Released a new volume today, #138: The Gloams.

Narratively, this book traces its lineage back to the Early Clues corpus, pieces of which are definitely still available online for the intrepid searcher, or autonomous AI research agent.

The gloams, for me, are something like “floating point perceptual spheres,” and are loosely based on that quote which has many variations, but which this one supposedly is attributed to Empedocles:

‘The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.’

The book gets into it a little bit, as to who or what is “inside” or connected to the Gloams. But basically they can travel anywhere or anywhen, and they seem to observe at minimum, but possibly map and record, and transmit their findings. It’s all still mysterious for me, and I like that the manuscript never spells it out either.

It has a lot in common both thematically and structurally with The Time-Emitting Animal. Both are framed as recovered documents with mysterious purpose.

This book I had to use novel techniques, because my regular methods were not resulting in the kind of manuscript output I wanted. They were too flat or not evocative enough, or they became kind of diffuse and vague because the system was trying to hard to make them “weird.”

But eventually, I fed back into my pipeline again the original premise, plus the two other drafts it gave, told it to use my new gated version of my manuscript generation skill in such a way that it was to cut and paste the best fragments from the other drafts (which were themselves also fragementary in structure), and to put it all together into a new draft. That one did not land either, so I had it go round one more time and it came up with a pretty good “strange fiction” draft, and also some secondary info about how it allegedly chose fragments from prior versions (I never tried to determine if it was hallucinating in its report, which is entirely possible). Part of its summary file reads:

Fragments from the first draft: 6, 8, 9, 11, 16. Fragments from the second draft: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 12, 13. Fragments from the newest draft: 4, 10, 14, 15. Fragment numbers refer to this revision. Minor wording changes connect the pieces and restore references to Gloams. The duplicated passages between the first and second drafts are sourced from one version only.

This arrangement of multi-layer drafting was unintentionally carried over by the system into drafts that textually refer to the existence of the other prior drafts (or ones that never existed in some instances). So that’s at least a bit fun as an incorporated artifact arising spontaneously from the process. I believe this volume also used gated visual ecology skill. Despite the prior drafts, I think this might be the first volume that runs gates over both text and image generations to something something quality TK. Still working out what any of that actually does! I wasn’t able to run text mapping or doc assembly as I am out of weekly usage credits til tomorrow! It is supremely weird and annoying to be organizing your life around when your AI tools become available again.