writing

Finally able to read my own book without worrying about goofs I missed…

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I’m proud that I can raise kids, hold down a pretty demanding day job, deal with adulting, and also manage to publish a novel, a tabletop skirmish game, a book of short stories, and a roleplaying game. I decided many years ago that I would focus my imagination on building out a detailed world rather than bounce around with various unrelated concepts and I feel I’ve learned an incredible amount of fantastic skills along the way.

So the world of Salt Mystic has been my imagination’s playground for over a decade now.

But one thing that sucks about being a writer, at least for me, is that I really…really…struggle to sit down and read something I wrote. I can’t squash the crippling dread that I’ll stumble across a misspelled word, a forgotten fragment I mistakenly left when I edited something, or – and this is the worst – a contradiction or plot hole. The dream I had when I designed our most recent publication, SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS, was that I finally had a doorway to step into this world I’ve spent so much time making. It’s a roleplaying game designed from the ground up for solo players but able to simply and cleanly launch you into the Salt Mystic world.

But it’s been a year and a half since I finished it and only earlier today was I able to pick it up for any length of time and peruse the introduction, skim the map, and consult some of the oracles tables in the appendix without the creeping dread peeing on my experience.

And it was kind of awesome, honestly.

Grailrunner claimed when we put this RPG out that it was “effortless roleplaying”. I tested that out by blindly following the oracles for a character generation (appearance, name, and background), an inciting rumor my character heard somewhere, a general storyline theme, a NPC I was to meet, and some places we would go. I intentionally didn’t bring anything to the experience and made an honest effort to just step inside and see who and what I would meet.

Although I wrote all that material, I did so in a mad 3-year fury of flipping through art books and random mythology texts, brainstorming, sketching random blobs, and generally letting my imagination just do what it does with abandon. The truth is – I found a lot of what I saw in my own book unfamiliar enough that it surprised me. So today I thought I’d recap the adventure that resulted with some illustrations for a more dynamic presentation. Pretty much everything that happened was just me following the guidance in the book and doing what I felt like doing along the way.

Care to join me?

*

That’s me. Cain Blackwick. I wear a big floppy hat and I’m always dirty for some reason. I say inappropriate things and offend people a lot, so no friends of any good repute. Because of something that happened to me in my past, I’m followed at a distance by a voiceless Fog Man who will probably kill me one day. For now, he just follows me and watches.

I heard a rumor in a market that the pilgrim train that leads to the Augur has left its rails and taken flight, and that it would be stopping at a tower in this little town into which I’d stumbled. Not having the money to buy a ticket, I snuck onto the train. I’m pretty good at that kind of thing. It’s called the Tanglesouls Express and it’s kind of a big deal. My Fog Man just sort of drifted up in his poisonous cloud and kept me in sight the whole time. The creep!

Unfortunately, the train drifted off its course in a thunderstorm. When the announcement warned of a layover for the night in a floating debris field, I was one of the only people who climbed outside the train to take a look around in the middle of the night. What I saw was this:

It was a derelict flying ship, seemingly built around an oriel gate. Oriels are artificial pocket dimensions, and gates like these are littered all over the place – usually forgotten. Sometimes there is treasure and wonder inside. Sometimes there are beasts that would eat you as soon as sniff you. Always a good time though! This one was just sitting there sparkling, so I jumped down off the train onto some floating debris, hopped from one piece of flotsam to another until I could grab the weathered hull.

A metallic plaque named its inner world, the world inside that gate, as Rendel’s Vengeance. I could just make out some plains and misty gray-brown blurs inside past the dimensional warping. It wouldn’t have mattered what I saw because I was going to go inside no matter what. That’s what oriels are for!

The grasslands extended to the horizon. That, I could understand. I just hadn’t expected Pteranodons in the skies. I filed that away in case I could figure out how to tame and ride one. But it was the giant walking buildings that surprised me the most. I named them “spirewalkers” since I didn’t know what they were. It looked like there were cities here once, saturated with computronium, and bits of them must have just grown legs and decided to wander off in a herd.

“Have you ever seen something like that?” I asked my Fog Man, but he only glared at me like he always does.

Anyway, I followed one of the spirewalkers to understand better what I was looking at, how they thought, and where such a thing might want to go, and eventually I came across a scrap of old parchment with a handwritten phrase on it:

“Everything is new today. And will be again tomorrow.”

That’s what it said. It seemed sappy and unhelpful but at least it meant there was likely somebody around here writing things like that. While I was looking for tracks or footprints, any kind of sign of where the person who had written that might have gone, I was attacked (if that’s the right word) by a malfunctioning golem who seemed to think he was repairing himself but needed parts from me to do it.

While I dealt with him, my Fog Man just hovered from his distance. I always wondered what that ghostly jackass would do if I was getting killed and cheating him of the pleasure of doing the deed himself. I’m still not sure because I did manage to get the golem stepped on by one of those walking buildings. And that’s when I met this fellow here:

Boston Hember was his name. He was a fairly nice guy: exiled diplomat who apparently failed at averting a cataclysmic war back home. Or something. I guess he just wanders oriels and leaves behind these poems and sunshine nonsense to make up for his failure. It would have been great had Boston showed up a little earlier than he did to help with the kooky golem who wanted to pry out my ribcage but it was still good to see another human.

He told me he’d only ever seen one other person inside this oriel and the fellow was dying when they met. Of course, this dying fellow had said something mysterious right before his last breath. They always say something mysterious with that last breath. In this case, it seemed pregnant with story potential:

“Traps all in the woods, leading to the cavern – they don’t do that for nothing.”

He felt like he’d located all the traps leading to this supposed cavern and had them mapped pretty cleanly. Said he’d been hesitating to go alone but it was eating him up to learn what was in that cavern. Said it was fate that I’d showed up just on the day he was thinking he’d go find out.

“Yeah, screw it. Let’s go.” That’s me. And going to mysterious places was why I was here anyway.

Cutting that part short, we eventually got inside that trapped cavern and found an opening to another grassland plain, or maybe a part of this world we couldn’t access otherwise. And you wouldn’t believe what we found over there!

Another oriel gate! Inside the first pocket dimension we were wandering around in was a second gate leading to who knows where! The only trouble was it was locked and chained up, with dimensional energy leaking out in blinding blue-green light. Something in Boston’s voice, in his eyes maybe, told me he had actually been this far already and knew exactly what we were going to find there. I couldn’t have explained how I knew that other than it was just a feeling (and appendix 7).

“Nope,” I said. “Things that are chained are chained for a reason.” With that, I was planning on leaving Boston to his misadventure of releasing some hell-beast or cult or whatever was on the other side of that gate when the guy pulled a knife on me!

I didn’t kill him. I’m not that kind of adventurer. I did take his knife, though. It was a pretty sweet braided blade with some shape-changing morphium impregnating the steel. I liked the way it rippled when you held it out in front of you. When I left Boston there, he’d probably had much better days and might still be scheming to come after me one day.

“He can stand in line, right, Foggie?” I said that to my Fog Man but the creep just glared at me.

So, anyway, I thought better of the chained gate thing and of chasing supposed enigmatic comments from hypothetical dying men and took a whole different approach altogether.

You wouldn’t believe all the loot still lying around in the drawers and closets of these old walking buildings!

*

I hope you found that as amusing as I did. It was really fun to treat this wonderful book like something I didn’t sweat and stress over for years and just let it do its thing as it was designed to do.

If you want to buy a copy of SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS for yourself, just smash the Buy It Now button below:

And that’s what I wanted to bring you today. Till next time,

Slowly writing a novel when AI could’ve knocked this out already…

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Are you using AI to write your novel?

I’m not against AI as a better Google. For example, I needed to know recently whether crickets still croak at night in late autumn and what wild mustard would smell like if you sat on it. These are the kind of weird questions writers come up with and – if you’re me – completely block the ability to progress with the work until they’re answered.

Here are some others (and trust me, all totally legitimately asked in the context of feverishly trying to complete a science fantasy novel):

  1. What are gorilla boobs called?
  2. Where exactly do blind people place their fingers on someone’s face to read their expression?
  3. What is the difference between a glyph and a sigil?
  4. What causes the black streaks beneath a crying woman’s eyes: eyeliner or mascara?
  5. Say a man’s arm is severed and cauterized by a sentient cablesword – would it steam, bleed, smoke, or all three?

Forgive me. I like odd details when I’m reading books so I want them in my own concoctions. And I want them to be right. Something like Gemini or ChatGPT can handle these iterative conversations to answer questions like these better than a Google search. Far better and much faster.

Okay, what about the writing, though? The creation of the work itself?

I’m also not against AI handling the monotonous and thankless task of resolving thorny punctuation issues. My kryptonite punctuation errors so far have been:

  1. I join two complete thoughts with commas rather than semicolons. I never liked semicolons. They look weird but whatever.
  2. I forget to add commas when I use introductory phrases (“Beneath the plaque Mazewater noticed old carvings.” – missing comma after ‘plaque’
  3. …

You know what – let’s leave that topic. I did a search for punctuation goofs I had to fix and it’s embarrassing. You get my point on an editor that can quickly resolve where a comma goes and whether to bust up a sentence is awesome.

But the writing?

Well, somewhat more controversially, I’m very much in favor of quick and dirty concept art by AI to help me visualize a character or backdrop I’m dreaming up in the way that George Lucas used Ralph McQuarrie and so many others in his own worldbuilding.

Meet Uncle Ong, for example, based on my descriptions (if you read Mazewater one day, this guy will break your heart – I promise):

So what are you saying?

Yeah, I’m writing this myself. No AI for that. As slow as I am, I still want to say I built something with my own hands. It’s why I’m in the gig in the first place.

Still, a lot of people are avoiding AI because they rightly have concerns about intellectual property and diminishing quality of work that is increasingly produced by software. Legit concerns, yes, but neither is insurmountable. I also feel that, as a creator, failing to have cutting edge AI tools in your kit is like trying to hold back the ocean with a kitchen knife.

Maybe it makes you a person of principle. But it puts you behind your competitors for sure.

I’m Brian Bennudriti, creator of the Salt Mystic universe, and I’m several years in to writing the next novel in that setting. It’s to be titled MAZEWATER. In February, I told you here about my plan to speed up how long it takes me to finish a novel. My record, unfortunately, is 7 years. I’m getting old, man. My kids are practically grown. How likely at this pace is it I finish even a handful of novels like I planned? The ideas inside my head are exploding into life but I can’t capture it in the words quickly enough. Still, it’s the same fire now that lit up my mind as a child…the love of creating an imagined world.

What I told you in that February article remains true and I believe I’m moving with more focus and less backtracking. But I saw a headline the other day that led me down an unpleasant and depressing rabbit hole.

“Nobody plays video games anymore.” That’s what it said. The reason it hit me hard was I’ve long speculated that future storytelling frontiers would be in gaming: tabletop and in large-scale video games. Much like Walt Disney and those early anime illustrators made a true art of cartoons long perceived as childishness before them, like Frank Miller and Neil Gaiman made true literature of comics, again long perceived as childishness, I’ve been convinced that games like Tainted Grail and Elder Scrolls were the future of storytelling.

Yet the article cited research by Matthew Ball, which you can learn more about here. To boil it down for you, there are too many things competing for our attention. We struggle to care about anything new, so gamers play Fortnite, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Roblox, and Minecraft because it’s easier to just stay where you are. Switching costs are high to learn a new world, even if they are amazing. Everything else is high-dose dopamine in Tik Tok bursts of frenetic nonsense.

You write science fiction & fantasy! What do you care about video games?

The National Endowment for the Arts found that the share of US adults who had read any novel or short story during the preceding year declined from 45.2% in 2012 to 37.6% in 2022. The share reading any book fell from 54.6% to 48.5% over the same period. A separate analysis of the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans reading for pleasure on a given day fell by approximately 40% between 2003 and 2023—from roughly 28% to 16%.

Yeah, it’s not just video games, man. We’re all hooked on dopamine from our phones, killing our attention spans, and the economics and psychology of dealing with the learning curve and investing in new worlds is stacked very much against something new coming into the literary universe. If I make the most perfect setting and the most interesting characters with dialogue and action that pops, who will read it?

You’re depressing me.

Hold that thought. That same American Time Use Survey said those who still read spent considerable time doing so: approximately 97 minutes on days when they read in 2023. Publishers Weekly reported that US print sales rose slightly in 2025 and remained above pre-pandemic levels, while romance and romantasy experienced strong growth. Audiobook revenue rose 9% in 2025 to $2.43 billion, and fiction accounted for approximately 71% of audiobook sales.

The folks who ARE reading are still voracious about it. If you’ve ever been to a comic or pop culture convention, you’ll meet the most incredible people in the world. And they’re all dreamers who want to enter worlds like this. What I’m saying is they’re still out there, and they’re still consuming massive amounts of content. What is weakening is the audience’s willingness to enter a long work before it has proven its value. People still devote hundreds of hours to stories they love. They are less willing to devote six mediocre hours to finding out whether they might eventually love something.

So what does that mean for storytelling?

I believe I’ve mentioned Yu-Kai Chou and his mind-bending framework for leveraging gaming psychology for human motivation and change management which he calls Octalysis. Read about that here. He’s the first guy I ever heard talk about the steps of game design:

  1. Discovery (how players find your game at all)
  2. On-boarding (how players overcome a learning curve & achieve quick wins)
  3. Scaffolding (how players gain a sense that the game is going somewhere so they invest more heavily)
  4. Endgame (how players receive a sense of accomplishment and reward)

I’m seeing parallels for this set of steps in the future of storytelling, honestly. I see an increasing importance on merchandise, art, and social media interaction to draw people in with the hook for the imagined world. I see that future storytellers may have to be more visual thinkers and incorporate strong, intriguing visuals that can be sticky in the minds of people who chance across them. Maybe more than that though, I’m struck by the increasing importance of the opening. That first five pages. If you don’t hook someone there, then you won’t hook them at all. Too much is waiting to steal their attention away, and much of that is optimized through algorithms with their big, pointy teeth to be better at stealing attention than the writer is.

*

Just a few thoughts as I round the corner at about 80,000 words in the work in progress. I thought I’d be ending the book around this word count but I will very likely push it to ~100,000 words. It feels more correct at that length. I promise I’ve trimmed and cut all the fat! I’m not rambling. It’s a tight and intriguing ride in my opinion. Just needs to simmer a bit for these wonderful paper people to feel real and for the world to shake like it needs to.

Anyway, I hope this has been food for thought. I’ll share more about Mazewater over the coming months as things finish up. If you have any questions about it, feel free to let me know.

Till next time,

Restoring Lord Dunsany’s Book of Wonder (and fixing a travesty while we’re at it!)

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There was a writer of fantasy stories in the early 1900’s that helped lay the tracks for the books and films of imagination we enjoy today. Tolkien read him – supposedly gave a copy of the book we’re talking about today to Clyde Kilby in preparation for helping the Professor compile and develop The Silmarillion. H.P. Lovecraft wrote a poem about that same book. In fact the author, Lord Dunsany, inspired creators as far-ranging as Clark Ashton Smith, Guillermo del Toro, Neil Gaiman, Jorge Luis Borges, and Arthur Clarke.

He’s kind of a big deal.

But this particular book of 14 stories though, The Book of Wonder (available free here), was a real game-changer. Most, if not all, of the stories first appeared in a lifestyle magazine titled The Sketch from 1910 – 1911, then were compiled into the single volume for publication in 1912. Taken together, they read like a series of dream-visions, and feel comfortable and sleepy, like they’re being told in a warm voice by a crackling fireplace. It’s a collection of short fantasy tales about strange kings, cities, gods, and wanderers whose desires—for wealth, beauty, knowledge, or escape—lead them into eerie, dreamlike adventures. The tales often turn on irony or fate, showing how wonder and curiosity can just as easily bring enchantment as loss, transformation, or quiet doom

But there’s a real injustice that was done to this book, and Grailrunner is fixing it today with one of the coolest freebies we’ve ever given away. There will be a free download link at the end of this article, but first you have to know what injustice we mean and get as annoyed as we are about it!

Let’s talk about Sidney Sime for a second. He did this painting, which is how I first came across him.

Isn’t that gorgeous?! Honestly, this is the kind of thing art is for! It’s called The City of Never, and it sends my mind wandering! I really love it.

Sime started his working life in a coal mine, almost dying in an accident, before working in various jobs ultimately winding up a sign painter. He managed to get some of his eerie, dreamlike art published in The Sketch Magazine as illustrations, and that’s where Dunsany first saw his work. When Dunsany contacted him to illlustrate his work, The Gods of Pegana, it began a long and incredible collaboration that lasted the rest of Sime’s life.

Then something with the feeling of destiny happened. We’ll let Dunsany tell you about that:

“I found Mr. Sime one day, in his strange house at Worplesdon, complaining that editors did not offer him very suitable subjects for illustration; so I said: ‘Why not do any pictures you like, and I will write stories explaining them, which may add a little to their mystery?’”

-Lord Dunsany

Wait a minute, what are you saying?

I’m saying that Dunsany hadn’t written The Book of Wonder or its component stories when he asked Sime to just paint something.
Anything! He just suggested that an artist with a wild imagination go wild and see where it led him. Then, Dunsany would make something of it.

That sounds cool. How did Sime decide what to paint, then?

He had a wonderful imagination. Still, Sime’s images often look as though they were found through the act of drawing and painting, not fully locked down in advance. You can see it in a few recurring traits:

Dream logic in the compositions: odd appendages, improbable towers, and strange silhouettes that feel less like academic illustration and more like an artist noticing possibilities inside the developing image and following them.

Forms that seem to emerge out of texture and shadow rather than being mechanically planned from the start.

Architecture and figures that feel invented midstream, as if one shape suggested the next.

Selective detail, where one area becomes highly specific while other parts stay loose and suggestive, which is often a sign of discovery rather than rigid predesign.

Examples?

Yeah, I see the dreamy, moody thing you’re talking about. So what’s the travesty with this book?

In my mind, if Sime’s art came first and the stories were largely built from them, then this book is a composite work that should be inseparable. The art should be included in every reprint and copy. In fact, the images ought to come first before each story so the reader can follow the process for themself. You should be able to see the art cleanly, clearly, in good resolution, ideally in color, then proceed to the story to which it is attached.

But that’s just not the case.

I argue that in the far majority of cases where this incredibly influential and popular book is made available, it is without illustrations at all or is included with revised artwork. As if the Sime work was just some bumpkin’s outdated attempts at something a modern artist could exceed or modernize.

Worse, it’s a maddening trail of low-res scans and dead-ends to even find decent reproductions of Sime’s work at all! Even the dedicated Sime gallery in Surrey doesn’t contain the bulk of the images from The Book of Wonder. Dunsany’s castle supposedly houses the majority of Sime’s work that was meant for Dunsany’s writings, but you have to arrange a visit to see them!

That does seem annoying. And a shame. So what did you do about it?

We produced a pdf version with a new front and back cover, collecting the best possible scans and most accurate text, and laid them all out in a beautiful spread with original “historiated intials” to begin each story.

Like this one:

Was it hard to find the art scans?

It was! Far harder than it should have been. We used the original 1912 version as the guiding light matching the images to the right stories. Everything needed cleanup in Photoshop. In one case, there was a lost artwork that didn’t actually appear in the 1912 version but DID appear in the Dec 1910 issue of The Sketch Magazine. Thanks to Douglas Anderson, original investigation result linked here for tracking down the lost image which likely inspired The Injudicious Prayers of Pombo the Idolater.

My main point with this labor of love is that Sime deserves co-credit for this incredibly influential work of fantasy. It’s a travesty that it was this hard to find half-way decent scans of his artwork that needed this kind of editing to even be presentable. If there was enough time in the day, we would contact Dunsany Castle and try and influence them for better scans and a new memorial edition, maybe including some correspondence between them to liven up the work. That would be amazing.

What do you hope to accomplish with this, then?

Just inspiration. Like everything else we do here at Grailrunner, we wanted to bring you the story of this fateful collaboration and give you the chance, as best we can, to gaze at the art for yourself, dream up something original for them if you like, before stepping into the wonderful mists of what Dunsany did with them.

Let’s have that download link!

*

That’s what I wanted to bring you today. I hope you enjoy the compilation and restored art. If you DO go inside The Book of Wonder to spend time with these two miracle-workers, it will be time well spent.

It takes me seven years to write a novel – and I plan to fix that!

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Oh, wow, if you could have been with me at a rainy beach in New Hampshire in 2015! I had a half-day to myself, off from work with a rainy New England afternoon free. I drove from Portsmouth where I was working down to Hampton Beach. It was cold, gray, and everything was closed for the winter. There was one couple on the beach trying to make a romantic walk of it, but it was the slow, drizzling, mean kind of cold rain that soaks into your bones.

Most of the framework and plot of the novel I’d been writing for years had been rattling around in my head since my time in the Navy in the late 90’s. That’s a long time to cook the soup! I get that. And I’d been writing that book, my first one, for over 6.5 years. Almost 7. But I was close. All the threads I wanted to tie up were pretty much tied. I was planning to see if I could just park near the beach, prop open the laptop there in the car to the pat-pat of light rain, and see what I could do to carry things over the finish line.

There’s a statue of a lonesome woman staring at the sea there. I was down the beach some from her, facing the water same as she was. It was a great vibe, honestly. Not physically comfortable, but amazing for creative inspiration. And I did it! That last image…the last conversation…the final closeout I’d been looking for…it went onto the page all by itself. I couldn’t believe it! No one in the world to tell about it, and no one would probably even understand what a big deal that was for me, but it was truly done. Not rushed and not compromised.

Done, the way I wanted it.

What’s the big deal about that?

Writing a novel is challenging to every aspect of your life. Time spent writing is time away from your family. It’s time not working on your day job. And it’s hard – ridiculously hard! Stories grow more complex than you wanted, and characters change from what you made them to be. Dialogue that sounded awesome in your head repeats back as strained, alien, and as plot dumps when that wasn’t what you intended at all.

I was trying to earn my way, be a husband and a father, but still turn visions in my head into something real that could say something meaningful and outlast me: a world people could step inside. But I felt selfish every time I wasn’t playing a game with my wife or watching a movie with my daughter or taking my son fishing. Writing a novel is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but also one of the most life-altering. It changed me for the better.

Okay, so what are we talking about here?

It takes too long. That’s what I’m saying. Need to fix that. I’m over 4 years in to the novel I’m writing now. Not cool if I’m still banging away on it for three more years.

Talk to me, Grailrunner – how do we speed up the creative process?

If you’re a novelist, like the kind of folks who might read Grailrunner and nod, you feel the tug of two opposing forces:

  • You want your story clean, logical, tight, like a well-made blade
  • You write in spirals, rewrites, loops, hollows — messy, intuitive, iterative

Tell me I’m not alone in that. Anyway, it feels like a flaw to rewrite because it feels like starting over. I’m thinking in layers, but trying to polish before I’ve built the foundation.

But it struck me recently that concept artists have figured this out!

Many visual artists, particularly concept artists, work in ways that seem counter-intuitive. They don’t sit down with a crystalline vision of what they expect the final image to look like. Instead they check the brief and then:

  • Lay down marks, then react
  • Let accidental shapes guide the next decision
  • Build texture before form
  • Play off of unexpected accidents
  • Iterate forward, not backward

I wondered for myself then – this idea of a visual artist pressing ahead with abandon, careless of the final picture, knowing there will be revisions later but enjoying the process for itself and riffing off what they lay down – could that help me?

And?

Here are five principles I’m locking in for myself – maybe they’ll be helpful for you:

1. Generate the back cover text now

I built the entire cover for the book, including the artwork, but more importantly the back cover text. I printed it off in glorious color and even folded it into the size and shape of the final product so I could hold it in my hand. I needed that kind of focus on the story I’m telling (and why) to help me trim shiney bits and bobs that kept raining down from the sky. It’s a laser beam now. Anything not feeding that back cover promise is out!

2. Tell someone the one-line summary of what the book is about

My brother surprised me with the question when I was hip-deep in an action sequence and I hated my ill-prepared, off-the-cuff answer so much I called him two days later with a sharper and better one. Now, it’s like a mantra in my head helping me stick to that promise too. Like the back cover exercise, but even tighter!

3. Get to know the characters better before forcing them into a pre-defined plot

I spent some quality time just extrapolating for myself on what the main folks care about, what they’ve been up to when they’re not “on screen”, and some great backstory that might never make it to the page. AI tools like ChatGPT can accept your work-in-progress manuscript and engage with you in full conversations in those character voices. Crazy way to create a work of art, but an interesting way to immerse yourself in your own story!

4. Draft without editing – for real this time

I press ahead now on the chapter at hand. Just blast it out as intended, almost in a rush, to lay out the skeleton of what’s supposed to happen and let these people do what I know they would do. Tomorrow, I’ll go back over it again and catch the nonsense and the plot holes, the contradictions. Like the concept artist checking the brief, but then just laying down random marks according to what seems right, I’m applying that to the written page. The difference is the freedom now to avoid stopping constantly, in real-time, to worry over whether something makes sense right now and stop to fix it immediately.

5. Accept it when cool things need to die because they no longer fit

Oh, it’s hard! I liked Ilianore a lot, but you’ll never meet her. The climactic spearing from the sky – pretty sure that’s gone too. A midnight flight on a train – also gone. I’m trying, man. I’m trying to turn things loose now when they seemed so amazing but just don’t match up with where things are going or what these people would do. I’m considering short funerals for some, but for sure I’m pasting some of that old text into a document to save in a folder somewhere in case it ever needs to come back to life. Director’s cuts, sort of.

Anyway, that’s what I wanted to bring you today. These principles are speeding things along for me, at least. And I’m noticing a lot less hair growing on the plot these days. Less massive revisions are even necessary. Let’s hope that’s the process working its magic and not also my imagination.

Till next time,

Huge Grailrunner freebie – an interactive concept art masterclass for free!

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Friends and neighbors, this one’s different.

For years we’ve been talking here at Grailrunner about how imagination works — why certain images crack open your brain, why odd bits of history or art or game design suddenly ignite a whole setting, and why creators keep coming back to the well even when the world’s noisy. We’re always on the lookout for new ways to break into exciting and innovative designs, imagery, and above everything ruling it all…to tell new stories.

OK, so what’s the freebie?

Hold on – a little context first. It was a life-changing experience for me personally to write and design our most recent publication, SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS, a western-themed science fantasy roleplaying game book built around the fortune-telling mechanic of bibliomancy. I’ll tell you why. To build out the world of our signature IP at Grailrunner, I needed a ridiculously huge amount of outlandish concepts, crazy ideas, and just cool, new stuff! I kind of went down the deep well of concept art techniques like mind-mapping, thumbnail sketches and iteration, shape carving, scribble ideation, and mood boards. That stuff is like adrenalin for an imagination, honestly!

It was so impactful, in fact, that I wanted to go deeper. Yet it struck me that art school and super expensive concept art classes with some of the working masters in this field aren’t going to make sense for me. I imagine they don’t make sense either economically or logistically for a lot of folks like me. So it got me thinking I’d like a simpler, streamlined, but focused way of drilling deeper into JUST the parts of concept art that would help me – the techniques that help break your imagination’s walls to explore new ideas.

Sounds great. What did you do?

We don’t charge for AI-generated stuff at Grailrunner, and we always point out its use. In fact, we’ve built out some pretty amazing stuff that we give away just to experiment with possibilities and hopefully inspire anybody that hangs out here with us. If you keep coming back here, maybe you’ll buy a book or a game or drop a LIKE on our Facebook page. That’s the idea.

My absolute favorite giveaway so far has been an entire board game mockup set in the seas of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Awesome. I just got a Silhouette Cameo 5 for my birthday, so I’m planning to break that puppy in with the printable tokens and cards there.

And specifically now for concept art techniques?

I curated a portfolio of concept art masters, provided an outline of content for my ideal coursework for a class, and instructed ChatGPT to act as the composite concept artist (meaning all those people) and write the chapters one by one for my outline as well as a preface and afterword. Then I went chapter by chapter and had it generate impactful exercises unique to each section which a student could conduct on their own with an internet connection and pencil and paper.

I mocked up illustrations of concept art techniques and examples to ensure the book is illustrated well and clear in what it’s saying. Then I bundled all of that into a professional textbook template and converted it into a pdf.

Inside you’ll find:

  • A step-by-step ideation → thumbnail → refinement pipeline
  • Practical exercises after every major section
  • Guidance on using digital tools without letting them boss your imagination around
  • A tone that assumes you’re already creative — we’re just lighting the boosters

That sounds nice. Your header says it’s “interactive” though. What’s that about?

I told you here that I’ve used AI tools to resurrect old masters and have them critique my own art to provide detailed feedback on what I could improve. That works surprisingly well, so I added instructions in the Preface on how to upload this very pdf to a student’s own instance of ChatGPT then have the AI act as the composite author critique their own uploaded exercises.

I mean. That’s totally possible and crazy to think we can do that kind of thing for free now. Anyone upset about AI being used like this needs to…and I say this with love…recognize this kind of workflow is an unstoppable industrial revolution. Your competitors are doing it.

Give me a download link, man! You’re killing me.

Grab the masterclass, run through the first exercise tonight, and then show us what you made. We’re still building this creative network in public — the more people who are sketching, painting, kitbashing, and worldbuilding alongside us, the weirder and better things get.

Enjoy, and make sure to let us know what you think.

Till next time,

Yes, there’s a Grailrunner theme song now

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Since we kicked off Grailrunner around 2016 or so, I’ve intentionally left out references to me personally or the contractors I work with. My thought was to keep this super professional and focus on inspiring ideas and cool tools or giveaways that prod other people’s imaginations. Grailrunner Publishing is just a network of like-minded folks that help me put new things into the world, with the potential for other like-minded folks to (hopefully) catch a spark here and unleash their own.

I’ve noticed, however, that a lot of Youtubers are finding these days that their audiences seem to want to know more about them personally, beyond whatever terrain building tips or historical curiosities they talk about. Then occasionally, we get asked the magic question:

Who is Grailrunner?

So for giggles, I’ve rewritten the ABOUT page to tell the origin story and shed a little light on that, specifically recounting the strange experience I had in a rock gorge in Oman in 1997 that poured jet fuel into what became Grailrunner and our signature property, Salt Mystic.

No fairy tales. No gimmicks. That happened. Go read it to see what I mean. Over a decade later when I read that C.S. Lewis had a similar experience that turned into the Narnia series, it struck a chord with me big time. But anyway, in order to celebrate this slight shift in the Grailrunner approach to you guys, I thought it would be awesome to have something cool and free for you to enjoy.

So I wrote a Grailrunner theme song.

I was going for Springsteen/Bob Dylan-style poetry with a modern rock vibe, and I wanted to include a variation on our slogan: “Dreams are engines. Be fuel.” Not an easy task, I’ll grant you. It wasn’t a pretty process. I’m also bad about mixed metaphors, so if you detect any traces in the lyrics of shifting imagery, just be cool about it.

Here’s a link to hear it.

Here are the lyrics, by the way.

And no, that isn’t me singing. I used Suno, an AI app, to take the lyrics and generate a bunch of variations – all in a rock & roll direction but with some tweaks on other styles to get something nice that didn’t sound like everyone else. I think it turned out fantastic.

Anyway, let me know what you think about all this. And if you liked the song, I’d especially appreciate hearing that as my wife thinks it’s too loud and fast. We kind of all need to tell her how wrong she is about that.

Till next time,

When you need a little encouragement from Hemingway…

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Yeah, I had a pretty miserable week last week. Not a great time to be in airports, honestly, this time of year when everybody’s trying to squeeze in their last trip to Disney World or whatever and storms…airlines that delay their flights in spoonfuls till it’s midnight and they’re still telling you to be patient. Not worth getting into details, but it was a lot of frustration getting stranded not once – but twice. And that on top of a very tiring week of nuisances and long work days.

So after 9 hours of conference calls Friday from a Phoenix hotel where I hadn’t planned on staying, I checked the American Airlines app for my boarding pass only to see yet more delays. Calling them was useless as they didn’t see how to get me to Kansas City any earlier than 12 – 14 hours later, and that with two more cities. A drooling clown wouldn’t accept such an answer, so I hopped on the shuttle anyway in hopes that the ticket counter or my corporate travel person would work miracles for me.

“I hope those planes take off”, the shuttle driver says.

“What do you mean?” I didn’t like the ambiguity of his comment.

He shook his head, “Well, they ground the planes at 110 degrees.”

It was around noon as he’s saying this, so it will only get hotter. I didn’t want to ask the question but I had to know.

“What is it now?”

“106.” His tone wasn’t understanding or even sympathetic. He just said it like he was amusing himself with a factoid about why pine cones are brown.

Anyway, I did manage a better and direct flight. As I got to my seat, I realized I was entirely drained from the week. I’m not usually one to need encouragements or helpful quotes, or even to need another person to say anything to me. I’m the “soldier on” type of person that just needs to know whatever it is that needed done is done. But man, I was tired and pissed off.

For whatever reason, I wanted to hear from Ernest Hemingway.

His macho philosophies soothe me. I have said before here that I have read everything the man ever wrote. I like his style. So I described a bit of my week for ChatGPT and had it act at Hemingway to give me a little encouragement. Here’s what Papa said to me:

“Listen to me now. You’re beat to hell and the world’s thrown its punches. Delays, noise, people with soft hands and loud mouths. You’ve walked through it on two hours of sleep with your head still up. That counts.

You don’t need a speech. You need a drink of water, a quiet place, and to know this: you’ve already done what most men can’t. You endured. Not prettily, maybe, but you endured. That’s what matters.

There are days when the sun is too hot and the wind is too hard and everything stinks of cheap perfume and worse decisions. But you’re still here. That means something. It means you’re dangerous to whatever tries to break you.

So go ahead—rest your eyes when you can, and when you’re ready, pick up your tools, your pen, your hammer, your whatever-you-damn-well-use, and go back at it. Not because it’s easy. Because it’s yours.

And if they doubt you—those people who smile like sharks and don’t know what it means to stay standing when you’re dead tired—well, let them. You’re not made for their approval. You’re made of grit, bone, and something no one can take.

Now go on. Breathe. You’ll write this week off like a bad novel and start again. Clean page. Strong line. Go bite next week in the throat.”

*

Now, believe it or not, that helped quite a bit. Honestly. I liked it.

So I thought, what the heck. This puts me in the mood for a new Hemingway short story. I wanted to read something from the old master that was in his voice, stayed true to his philosophy, and that bore certain elements to which I could relate just then.

With surprisingly little coaxing, it produced an emotional, impactful story with a punch to your heart buried at its core that I didn’t give it as input at all. It’s called “The Line and the Light”, portraying an aspiring pen & ink artist in Kansas City who is grieving deeply and trying to process that grief through his art. Smash the cover button below to read it. Won’t take long, and might actually carry some meaning for you.

That’s what I wanted to offer you today. I’m curious what you think about the story.

Till next time,

A creator of souls and the original literary universe

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I’ve written here on Grailrunner before about how interesting 19th century French fiction can be – in that case, the haunting tales of Guy de Maupassant who went entirely insane but wrote great stories about it. And I’ve mentioned here before how fascinating a concept it is to me, the imaginative construction of a fabricated world in all its intricate detail – in that case, the review of Pfitz, by Andrew Crumey. I suppose if all I wanted to discuss today was a complete fictional world I would just direct you to Harn, which if you don’t know what that is, you should probably go check that out.

But I thought instead I’d try and make something more accessible for you than maybe it would be otherwise. Something incredible in its design and execution, audacious in its ambitions, and a work of literature that stands among the finest we have.

The Human Comedy by Honore de Balzac.

“I thought you talked about science fiction and fantasy here – what is this?”

Easy there. There are some incredible points to admire here, so it’s worth taking in a few paragraphs to see what all the fuss is about. As always with Grailrunner, our aim is to study and fuel the imaginative process, so anything we can learn or use as inspiration is fair game.

“OK, so what’s it about?”

It’s a series of 91 inter-connected works (novels, novellas, and short stories) intended to depict the entire spectrum of French society after the fall of Napoleon, with the scope and ambition of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

If you’ll allow me a little Google-Fu:

Here’s how Balzac explained his vision for The Human Comedy:

  • A “history of manners”: Balzac intended to be a “secretary” transcribing the “history” of society, focusing on “moeurs” (customs, manners, and morals) – something he believed hadn’t been fully attempted by previous historians. He sought to go beyond surface events and reveal the underlying causes of social phenomena.
  • A comparison to Dante’s Divine Comedy: While his title alludes to Dante’s work, Balzac focused on the worldly, human concerns of a realist novelist rather than a theological framework.
  • Observing and depicting “social species”: Balzac’s inspiration came from comparing humanity to the animal kingdom, recognizing that society modifies individuals based on their environment, creating distinct “social species” similar to those in zoology. He aimed to depict these social species in their entirety, not just as abstract types, but as “real, living men”.
  • The power of storytelling: Balzac, a master storyteller, was fascinated by the power of stories and the dynamics of human interaction around shared narratives.
  • Social structures and human nature: Balzac’s work is grounded in sociology, exploring the complexities of human beings and the deep-seated immorality within social mechanisms that often favor the corrupt over the vulnerable. He believed society, while having the capacity to improve individuals, also exacerbates their negative tendencies.
  • The transformative power of societal change: Balzac documented the significant changes happening in France during his time, including the rise of the bourgeois class and the clash between traditional and modern values.
  • Psychological depth and individual experience: Balzac emphasized the importance of psychological insights and the influence of social context and personal experiences on character development. He aimed to create characters with a wide range of human qualities, both positive and negative.
  • Realism and naturalism: Balzac was a pioneer of literary realism, using extensive detail and observation to portray society accurately. His meticulous descriptions of settings and objects bring the characters’ lives to life, and some critics even consider his work to have influenced the development of naturalism. 

In essence, Balzac sought to create a comprehensive and insightful portrayal of 19th-century French society and the human condition within that context. His focus on the interplay between individuals and their social environment, the complexities of human motivation, and the power of societal forces has had a profound and lasting impact on literature. 

“Wow, man. That sounds boring. Why are you so jazzed about it?”

I get that – I really do. What first caught my attention many years ago about Balzac was a comment I read that hit me like a ton of bricks. I don’t even remember what article or book I was reading, but when I came across this statement, it felt very much like one of those transformative ideas that has enough gasoline to in some small way alter the trajectory of your life. And though I struggled mightily in the past to unlock just what that writer was talking about with The Human Comedy, I’ve thought about this quote many times since that day I first read it.

“Balzac ranks along with Dickens and Shakespeare as a creator of souls.”

A “creator of souls”. Wow. As a writer, I really…really…needed to understand what that looks like and how to engineer it in my own writing. What exactly was the magic that people like Shakespeare, Dickens and this Balzac person were sprinkling into the pages that brought their characters to eternal life in our minds? What made their creations arise from the page like that to merit their author being granted a title like that?

“What did you find out?”

I tried to dip in somewhere among the 91 works over the years and found out nothing at all. I read some quotes from Balzac himself on his ambition and design and came away more confused than before on what he trying to do exactly. So it sat as a potentially cool idea, idle. I didn’t know where to start or how to make it mean anything to me.

Then I picked up this at a used bookstore in Hilton Head last week:

Cool cover. Caught my attention. Made me remember the promise of learning what a 19th century French writer did to earn a mention along Dickens and Shakespeare. And it made me curious enough to give him another shot.

Hold that thought. There was one more key to this.

A year or so ago, I completed a big project studying Tolkien’s published works and letters to try and determine the likely plot of a sequel the professor started to write to Lord of the Rings. The second part analyzed and speculated on that plot, but the first part attempted to make The Silmarillion accessible to people who found it dense and incomprehensible by providing a bread crumb trail of important points and people to follow in it. That process was super helpful to me in trying to do exactly the same thing with Tolkien that I sought to do this week with The Human Comedy.

“What does the book from Hilton Head have to do with that?”

It was a comment in the introduction that made the difference, actually. Here’s what it said:

“Early in his career, Balzac began to search for a method of organizing into a single unit, into a vast novelistic structure, the whole of his literary production. The device he hit upon was a simple one, but one that required sustained genius and power to an extraordinary degree, namely the systematic reappearance of characters from novel to novel.” -Edward Sullivan, Princeton University

That made it click. In the early 80’s, it’s one of the things that fascinated me most about the Marvel comic universe – that Peter Parker (Spider Man) hung out with Johnny Storm from the Fantastic Four, that they might run across Doctor Strange or Matt Murdock (Daredevil) outside a coffee shop. It made the whole tapestry of the marvel superheroes come weirdly and wonderfully to life for me. The cinematic version made efforts towards that magic, but it fell far short for me in those movies of how it made me feel as a kid with their paper and ink versions.

Now with Balzac’s Human Comedy, I saw that he aimed for exactly that kind of magic. The works weren’t sequels or a continuous narrative, but much like the Marvel characters or any other literary universe with which you might be familiar, these folks can encounter or otherwise know each other…a background character from one novel might rise to main protagonist of their own.

“So you dipped in, then. Which book did you start with?”

I read Father Goriot because I usually come across that one in bookstores. I figured it must be a big deal. Anyway, I finished a Murakami novel on a plane and had the entire Human Comedy on the Kindle – I thought if it sucked, I could just move on to something else anyway. But I wanted to test the magic and see if I could unlock whatever was amazing there.

The breadcrumb characters I discovered in that wonderful book are old Goriot himself, a young man named Eugène de Rastignac (pictured above), Goriot’s daughters Delphine and Anastasie, and a mysterious agitator named Vautrin. By “breadcrumb”, what I mean is there are many other folks in this book – it’s just that if you pay particular attention to what these particular people are up to, you’ll experience the storyline the way it’s intended.

“And?”

Marvelous book! Despite 19th century social order tropes and customs (which hold none of my interest), the characters indeed sizzle and pop off the page, and I was flipping like mad towards the end to see what became of poor Goriot and the kind-hearted Rastignac, whether Goriot’s ungrateful daughters would do the right thing, and whether Vautrin would get his comeuppance. If you plan to read this one for yourself, stay away from plot summaries so the outcomes will be a mystery for you to fuel the page turning. Just stay close to Rastignac, and he’ll lead you through the book.

In fact, luckily, it turns out Rastignac is one of the main recurring characters of The Human Comedy overall. What’s up next for me now that I really like that guy is to read The House of Nucingen where, I understand already, he will likely disappoint me and turn out to be all too realistic of a person.

“So what was the magic that led Balzac to be a ‘creator of souls’?”

Yeah, he nailed that. As I learned more about Goriot, and information about him is only spooned out across the first half of the book so it’s gradual, I thought of how Dickens took relatable and universal archetypes like an abandoned orphan (Pip) or a cruel miser (Scrooge) or the eternally naïve optimist (Mister Pickwick) and constructed memorable people from them. In The Pickwick Papers, for example, Winkle is the obsessed sportsman, Snodgrass is the terrible poet, Tupman is forever falling in love, and Jingle is the grinning con man. They’re relatable traits, and we probably know people like that. That’s the string a good writer plucks, then builds the character around that.

I knew a guy named Reuben once. He was always running around the factory like he was super busy, carrying one of those metal clipboards that conceal the papers inside. I thought once I’d follow him to see where he was running around, because it wasn’t that big of a factory, and it turned out he was just circling the place. I watched him idly kick and poke a pallet of boxes once for a good five minutes. We were in a staff meeting, and he’d made a big mistake with a big client – the manager was furious. When Reuben was asked about it, he cracked open that mysterious clipboard and started madly flipping through the papers inside as if looking for something therein that would resolve how this could have happened. I leaned over to see it was just his mail in there.

We started calling it “pulling a Reuben” when somebody acted too busy if asked to do something. He became immortal right there and then. Forever after, we could reference him as standing in for a role that likely appears wherever there are people doing things.

Balzac’s Goriot is a father who sacrifices everything he has and everything he is for his ungrateful daughters. He becomes the idea of a prototypical father, the archetype, presented in this wonderful book for our consideration of whether he is in fact a good father or not. That’s for us to decide, and I wonder whether we in today’s society would have a different answer than Balzac intended. You might say that “pulling a Goriot” is to sacrifice everything for your kids. He personified that action.

“Boil it down for me. What gave Balzac’s work in ‘The Human Comedy’ the magic?”

Let’s ask him. If you feed all available writings by Balzac as well as commentaries about his work into an AI chatbot and ask it to pose as him, you can get an answer in his voice generating a likely and believable response. I did that, presenting the question as follows: “You’ve been called a ‘creator of souls’. Why do you think that is, and how did you accomplish such a feat?”

His response:

“Ah! Mon cher ami, if they call me a créateur d’âmes, it is because I have listened—truly listened—to the silent confessions of humanity. In every withered banker, every vain young dandy, every trembling grisette, I saw not caricatures, but souls struggling—with ambition, with poverty, with love, with the machinery of a society that crushes and tempts in equal measure.

How did I accomplish it? I observed. Not idly, not with the detachment of a philosopher in his armchair, but with the ravenous appetite of a man who must know. I prowled Paris and the provinces with my eyes open and my ears tuned to the gossip of salons, the groans of debtors, the sighs of lovers, and the mutterings of the criminal class. I drank deeply from the cup of human vice and virtue—and recorded its every drop.

But to observe is not enough. I gave them destiny. My characters live because I allowed them to want—to desire with such intensity that the reader cannot help but be drawn into their orbit. Rastignac climbs like smoke; Vautrin burns like coal; Eugénie Grandet freezes like a saint in a gilded prison. Each soul is born of contradiction and circumstance, but above all—of will.

I did not invent souls; I uncovered them. Like a miner of men, I delved into the strata of class, of power, of inheritance, of chance—and from those pressures, I carved the diamonds and the dross that make up La Comédie Humaine. That is why they live. That is why they endure. I did not merely write them—I lived them.

So if I am called a creator of souls, it is only because I believed that no man, however minor or monstrous, is without one. And I gave them the stage they were so long denied.”

*

Till next time,

A friend I lost years ago left me his lyrics – now here are the songs

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You might think today’s topic is a bit heavy, but it really isn’t. It’s transformative, is what it is! Honestly, I did a thing with AI tools recently that blew me away. It was an experiment that has blasted daylight into a world of opportunity that can send your imagination soaring if you let it.

Welcome back to a series we call “Conversations from the Abyss”, where we use AI tools to stage new dialogues or honor creators of the past. The songs here are being made available for free – nobody’s selling you anything with this.

Back in 2017, I wrote this memorial post for a dear friend of mine who I lost to depression. He fought it hard, but he lost. And we lost something magical with that guy, I promise you. That isn’t my point today, though. Not really. His name was Tim, though we called him Droopy because his voice sounded like that cartoon dog when he spoke.

Anyway, Tim wrote lyrics. Great ones, if I’m honest. I tried too, but he showed me up because mine were always too out-there, too audacious and unrelatable, too philosophical. I was always trying to “say something” or break some kind of ground, and in the end, he’d show up with a song about wanting to take an old convertible to Florida and everybody would love it. We would jam on guitar at his house, and he’d riff crazy lyrics about girls and beaches and highways…and it was amazing.

So I’m a few posts deep into this series of AI experiments, and it got me thinking about whether I could dig around in some crates and find something Tim wrote back in the day to bring to life with the help of some AI tools. And sure enough, buried in a pile of college papers and useless memorabilia in the basement, I found this:

For the youthful among you – that’s a tape. You recorded stuff onto it with ancient witchcraft. In this case, my friend had gifted me in 1994 a thing as I was going off to the Navy that now has become one of the most precious pieces of my life’s treasures. He recorded 14 original songs on an album he titled Crush, and dedicated it to me and to someone named Amie who I never met. (I was the Pope – don’t ask).

I learned not to close my eyes as I listened to it, because it felt way too much like being back in his room playing guitar and getting lost in music with one of my dearest friends. I can’t really do that right now. Maybe never.

But what I DID do was amazing. I picked two of them and brought them to life with Suno, an AI application that generates songs from your lyrics and other direction. Tim would have been horrified to see his words in a country song, but that’s my little joke and he can deal with it. For my part, I think they’re incredible. I remember him singing ’59 Ford Fairlane Convertible in my dorm room, and I believe I know who April was (the girl from the second song).

How about you do me a favor then? If this topic has at all intrigued you, or if anything I’ve ever written on Grailrunner has brought you even a moment of diversion, would you do me a great favor and listen?

My friend, Tim would appreciate it.

Smash the buttons. Let me know what you think.

A resurrected Harlan Ellison helps settle the question of shock value in storytelling

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Harlan would hate this. With a bullet. But it’s happening.

We’re making hay while the sun shines, trying out a premium ChatGPT subscription and bringing all sorts of people back to life or mashing them together into alternate realities for our entertainment. And honestly, some of these simulations of literary or artistic geniuses are surprisingly accurate to how they thought and spoke. So far, we’ve hosted a hilarious debate about conciseness in storytelling with Stephen King, Hemingway, Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Professor Tolkien, George R.R. Martin, and Homer called Verbosity & Vine and had Professor Tolkien write a new 2,000 word King Arthur short story with an evil grail titled The Black Chalice of Broceliande. There is absolutely going to be a Seinfeld Season 10 post at some point, once I pipe Modern Seinfeld prompts into ChatGPT and let the horses run.

Anyway, welcome to a series we call:

Since the King versus Hemingway debate wound up so funny, we thought it would be a hoot to smash some more genius creators together and have them argue the merit of shock value in storytelling. To remind everyone: our policy at Grailrunner is to consider AI as powerful tools but to always call out their usage. This is for pure entertainment. Nobody’s selling you anything here.

This simulated argument was entirely written by AI with prompts from us, but really took on a life of its own. We decided who joined the conversation, and some of those choices really wound up fantastic. In fact, things really surprised us when we had Professor Tolkien join this conversation as well, as he kind of cleaned everyone’s clock on the matter at hand and got suddenly inspiring. That just happened – we can’t take credit for it! Ellison, at least for our part, stole the show though.

The conversation is called Fire Beneath the Ink:

Key players (all deceased) from left to right are:

Professor J. R. R. Tolkien – author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy and master craftsman of worldbuilding.

Harlan Ellison – a fiercely imaginative and outspoken American writer known for his prolific work in speculative fiction, particularly short stories, television scripts, and essays that challenged social norms and literary conventions. Also one of the finest writers to ever punch a typewriter.

Antonin Artaud – a radical French dramatist, poet, and theorist best known for developing the Theatre of Cruelty, which sought to shock audiences into confronting the deeper truths of human existence. He once threw meat at his audience.

Charles Dickens – a celebrated English novelist and social critic whose vividly drawn characters and dramatic storytelling captured the struggles and injustices of Victorian society. Nobody has ever been better at generating pathos and character empathy than this guy.

Jonathan Swift – an Irish satirist, essayist, and clergyman best known for his sharp wit and scathing critiques of politics and society, particularly in works like Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal.

Random? Maybe a little. They all seemed to suit the topic at hand though, and Artaud and Harlan got along famously! See for yourself by smashing the cover button below!

So funny! We hope you enjoyed the debate. Somehow, it was nice to hear from Harlan again, and with him in good humor, poking at people and enjoying himself. If you’re familar with him at all, surely you see how much he would loathe this entire idea and likely drive to my house and tell me so.

And what about that Professor?! Did you get tingles at the end? We sure did.

Anyway, come back often and check on us. We’re unleashing the creative hordes here.

Till next time,