More Progress on the Update: 3068!!

It's been a couple of months since the last post here, so here's what we have been doing.

We have six new pieces of art.

We have finished all 41 of the Update entries.

We have assembled a master organizational page outlining the page count, to include all art, chapters, entries and the headers, including the Table of Contents and the Index.  There are the Front and Back covers, as well as two new things I am adding to this Update, which I think will bring added value to the book overall.

                                                                       Champion IIa

These new things?  Mission Profiles for each entry.  These will give a brief outline of the machine, a list of its strengths and weaknesses and ideal applications for its use on the battlefield.  In case anyone is confused by terms like 'defilade', there will be a Definitions section at the end of the book.

                                                                    Mercenary Dragon

And finally, a shocking announcement.  

 I am 65 and am still willing to try new things.  Since May, I have been working with an AI to perform certain writing chores.  It is definitely an education.  Far from just typing in a few words and letting some machine create the rest, I have been submitting our own rough drafts and polishing them with the help of the AI.  If I want to accentuate the active voice, or any number of other things I find lacking in my writing, I carefully prep the AI with parameters and it does in a twinkling what would take me hours to perform.

It's not all smooth sailing.  The AI is subject to a lot of things; hallucination (where it makes things up), drift (where it strays from technical writing and into narrative) and any number of little niggling errors. It doesn't actually know the rules of the game!   I have to maintain strict editorial control, reading everything it produces and checking for balance, word use and tone.  So the parts that take me a long time to do, get done faster, but the parts I am good at, well... I still do them.  

The art is still exclusively done by people, though.  AI is good for spitballing, coming up with different looks, but you cannot correct or adjust the images they produce.  

I think of AI as I would a good word processor back in the 1980s.  Good for a lot of things, but you still have to work at it.  

Thanks for stopping by!

Steve