Music Notes

The Bard's Hall, June 2025, Entry 4

Ẃeβ࿚Ẃỉtcĥ StephBee "The Bard's Hall Contest" 

Ever since I had a smartphone, I was using Google Docs to stash notes on my dream novel. I had everything in my head that I wanted, and I scribbled down character studies, themes, worldview, plot points, settings, sample scenes, and even goofy little things like a pop song ringtone and make and model of car for each character. I collected stock photos and pictures of actors that looked like my characters. Even the heroine's dog, Barkley, became embodied in a stuffed Wire Fox Terrier. I did everything except write the novel

I was always interested in designing my own book covers, and made myself a bunch of amateur digital collages which were more like concept boards than anything else. In those days the novel was called It Takes Courage.

In 2017, though, my novel obsession was pushed aside by my music obsession. I grew and matured and learned so much about the world, that when I peeked back into my old Google Doc a few years later, I was rather embarrassed at how naive and simplistic I had been.

So the novel returned to its place in my head, where I lived in the ever evolving yet steadily looping world I'd created in a way similar to Peter Pan's Neverland. It was always in the back of my head to write it someday.

One of the fun things I did in 2023, prior to joining WdC, was to install the Novelist app on my brand new Galaxy phone. If I remember correctly, I did so because I had installed Hoopla and read some fiction for the first time in several years, and it had reignited my novel dream.

My attempt at using the app petered out soon enough, but with a fresh look at committing my same old novel ideas once again to words on a screen, I gave it a new title: All My Secrets Away, inspired by the chorus of the 2007 OneRepublic song Secrets.

With the new title came a desire for a new book cover. I realized by now that a square, collage style image wasn't especially professional. This novel rehash was during my AI art obsession, so naturally I turned to Wombo Dream to help me make a cover.

In those days, AI art was generally super primitive, only beginning to rise out of a “primordial slime” of abstract blobs and swirls. I played around with prompts and settled for an approximation of a hand held up, sending off a flock of birds.



As you can see, it was an awfully sloppy image, but I liked the concept and how it related to the revealing of secrets.

So… after WdC, I discovered I didn't really want to write a novel at all. Apparently what I thrive at is short stories. I've spent the past two years honing my writing skills, moving away from my old constantly looping Neverland into a vastly more interesting and mentally healthy space.

Recently, though, it occurred to me that using today's advanced language model AIs, specifically ChatGPT, I would now be able to create a far more professional book cover exactly to my specifications. I could even have it add the title, without needing to bring the image file into a conventional photo editor to add text like in “the old days.”

So that's what I did. The image ChatGPT gave me is precisely what I wanted and what I described to it. The process was simple; the ability to write conversationally instead of in the brusque way the dedicated AI art generators expect is a huge improvement.



So… yeah. Two covers of a novel I will probably never write, but that occupied my headspace for a number of years. It grew with me, matured with me, and when I no longer needed it in my head, it was tucked away into various corners of my Google suite.

Here also, OneRepublic's Secrets

Words: 660.