Author: marylowd

Illustrating “Summers on Sylverra”

The advances in AI these last few years have been truly magical, the absolute best thing that have happened during my lifetime.

For this piece, I experimented with pasting the whole damn story into ChatGPT & asking it to come up with an illustration. It took a lot of editing to fix it up right, but DALLE3 captured the heart of the story on its first try! And it complimented my world-building! So, win-win. Continue reading “Illustrating “Summers on Sylverra””

The Girl Who Could Hear the Stars Sing

by Mary E. Lowd

Originally published in Beyond Wespirtech, November 2023

“If the stars had chosen her — somehow — to be their scribe, then it was not for her to turn the role down.”

It was so beautiful that the weight of it made her feel weak inside.  She cried, and no one knew why.  No one else could hear the music.  But Brianna could hear it inside.

Brianna’s parents didn’t understand.  They thought their child simply had an artistic sensitive soul, and perhaps, she was unusually susceptible to sunstroke.  They tried to keep her inside on sunny days, especially in the middle of the summer.  But Brianna craved the sun.  It made her cry, but it also made her giggly and manic.  Sunlight could make her happier than anything else — that voice whispering in her heart, rising and falling, raising expectations, holding out a moment longer than she thought she could stand, and then resolving.  The music Brianna heard was the fabric of her life. Continue reading “The Girl Who Could Hear the Stars Sing”