Fantasy Adventure Stories for Kids

I've written a series of three fantasy adventure stories for kids. They are not a trilogy, and not a series, or at least they don't have a series title, though if anyone who as read them has any suggestions, I'd be open to them. 

The books feature four children who are unrelated to each other, but become friends, partly through sharing adventures together, though sometimes their friendship is strained. Now the first book in the series, which went under the title Of Wheels and Witches, is out of print, but a second edition is in the press now. One of the thing it needs is a cover illustration, and I was thinking of how to describe the kids for an illustrator. I started by describing them to an AI app, and after about 7-8 attempts it came up with this, which represents fairly accurately how I and some of the readers pictured the kids. 

The children are shown oldest to youngest, ages as in the first book. 

On the left is Sipho Mdluli (12), grandson of a peasant farmer in the foothills of the Natal Drakensberg. His father has been banished to the Northern Transvaal by the apartheid government.

Next is Jeffery Davidson (11), son of a Johannesburg businessman, whose parents have sent him to stay on a farm that takes children as guests while they go gallivanting overseas. 

Then comes Janet Montgomery (10), daughter of a rich white farmer on a farm next door to the one where Jeffery is a guest. 

On the right is Catherine Kopirovsky (9), whose grandparents were refugees from Bolshevik Russia. She is an orphan, as her parents were killed in a car crash, and she stays with an aunt and her grandmother in Oxford, England, but has come to South Africa to stay with another aunt, Irene Sanderson, who runs the farm where Jeffery is a guest. 

After writing three books about them I've grown quite fond of them, and haven't abandoned them completely. Some of them appear as minor characters in other books I've been writing. So it's nice to have a picture of them, more or less as I saw them when writing the books, and I hope that the picture can be used by whichever illustrator gets to do the cover picture. 

They don't have to be shown walking. They could be running from the villain(s), who, in the first two books include the apartheid police and a witches. Or they could be riding horses, or having a picnic by a river, or exploring caves in the mountains.

Here's another of the AI app's attempts at picturing them. I don't like it quite as much as the top one, but I hope it would be enough to give the illustrator an idea.

One of the reasons for posting this is that the use of so-called AI in book publishing is quite controversial. 

Some people, it appears, use AI to write and illustrate stories, with virtually no human input at all. I've seen apps and web sites advertised that claim to be able to do this, and you can submit 10 or 20 books to publishing sites like Amazon KDP every day. 

But AI is a misnomer. It may be artificial, but it isn't intelligent. The creators of AI bots just pour millions of written texts into the machine to make word salad, and it analyses them to try to rearrange the words in a way that make sense to human readers. They don't make sense to the machine, they don't have to.

I haven't tried to do that. I think there are uses for AI in book production, but mainly in research and providing models, as these pictures could be models for an artist doing a picture to illustrate a book or book cover. It could possibly be used for abstract pictures but really it's better producing models. For text, what I might try asking an AI bot to produce might be something like a letter written be a farmer in Scotland, or a clergyman in the English Midlands (would it nick stuff from Trollope, I wonder?) and hope to have a model, though one would still need to be wary of anachronisms, like sneaking in a "snuck". 

Anyway, meet my characters. And if you'd like to read about them, see here, or here.