RUN!

 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.

Happy New Year!

 Hi Guys,

So new year - old problems!

As you may have noticed another book got published right at the end of last year - and strangely enough it wasn't Druid! Those of you who read my posts will know that this is nothing out of the ordinary. I get side tracked and things happen. Which is more or less exactly what happened to me, yet again.

So "The Hunt" is out. Another Detective / Police Procedural / Mystery which follows some well-worn themes - like someone needing to use extreme plastic surgery to escape her would be killers, but handles them in a new way. But it also has some new plot points, new locales, and a much more hard-bitten hero. (The only one who comes with his own armored car and an arsenal!) He also has a somewhat more jaundiced view of the world. And yes - this time I let the bad guys destroy the world! (Just a little bit! But you know - the bad guys just lose so much - they need a little reward every now and then!)

Oh, and the cover as you can probably guess comes from Deep Dream. (Long may our AI overlords rule over us!)

So here's the blurb:

Once she had been Chrissy Fuller – cover model. Then she had become Chrissy Gordon – abused wife. And now she was Brittany Holder – terrified. Fleeing for her life after shooting her husband. Desperate enough to take any risk.

Icarus West meanwhile had always been a soldier. Now he just used his skills as a private detective to recover what was missing. People and property. But little could he know when he was asked to find Harry Gordon's missing wife, that it would lead to disaster. He just knew the guy was bad. That he meant to do his runaway wife harm. And that he couldn't take the case.

But actions have consequences. So does inaction. And sometimes those consequences were completely unpredictable!

Both Brittany and West were stepping into a world they just didn't understand! Where nothing was as it seemed! But one that could kill them both if they made a single mistake!

Hope you enjoy and have a great new year.

Cheers, Greg.

Druid's Almost Ready For Publishing

Hi Guys,

To begin with I thought I'd let you know that Druid is now almost ready to roll off the presses. It's an urban fantasy that will hopefully be out in time for Christmas after just a little more editing.

The other thing I wanted to tell you is that that image you see at the top of the post is me - sort of! (Or it could be me if I shed twenty years, a hundred pounds, got to the gym a lot more, grew some designer stubble, maybe used a little hair dye, and underwent some plastic surgery,) Really, it's a dead ringer for me! At least Deep Dream seems to think as much.

The reason I wanted to show you this, is that this was a fun experiment which I only thought of the other day and tried out simply to see what would happen. And it's amazing! Normally when I use Deep Dream I use only a written command prompt, and often get some very random images. The people it comes up with might not be very representative of the instructions I gave the program or the image in my head. But if you add a photo as a reference, you tend to get something far truer to the image. And then it occurred to me - what if I began with a photo of myself?!

So, I tried it, using a minimal command prompt and a photo and got something that was of course a supermodel twenty year old guestimate of me. And while it was pretty, I really couldn't see a lot of myself in it. But by adding a little to the command prompt description and playing with the parameters I got the above - which is probably fifty percent me and fifty percent the AI's built-in biases for young and beautiful people. And it's truly strange and amazing and awesome to look at it and see something that's almost me. A little like staring into the uncanny valley! (And then for variety, I started using some of the other engines on Deep Dream like photoreal, fantasy and artistic and got even more weird and whacky versions!) It's been a blast!

And yes, I know, AI is terrible, and all the machines are going to rise up and destroy us shortly, but damn - some of it is worth the ride towards the apocalypse!

So I think my point here, is to recommend to all of you that you try the same experiment with photos of yourselves and whichever AI you use and see what comes out. It's just so damned much fun!

Anyway, that's just my two cents worth, and I hope you take it for what it's worth. I'll also try to put out another post before the end of the year. (Maybe I'll even try to hit the gym again too now that I know what I could almost be like if I really, really, really work at it!) And in the meantime, as usual, be good or don't get caught.

Cheers, Greg.