeface in the way that Fireworks did so the text isn’t how I want it to be. I’m sure I’ll figure something out to improve that.

One advantage of playing around with an A.I. image generator is that it comes up with ideas that you may not have envisaged in your description. This has helped give me the incentive to enhance the story as it currently stands and will, hopefully, liven it up even more than it already is.

As Earl Bassett might have said “It’s a whole new ball game!”