When learning a new technology, I like to drive right in and start using it without reading the manual. In part because of the challenge but also as a test to see how intuitive the interface is. Midjourney’s one of those tools you can pick up and use with very little instruction, but a little knowledge produces much better results.

I’d already experimented with name-dropping artists, materials, and styles. But adjusting the aspect ratio created the most remarkable diversity of images. The standard square box produces lots of portraits, landscapes, and abstracts. But taller ratios result in more figures, and wider radios create some actual scenes.

“a car chase in pyongyang, illustrated, pen and ink”

There’s something North Korean about this, and something like cars. The chasing is barely implied.

“spies by CGSociety”

CGSociety came from a lost of represented artists.

Including “spies” gave me a lot of overcoats, sunglasses, and fedoras. I had to stop using it.

Once again, Midjourney’s experimenting with gender here.

Artists shouldn’t worry about AI taking their job, at least not yet. Midjourney can draw, but it can’t interact. There’s no way to draft, no way to elaborate on one’s instructions, and no sending pieces back for changes. The only artists this will replace are the few who specialize in abstract landscapes reflecting little of the commissioner’s desires.

Having played through the ESPionage one-shot, the players came into session zero with an idea of mechanics and the setting. The cast consists of two Card (psychics) and two Proposition Players (non-psychics). The Cards are a man with, what I call, Bruce Lee Delusion Syndrome (BLDS) and an Ordinary Girl with the power to be ignored, psychic invisibility. The Proposition Players are a former fake-psychic Con Man and a Field Agent who believes he has psychic potential. They’re agents of C.R.O.F.T. (an undefined acronym), a government agency dedicated to collecting psychotronic devices for study.

C.R.O.F.T. wants the book of cowboy poetry acquired by Rainbow Intelligence Services. The PCs can choose to jump the Rainbow agents as they exit the Bullpen (the jail for psychics), ambush them as they’re transporting the notebook back to their office, or steal it from the Rainbow office. My players opted for the third option.

Rainbow runs conventional security services in addition to engaging in psychic espionage. The first floor is filled with security guards passing in and out. At the same time, the upstairs is understaffed office space. I was using the heist or con outlines from Crimeworld. They chose con over the heist as a group with skills that lean more toward social than violence.

Rather than dive in like a crew from Blades in the Dark, the team spent a healthy amount of time researching their mark and preparing their cover identities. BLDS acquired a security guard uniform through his agency resources and milled around the first floor if things turned south. The Con Man and the Field Agent posed as agents from a fictional agency looking to jump ship. They seeded their story with a misinformation campaign about the fictional agency’s troubles. And the Ordinary Girl pulled the building’s records, acquiring floorplans and a work order for a recent safe installation.

BLDS filled his time, mildly distracting the staff downstairs. The Con Man and the Field Agent said the right words to get upstairs and occupied the staff with their offer. And the Ordinary Girl snuck in, found the safe, and found the notepad of passwords with the combination, absconding with the book of cowboy poetry and the passwords. A successful mission all around.

I wonder if it was too successful. I know Fate’s a game with lower stakes than most, but the PCs have bulldozed through the opposition on both missions. I’m comfortable with the early missions being easy while we figure things out. But I’ll creep up the difficulty incrementally throughout the campaign until I find the right balance between the protagonists and their missions.

In the meantime, I’ve got two weeks to write some cowboy poetry.

In last month’s Tone Report, I gave y’all my outlining process on The Jade Queen, as it currently stands. Now that the road was mapped, it was time to move on to the hard part; the actual writing. I don’t like writing. I don’t like not writing. I only like having written. So the first draft is my least favorite because it’s the furthest from complete. But there’s no way around it. The only way is through.

A consideration I didn’t have with the novels is partitioning a comic into issues of 22 pages averaging 5 panels a page. There’s a lot of wiggle room there. I can throw in a few full-page panels if I come up short, or I can throw in a 9-panel grid if I’ve run long. So I decided not to worry about it too hard and through to the end and split it up into issues later.

I honestly don’t like issues and prefer to read comics collected in trades, but I understand that the marketing engine for comics still favors the floppy. So partitioning into issues is the way to go.

Once the first draft was done, I had a script with one page of about 500 panels. A challenge for even George Perez to draw. After some self-editing, I parsed the panels into pages and then split the pages into issues.

I try to end every scene with a hook. So technically, any scene could be the end of an issue, but some hooks are stronger than others, and there were three spots in the story that were clearly issue-ending moments. Unfortunately, the third issue was almost twice as long as the others. So I split it in two, rewrote the scene that ended the new #3 to give it a little more oomph, and I was good to go.

The Jade Queen is now a 5-issue limited series. But will it survive contact with the reader? Find out next month.

I attended San Diego Comic-Con Special Edition and the L.A. Comic Con on the quest for submissions editors. The convention circuit doesn’t seem to be the place to pitch anymore. Not if you’re a writer with my limited amount of renown. I’m so glad someone on the Comic Experience message board suggested I bring the pitch on a tablet instead of in print. I would have been carrying around 120 pages of useless paper instead of a marginally viable and aging Android device. But I did get one in at a publisher who will remain anonymous. If that pays off, it will have been worth it.

Plug of the Month: Walter