Exhausted after a sleepless Saturday-Sunday night, not from worry but from writing ideas and plot problems that kept swirling in my head, I nevertheless dragged myself to church that stormy morning, a thirty-minute drive. Rain pelted my car and wind howled. Ordinarily, I’d have gone home after church, but my pastor called a special meeting with us lay leaders. Thus, I stayed with a friend till meeting time … and got little rest.

Upon my return home that evening, I found an urgent message in my email’s inbox. My sister’s message was brief: my brother-in-law’s farm suffered a direct hit from an EF4 tornado, the second strongest category of these storms and equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane (the worst).

My nephew, his two sons, and their dog were there when the storm hit. Thankfully, they hid in the farmhouse’s closet, except for their dog who refused to join them. They all survived. According to my brother-in-law, the storm’s eye came within one hundred yards of the house. Had it come any closer, my nephews might have perished. I’m grateful to the Lord for protecting them.

What does this have to do with writing? Priorities. I put aside my writing for a while in order to help my family clean up from the storm. Though writing should be near the top of our list if we’re serious about it, as Christians, we cannot make it an idol. Church attendance, Bible study, worship, prayer and family should always come first, in addition to sacrificing our time to help others. So, make writing a priority, yes, but be careful not to make it an idol.

In the “good ole days,” when working on the characters for my novels, I often used a sheet listing things such as hair color, eye color, build, etc. As far as physical descriptions go, these sheets served me well. They helped me keep them consistent throughout the book. However, with the advent of AI, I now draw them.

Here’s what I do. I ask AI to draw a character based on the description I give it. For example, in my current work-in-progress, one of my main characters is a young, mischievous nineteenth-century Southern belle named Martha. I told AI that I wanted her to have red hair, green eyes, and a mischievous smile. The picture shown here is AI’s result.

For another example, I gave AI the description of a setting based on the details I found in my research. In the picture below, the setting is the market in the Northern prisoner-of-war camp in Elmira, New York. Confederate prisoners often used tobacco as currency. True, I have period photographs of this prison, but I did not find any photograph that showed the market. So, this drawing helped.

Why not give it a try and see if it works for you?