A Busy Couple Of Months!

 Hi Guys,

Blurb:

Brian had too many problems in his life. Living the life of someone in witness protection was never easy. The rules were hard. Never tell anyone your true name. Never engage in personal relationships – they were a trap. And never forget who you were supposed to be. And he always followed the rules. Or he had. But after fifteen years in hiding, things were starting to slip. He was forming personal attachments. There was a girl he liked. And some days he almost forgot he was in hiding!

Then his family, the people he had put away for life, got out of jail!

Medea wasn't finding the life of a constable with the Fijian Police Force that easy either. Constable it turned out, was another term for dogsbody. The detectives treated her like a slave. Her bosses screamed at her. And there was absolutely no respect! Still she put up with it.

But when somebody started murdering tourists on the island and leaving body parts everywhere, their real problems began!

Blurb:

Having a gift was cool. Magic was cool. Krys loved it. He loved being a druid. But he didn't love everything else that came with it. Like being a member of the Assembly. Having to attend the monthly forums. Being bossed around by the watchers. And never being able to reveal his true nature to anyone.

Callista held similar views. Especially after the watchers had not only demanded all of those things of her, but had stolen her money and her mansion as well! They'd forced her into the life of an indentured servant! And now they seemed to actually want to make her into a watcher! All because of a little bit of fraud! Honestly the normals would never have found out about it!

It just wasn't fair!

Then one day a teenage boy started flying around New York, and none of that mattered. The only thing that did matter was keeping their secret lives, secret! Before the witch burnings began!

Sorry it's been a while since my last post. But I have been a little bit engrossed in my writing. And now I have two books out to show for it. (Covers and blurbs above!) So not a terrible start to the year. And hopefully there'll be a few more out in the not-too-distant future as well. And yes, Freaksville is on that list, currently going through its third edit.

The covers as usual are the creations of Deep Dream (all hail our AI overlords!) with me just adding a few tweaks and titles etc. And I have to say that while it's a frustrating program, often spewing out results that don't resemble anything like what I asked for, when it gets things right it gets them even better than I could have hoped for!

Anyway, I'm proud of these two books, and busy, losing myself in writing several others as usual. But I will try to update my blog more often in the future (and hopefully apologize less for my failures in doing so as well!

Hope you're all enjoying this new year, and I wish you all the best.

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.

 

 

Enjoying Some Down Time - On The Couch!!!

 Hi Guys,

Been a little while since I posted anything - mostly because I put my back out about three weeks ago and haven't been able to do much in the way of sitting, standing or walking since then. It's no fun having a back that goes out more often that you do!

However the good news is that I have been writing - lying on a couch and tapping away on my laptop which my back seems to be okay with. And I expect my next book should be out shortly. It's another detective - Hobson's Choice - which I'm just finishing off now. 

 Mostly what I'm doing is tweaking the dialogue of one of the characters who is Tahitian and likes to mangle not just the English language but French as well. You'd think this would be easy for me as after two years of failing to learn French at college, my French teacher was glad to see the back of me. But it seems that in order to mangle French properly you should probably know how to speak it first! (I think it may be a little bit late for that in my case!)

I've also picked up a couple of words of Tahitian as well writing this, but I keep wondering when I read the correct pronunciations of the words, whether I should try writing them phonetically. Because the way they're written doesn't match at all with they way they're said!

Other than that the book is basically finished, and two others, Druid and Freaksville, are in the editing process, so hopefully won't be that far away - if I can ever stop starting new books!

Anyway that's my life at the moment. Hope things are doing better with you guys.

Cheers, Greg.

DRUID

 Hi Guys,

Just to let you guys know that I am actually working and the first draft of DRUID is now complete and the revisions / edits are underway.

Druid is a basic urban fantasy and the tattoos are a part of the magic of the man - Krys Ingrim. In fact in this world all those with magic can only use it by shaping the gift within them through markings painted on their bodies - which makes it kind of tricky to hide what you are from the rest of the world if people know that secret! Of course the background to the story is that the secret gets out and the magical have to try and keep their heads down while battling a traitor within their own number and an international intelligence agency wanting to utilize their gifts. 

The story is set in Rotorua, New Zealand and the main protagonist lives not that far from my door. Just on the other side of the lake in fact - a place called Haumarana. So be warned, there are some Maori names in the work which are going to sound odd to non-kiwi ears. (The spell checkers didn't like them either - and some of the auto-corrections were hilarious! Haumarana for example they believe should be either maharani or amaranth - neither of which I'd ever heard of before.)

Meanwhile Freaksville is still in process. I've reached the final chapters and love the story but can't quite figure out what the ending is. (Oh the joys of being a pantster!) But I will keep working on it and I'm hopeful it will be out shortly.

As always I hope you're all doing well and keeping out of trouble - or not getting caught!

Cheers, Greg.