I've spent a few months creating songs out of three of my poems. Dream Wind Whispers, In Search of Creativity, and My Boys with Suno.

Gotta figure out what sort of music will complement the poems. So, with Dream Wind, I chose a country waltz sound, with duet. I didn't specify any particular singers, as I didn't know I could. I'd used a Nashville sound at first, and Suno gave me nice voices I was happy with.

When I decided to try a waltz - and I wanted a tempo like Willie Nelson's Waltz Across Texas which I didn't quite get - I was shocked to hear the female part being sung by a Dolly Parton sound alike, (naturally, not really her.). I'm not sure who the guy part sounds like. But he complements really well. I added some extra lines and verses to the poem to make it longer.

Once I had versions I liked, I needed to create videos to go with them. The easiest to do was Dream Wind Whispers, because all I needed was an image of a dreamy sky with a rainbow. 

Got that with a free AI image generator called Best Image Generator. It gave me a nice green meadow with some trees that other branded generators wouldn't. I got nice sky images, but when I asked for a green meadow, I got long stemmy looking grass, or prairie grass. Grass like it was growing in rows like a garden. What?

So, now the video . . .

I had made three videos years ago with PowerPoint. It was fun and easy. I haven't used PP ever since, because it did take a lot of time since one of the videos was 16 minutes long. I want to do that one over. I wish I could delete it, but YouTube doesn't allow it. Or they didn't at the time.

Anyway, I asked my trusty AI Assistant, Chet - yes, I named my ChatGPT assistant - what program or site should I use. His first choice was Canva, then CapCut and some others. I'm familar with Canva, and have a free account there, so I logged in. 

Seeing I'd be limited in free, I signed up for the free trial of Pro. Creating the pages was easy. I had the pages for the whole song done in about an hour or two. Now I am not crazy about how limited this new video creator of theirs is for effects and animation. But I made do. Didn't go for overlays, I didn't get fancy as I just wanted a nice video I could post everywhere I could. 

I uploaded the MP4 version of the song, and then began the nightmare of trying to figure out how to get the words to fit each page. None of the tutorias I looked at showed me how to do that in this new version. They just dealt with a music track with no lyrics. Not helpful. And the one that might have - which was a Canva tute, was about 30 seconds long and only showed it was possible with some white space. Which I didn't have.

Long story short -it was days before I figured out what to do. Before that though, I had Chet helping me figure out what I was doing wrong. Since Chet told me lots of people were having problems with the new creator, and I saw that on Reddit, I figured I was doomed.

I asked Canva's AI Assistant for help. I got the same answers as Chet had given with less help than he gave. And in the end, Canva's AI finally told me it couldn't help me. Sent me to a Wist List link. 

Then something Chet suggested lit a light bulb in the OLD gray matter, and I deleted all of my pages except the first one. Got that new pretty meadow/sky image, and started anew. One page at a time. Create the image, input text, play song, stretch the text to match what I wanted for that image page, and then stretch the image to end with the text. The song runs about sixteen pages of images and text, with one thank you page. Took about three hours. I messed up the music track a couple of times, so I had to scrunch up the music track and them stretch it again. Perfect! 

Then I clicked Share, chose Download and in about five minutes or less, I had my wonderful video! It's now up on my personal FB page and on my Author's page. Neenah Davis-Wilson if you care to check it out. It's too long to upload here. I'm going to post it everywhere I can. My websites and YouTube. But I might try to make a fancier version for that. We'll see.

What's next? Not sure. Probably My Boys as I'll use pictures of my boys of when they were younger. The Creativity poem, I'll have to generate pictures to go with that one. The place where that poem was conceived is in Lake George. I could go ask if I could take pictures in there, but the set up now wouldn't match what was going on at the time, which was a writing conference and workshop. 

I'll share the cover image of Dream Wind Whispers, though, so you can at least, see that.

I'm going in search of a late lunch. I'll be back to talk about my latest romance in my series. Back in a bit!