Hi Guys,
As you may have noticed I've been offline for a while now. No great mystery about it I'm afraid - I put my back out about three or four weeks ago, and haven't been able to stand, walk or sit down for any length of time since then. I'm really annoyed about it - long time ago I had a physio tell me that once you pass fifty the frequency of back seizures decreases. Haven't noticed it! And in fact the last couple of seizures have been the worst I've had in years!
Any way the good news is that while I've been offline I have still been writing - by virtue of lying on a couch and typing on a laptop on a coffee table! And as a consequence, I have managed to complete the rough draft of another mystery / detective. The title is Run, and I think the cover will be based on the image above. It still needs to be edited and revised so publication will be a little way off.
Actually I've written two, but the other one - Model Behavior - won't be published for a good while as it falls back into too many old tropes of mine. (The cover might be a little racy too!)
And sadly, I've also been spending a lot of time watching Youtube videos - including a lot of short stories. The one thing I have noticed - most of them appear to be AI generated. Oddly they don't just have the same plots, they have the same character names which spring up again and again. For example, I don't know how many different space navy officers and scientists named so and so Chen - but if that's your name it looks like your career path is already sorted! Congrats!
Also why does every spaceship in a battle decide to do "jinking"? (I think it's a typo that's somehow been cut and pasted by every AI program out there. You'd think that one of them would have the sense to read a dictionary - unless of course jinking has been added to it!)
The other thing that keeps popping up are the repeated variations of whole sections of text, as if someone decided to rewrite a section, add a few lines here and there to it, and then just pasted it in without cutting the old section. It's really strange and somewhat disconcerting. But then again, maybe that's simply my editing eye coming out. That's one of the consequences of becoming a writer and editing so much of your work - you can't read anything else without picking up issues.
Anyway, that's where I'm at, and hope to have Run out by the time I next update the blog. And I hope you guys are having a better time health wise than me!
Cheers, Greg.
