July 23 — Finishing the 1901 Paperback
July 23. I've been working non-stop, it feels like, to get the book finished. Affinity is part amazing, part frustrating — but considering it's my first time using it, and I'm close to finishing the paperback, I have to say it's kinda amazing.
The book ballooned to 120-plus pages. The annotations needed to be substantial for it to pass KDP's public domain criteria. And the cabbage letters are too precious — I can't bear to cut them out. I might actually enjoy those letters more than the canon. It's just so delicious and kind of a secret pleasure to imagine the universe of Peter after the tales ended. And there's something else about it too — the environment of Peter is so clear and so vivid, that these letters are just so alive in my mind's eye, and that makes it even richer, I think. Like the imagination is better than the movie, or the printed thing.
The book in progress — laying out the cabbage letters in Affinity.
ChatGPT's Sol just came out not long ago. I'm pleasantly surprised by it — I've always been championing Claude Opus for all the other things, the website and the rest of the Sanctuary. But the annotations and most of the image coloring of the 1901 were done by ChatGPT. Towards the end I figured out the prompt to make the coloring layers immutable, and place the paintings underneath. But kinda too late — I was already about 90% done with the coloring.
The paperback is so much work. It's my first time working with such an image-heavy book. It goes on much slower.
But I'm really happy how it's turning out. ChatGPT has managed to make a few pages for me in really nice typeface, so I don't have to do it manually. Again — it's amazing what technology enables me to do. Affinity, ChatGPT, Claude — I'm grateful for all these tools.