Tag Archives: Writing

General musings

A little Limbo

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I like Autumn. It’s always been one of my favourite seasons. The occasional storms, the surprise of a late or Indian Summer. First log fire since March. Small pleasures.

Local entertainment has come in the form of Cattle incursions onto our property, which normally has only sufficient grazing for six or seven cattle at a time. A few weeks ago we found twenty five, including a very handsome looking Black Angus bull. Still haven’t worked out how they ended up in our modest acreage. All the fence boundaries are sound, but livestock is like that. Notwithstanding, I made a couple of phone calls, other phone calls were made using a method that would put any grapevine to shame, and the errant animals were retrieved and put back to grazing their allotted meadow.

Writing has been a lower priority since the last post. I have been doing necessary property upgrades, planning travel for next year and building a replacement log and coal store, tidying up the screed in one of our sheds, grass cutting, gardening etcetera.

Then there’s the dentistry. A root canal and subsequent treatments which I have found rather debilitating. Still not finished at the time of writing, dental matters being what they are. We’re been fortunate enough to find a New York trained Dental Hygeinist not too far away, and whatever your opinion of North American medicine (Canadian or US), their dentistry is superb. Our new dentist operates from a modern office in town with state of the art facilities, and despite my anxiety, having suffered the slings and quarrels of UK NHS dentistry, found the experience tolerable and not as uncomfortable as other experiences in the dentists chair.

There’s a new story from the reject pile in the short stories section entitled ‘I scatter Lavender‘. A two thousand and something word length apocalyptic tale about human stupidity and how fear can drive people over the rim of the insanity event horizon. A topic that seems quite relevant in this day and age.

General musings

Progress, of a sort


My yard is once more dry enough to walk across in ordinary shoes for the first time in over two months, one of my bee traps may have caught a swarm (dare I look?), and we’ve had a Summer, instead of the incessant drizzle characterising last year.

We have been graced by a visit from one of the Hares that inhabit my meadows and the ground has drained to the point where my wellingtons are no longer a necessity.

On the physical side, there are fence panels to be moved and fence posts to be pulled, weeding to be done and this Autumns replanting schedule to be planned. And I have begun to write in earnest once more. Only five hundred or so words a day, but that will do for the moment. I am far from the form that let me write around four thousand words a day, but now my time is more organised, that may not be outside the realms of possibility. Still. Baby steps.

‘Darkness between the Stars’ is finally taking a more coherent shape, but still a long way from completion. The narrative had become full of too many stray threads going nowhere and has needed multiple bypass operations to revive it. All in all it’s felt like an exercise in discontinuity. However, progress of a sort is progress, no matter what.

One of the things I will not be doing is using Long Language Modelling to complete the project. Mainly because I feel that using AI to write stories is not only cheating, but pretty low quality cheating at that. Yes, I’ve seen the plethora of AI written videos on YouTube and elsewhere, and the machine writing becomes very obvious within a few sentences. I won’t condemn it out of hand, but despite the quality of English these LLM’s are capable of there’s always something that feels out of tune. To extend the musical metaphor, their word music is technically perfect but just slightly off the beat. A demi quaver of a minim off key. Enough to scrape at the senses like fine sandpaper.

Hence the little symbol (See below) that I will be appending to the site. Just a little logo stating that no LLM or ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was used in the writing or construction of any of my work, such as it is. All the mistakes, typos, and failures of research in my work are entirely my own. The machines cannot replace humans because they lack biological inputs. They don’t have bad days, hangovers, or indigestion. Nor are they prey to all other biological stimuli, both internal and external. Machines cannot look at the moon and see wonder, or be inspired by nature. They lack intuition. Why? Because they are still binary code, unfeeling algorithms. Humans can feel, love, hate, envy, suffer and create. Machines merely make collages. Neat, well constructed collages, fast and precise, but no more than that.

I have heard it said that companies currently betting the farm on AI, having shed human workers to cut costs, are finding that while machines can deal with the mundane and repetitious, like production lines, humans are required as first line problem solvers able to empathise and provide value plus to a business. Which is causing the companies in question to lose out in certain situations. Therefore said companies are having to re-hire employees to fill in the empathy gaps.

Cerberus, Old projects

An object lesson


I was surprised by an email the other day while my head was more focused on worldly matters like leaking water mains and fill in planting for my garden. Apparently some book club had picked up on a work I self published in 2014. They wanted to do an interview.

Now as a writer it’s easy to become a little euphoric at these very rare junctures, On the other hand one should always apply the old axiom ‘If it sounds too good to be true – it probably is.‘ So I replied guardedly and received a second email full of words of admiration, which I felt mildly flattered by. However, there was an offer of graphic design for redesigned book covers and other promotional material. None of which I was interested in.

Then right in the penultimate paragraph there was a little note that there would be a fee for this material, presumably whether I wanted it or not. For about thirty seconds I felt a a little torn. Should I try to say yes to the interview and no to the other stuff?

I discussed the matter with my wife and let her read the emails, on the simple premise that two sets of eyeballs on the same material are better than one set skewed by hope. False or not.

Just in case, I spent an hour or two updating my profile on a couple of sites, putting up an up to date profile picture and a quick once over for glaring errors

Given that the Paul Calvin story in question ‘A Falling of Angels‘ (Not the W.T.Delaney book of the same name) is over 12 years old, I wondered how much of it I would remember for an Interview, so I began reading my proof copy once more to remind myself of the content. And yes, I found it enjoyable, even relevant, and the experience revived a few memories of who why and where the ideas within the book had come from. It reads well enough. and that remains my opinion. To me that’s the only one that counts.

To cut a long story short I have elected to politely decline this never to be repeated, one time only offer. If a book club (or anyone) wants to talk to me, ask questions about my work and ideas, given time constraints I’m sure there is a place for the meeting of minds. A Zoom conference or whatever. That is fine. Even a list of questions to be answered via a YouTube / Bitchute / Rumble video, buckshee, free of charge. Happy to help.

However to make up unrequested services, no matter how good, then attempt to charge an author for the privilege as the price of being interviewed, that is unacceptable. An interview is an author provided service, therefore the interviewer should pay up, not the interviewee.

Well that’s it for the moment, I’m watching the ground water back up from the leaking main, hoping against hope that it doesn’t undermine the foundations or the concrete of my yard. My neighbours cattle are grazing contentedly in my meadows and there is a list of jobs a mile long for the next bout of sunny weather.

Here endeth the lesson.

General musings, Novella, Publishing, Short Story

A trend in the making?


Seem to be writing a lot of short stories that are what I’m beginning to call ‘future parables’. Which actually goes with science fiction as a genre. A lot of stories come from the viewpoint of knowing what I have learned about humanity, what would happen if?

‘Blink’ is about full retinal controlled digital life of a hard partying socialite, a borderline narcissist, and what happens when her digital life disappears in what might be called a fifteen minute city.

A new 6,000 worder called ‘The Winter Trees’ similarly asks what might happen if a Carrington level solar event takes down the electrical grid and much of the electronics reliant thereon. Written from the perspective of a small group of determined holdouts who live their lives dodging killer drones acting as enforcement for the all controlled.

Then there’s the ever changing versions of ‘Not with a bang’ about what might happen if those zany kids in the World Economic Forum and their adherents actually get ‘carbon capture’ to work on an industrial scale. In my version children betray their parents to the authorities for the crime of ‘denial’ and the machines actually work. Until of course all the plant life on Earth dies, thus every human does too, eventually. Not telling how, that would ruin the ending.

I seem to have a whole collection of such stories which have never been submitted to a mainstream publisher, and probably never will because I tired of that circus over ten years ago and rarely send anything to anyone except good old Leg-Iron books. Maybe I’ll just post them on this site. Don’t know.

Still struggling with the overall narrative of the final in the trilogy ‘Darkness between the stars’. Trying hard to keep the narrative consistent from the point of view of technology. Alcubierre type warp drives, no sub or hyperspace comms, a fractured Earth full of power games and ruthless ambition. Same stuff different day.

Then there’s ‘Straight on through morning’ a novella length MSS about the rise and fall and rise of a bunch of Asteroid miners set in the ‘Stars’ technology universe. Still contemplating putting in a fight scene where one of the protagonists calls another a ‘Musky’ (A fan of Elon Musk) leading to broken furniture, missing teeth and various items of grievous bodily harm. The sequence in question is still in note form at this stage, but am vacillating. Is it too near the knuckle? Might as well have a play, see how it feels.

One obstruction to writing has been the ongoing process of refurbishing our home in the west of Ireland. Latest upgrade is a revamped kitchen. A saga full of expensive wood, lots of white tiles and getting rid of a whole pile of 1990’s kitchen cabinetry. We know this because people had written names and dates on the plasterwork behind them. This has given rise, on my part, to a couple of burns, the recurrence of old back and knee injuries and various cuts, bruises and a great deal of florid four letter invective. Fortunately that’s mostly over and my kitchen will soon be fully operational once more.

Sometimes I wonder if I might like to go back to using an old typewriter. Had one back in the 1970’s and 80’s, which did sterling service until I lost it in a house move. Did try to buy a replacement from a person in Sligo, but after a number of enthusiastic online messages and a minor road trip on my part he never showed up at the location provided. So after a two hour wait I simply walked away and had a nice day instead.

Sligo is quite a pretty town. I’ve stayed there before. It’s relaxed and easy going, an Irish University town well worth a visit. Pity about the typewriter, but since that was not to be I’ll just keep my old laptop limping along.

General musings, Observations, Short Story

Not with a bang

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Back in 2015 I wrote the following story outline which never went anywhere (I do a lot of this):

Not with a bang

A comic tale of a truly man made apocalypse.

Outline.

Mankind finally develops the means to control CO2 levels on Earth with fusion driven power and a new electrostatic technology that literally unbinds the Carbon and Oxygen molecule that makes Carbon Dioxide …

In 2021, the United Nations proudly announces its forthcoming ‘World Climate Day’ which will save the Earth from man made global warming. After five long years of testing and building the necessary technology, the system is switched on … combustion becomes a crime, punishable by life in prison.

Despite an outcry from a minority of the scientific community, the Secretary General switches the system on to public acclamation and world wide celebration.

In the first year, the levels of CO2 drop below 390ppm. In 2032, the level drops by another 30ppm to 360ppm. By 2033, the level is 310ppm and dropping. 2034 and the level reaches an all time low of 265ppm and the experiment is hailed as a great success, despite no significant reduction in the rise of global temperatures. In 2037 the atmospheric CO2 level dropped an astonishing 50ppm in fourteen months. In 2038, with expanding deserts and massive dieback of temperate zone forests, some scientists state that the project has achieved it’s objectives, and at this point may have gone too far. The UN convenes a climate advisory council to discuss whether the system should be switched off.

By 2041 the level of atmospheric CO2 drops below 150ppm and despite several large volcanic eruptions, keeps falling. Crops begin to fail all over the world as there is no longer enough carbon dioxide to support photosynthesis. The climate wars start in sub-Saharan Africa as millions of starving people try to destroy the massive arrays of carbon dioxide reduction machines. In south east Asia, two whole islands in the Philippines are evacuated to prevent the poor and starving rioting and destroying the massive carbon sequestration machines. Massive algal blooms cover almost half the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans forming mats tens of metres thick which disrupt shipping. Finally the carbon sequestration machines are switched off, but the drop in world wide CO2 continues. Starvation ensues and all remaining foodstuffs are sequestered.

Now the UK carbon zealots, driven insane by bad scientific models, want to dim the sun and remove CO2 from the environment. Even putting balloons loaded with sulphur dioxide (what about acid rain?) into the atmosphere. They don’t seem to understand that carbon dioxide is neither a pollutant nor a poison, but an essential part of the biosphere. CO2 is life.

Without enough CO2 the world dies. Humanity dies. For what? There is no empirical proof that CO2 controls the weather or climate. As for the ‘all scientists say’ argument, that is based on the Cook et al study 2015 which was such a statistical fudge that it is a wonder it ever got published.

I might be tempted to say that you could not make this up. Obviously I was wrong about that.

General musings

April


Am enjoying the current run of sunny weather. This is good news healthwise as I am working outdoors, building and fixing, topping up my vitamin D levels and working up a sweat. Whilst my hands are busy, my subconscious is currently going over all the ‘Stars’ storylines. Which is a lot of ground to cover before the Irish rain returns this weekend coming and I am once more indoors behind the keyboard.

Not that I think that it is going to be a wet year. My money is on a dryer year, here in the west of Ireland. Not before time. We had two very wet years after all the water vapour punched into the atmosphere by the 2021 Hunga Tonga eruption.

A dry year is fine by me as I love being outdoors whenever possible. There are many tasks to be completed on our small acreage. Fence lines to be moved, clearing up the last of the mess that damned storm left us with at the end of January. Setting up bee traps, building new hives for next year to replace my obliterated colonies. Fixing famine era boundary walls.

The drains are running clear, not backing up like they were. Seeds have been planted, soil moved. New borders in to bring a few more splashes of colour during the Summer. While it sounds like I’m not writing, the opposite is true. Technology to be revisited in the light of new knowledge, storylines adjusted. Notes made. Plots to be checked. Continuity checked. It all has to be done in advance, Working with my hands helps relax me into the right frame of mind to focus on laying down anything from 2-5000 words a day.

5000 words a day sounds like a massive workload, and it is. I’ve managed it once before. With a 1000 words a day scrappage rate, where I had to delete around a 1000 words out of the previous days work for going off on a tangent, glaring plot holes and unusable narrative threads. Last time I had that focus, I managed an average of just over 3,559 word of usable narrative a day over 14 consecutive days.

The only other time I have ever managed close to that kind of work rate, the atmosphere was just right, although I had to take a good long run up at it. A sixty two thousand word novel in just under thirty days. On a manual typewriter. Hodder and Stoughton, a London publisher, showed some interest, but only if I could make it a series, which I couldn’t. So that went nowhere.

But that’s the price of writing fiction.

General musings, What if

Playing with ideas

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I’m currently messing around with an idea regarding warp technology. Just postulating a measurement of warp speed using the logic outlined in ‘clearing up’ I came up with a measurement that would fit with the described technology of an Alcubierre warp drive. Warp speed being measured in increments of ‘Ex’, short for ‘Exponential’ where velocity increases exponentially with warp field flow and compression.

After all, ‘Ex’ sounds a bit more dramatic and flexible as a term describing the more pedestrian sounding ‘Warp 2.5’ which could mean anything. ‘Ex’ as a measure sounds more exciting, a better adjective for multiples of light speed through warped space.

Woke up in the wee small hours this morning with an idea about a triggering event for something like the Younger Dryas era 12,800-11,600 BCE (Before Common Era). About 1,300 years. Now the current preferred (But highly debated) hypothesis is for a meteorite impact.

However, what if that were not the whole story? Meteorite impacts happen all the time. What if, and here’s no reach, astrophysicists have proved that there are extrasolar or ‘rogue’ planets, wandering giants with their own trajectories. 540 detected at the last count, with millions more potentially out there. There’s even a NASA mission scheduled for launch in 2027 to detect more of these objects and find out if any pose a threat.

Then another ‘What if’ that one such, a Jupiter plus mass object, passed at speed, too fast to be captured by our suns gravity, but exerting enough influence to subtly shift the orbits of Earth, Mars and Venus, then swung out on a hyperbolic slingshot to disappear among the stars again at the end? That might have triggered the mini ice age of the Younger Dryas, depending upon the orbital mechanics.

It’s a hell of a thought to wake up with. There might even be a story in it. It’s a gardening day today, so I’ll mull it over as I dig before putting fingers to keyboard.

General musings

Clearing up


Spent the day cutting up fallen branches in the yard after our return home. There’s a lot to do still, but at least I’ve made a start. The main yard is now clear of windfalls, but all that has done is show me how much more there is to do, fixing the tree damage due to that storm and our secondary septic systems grey water drains are backing up.

What all these manual problem solving tasks do is give you time to think,while focused on the mainly physical, letting inspiration come as your hindbrain focuses on the mundane, allowing the frontal lobes to play around with concepts and storylines uninterrupted.

Like on the ferry over, I was making some routine notes and looked up to see a curious sight. Looking out of the window at a 45 degree angle a life ring attached to the ships rail gave rise to a curious optical illusion that made me think. To the left, in the direction of travel, the sea looked to be flowing normally toward the life ring (From left to right), but around the edges appeared to compress into streams warping around the life ring, and to the right of the life rind, appeared to be accelerating rapidly in opposition to the direction of flow.

I blinked, but the sight did not disappear. Turned my gaze from right to left. Tilted my head and then watched curiously as the illusion changed. All this gave rise to some half buried thoughts I’d had about space warp drives, and how they might work within space / time. What effects would they produce for those traveling within the warp bubble? Would such a field produce an anti relativistic effect for those traveling within it? I’ve explored this idea before in ‘Sky full of stars’ where the drive used to speed FTL travel has some unexpected effects of space / time for those using it to travel between star systems.

That idea being such a vessel traveling faster and further would, because of space / time compression and distortion, cause said vessel to arrive slightly backwards in time, because the flow of space / time around a warp field would mean that space / time in the direction of travel would be accelerated and compressed past the warp field, but, as nature abhors a vacuum, so does space, and would subsequently rush in to fill the void behind the accelerating bubble of space / time containing the FTL drive ship. Like a ships wake, only this phenomena would help accelerate the warp bubble at an increasingly Faster Than Light (FTL) velocity..

Obviously this is only a blog post, and a pretty non technical one at that. However, it is an intriguing thought. Would an Alcubierre type drive behave in such a manner? Einsteinian and Quantum physics say no, but the principles of flow and displacement are well established, and why should they not apply to space / time? Or had I just consumed far too much caffeine that morning?

This sort of thing occurs to me as I meander through my life. I find it more entertainment than anything anyone else can put on screen.

General musings

Powering down


While we’re still away, we’re giving thought to the increasing likelihood of power outages back at home. This is not a phenomena restricted to the west of Ireland, but one across all Western Europe and Canada. Those chilly nine January days without electricity got a little grim, washing out of buckets of warm water heated on a barbecue, eating fast food at a service station as our only hot food for the day. Angie got fractious, I just ran out of energy and the atmosphere in the house was like the weather, stormy with clouds and rain. Not conducive to writing.

Back in 2011 I was writing a story about a family split over the issue of carbon capture and it’s ramifications. Meant to be a black comedy of errors, ‘Not with a bang’ was the story of how humankind finally develops the means to control CO2 levels on Earth with fusion driven power and a new electrostatic technology that literally unbinds the Carbon and Oxygen molecule making Carbon Dioxide. Essentially it was about what would happen if the radicals got their way and reduced atmospheric CO2 to under 150ppm.

However, real life got in the way, my thread was lost and the story still sits, part completed, on my hard drive. Unfortunately the story went from an intended 5,000 words to a mini novella of 20,000 words and I still had integral story lines which needed far more narrative room.

At that point I decided not to keep going with it as I felt the story would be out of date before it was completed. That and having other projects I was more keen on, like with my comic paranormal tales, which I wrote mainly to cheer myself up. In its current form ‘Not with a bang’ isn’t very good, so will not be posted here, or anywhere for that matter. Besides, I am committed to complete ‘Darkness’, so the tale will remain in my archives, never to see the light of day. Even if it is pertinent to the insane push for ‘Net zero’.

On that topic we’ve decided to find backup sources of heat and light for our home. My calculations indicate that a 22Square metre solar array and at least a backup 4kw diesel generator with 20kw/hr battery storage should inoculate us from any further outages. Water might be an issue if the backup generators fail at the local pumping station like last time, but our property still has an old bore hole, a well that could quickly be brought back into commission to supplement a rainwater collection and storage system. That would require a small water filtration / treatment facility added to the water softener, but if the current crop of politicians have their way. That might just be a wise investment. Not enough to go completely off grid all the time, but certainly enough to tide us over in comfort for a month.

As for comms, we’re considering Starlink for Internet with hopefully their mobile phone subscription to keep us in touch no matter what the outside world, in its lack of wisdom, decides to do. Candidly I’m fed up with the ineptitude of the modern European political class, and am electing to insulate myself from its worst insanities. Western Europe may be going to immolate itself in a purge of insane self loathing, but I have no intention of joining it.

General musings, Stars Trilogy

The whole point

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…while we are in Montauban, Southern France, I have been reviewing my manuscript for Darkness, the third title of the sequence, yet again, and have decided that the project is not beyond reclamation. In some ways it is like having an obsessive compulsion to complete. In others I feel stymied because the story loses focus about the half way point, plot lines scattering like a startled flock of chickens with every fresh idea meant to take the story forward. So I really need to painstakingly unpick the manuscript back to its coarse fabric, then re-stitch the main threads to complete the planned 150,000 words. Excuse the embroidery metaphor.

Notwithstanding, the whole premise behind the ‘Stars’ trilogy (for anyone interested) a story sequence set in the late 21st century, is set when corrupt neocons and neoliberals, are back in power after a series of tumultuous events, including a middle eastern nuclear exchange. Under these circumstances the story speculates about the social and technological changes that might ensue from the development of a radical new technology, specifically a reactionless space drive allowing fast travel between star systems. It also speculates about how armed conflict between two heavily top down pseudo socialist western regimes, one of which, called the Gaians (After Gaius Julius Caesar or the ‘Sons of Gaia’, an extreme environmentalist movement – I’m a bit fuzzy about this myself), uses religion to bind the European peoples into a loosely cohesive social structure and makes war across the Atlantic with the United States and Provinces. Also how a maverick pseudo democracy driven by one devious and ruthless man (William J ‘Bill’ Colby, de facto ruler of the Cascadian Republic based in the Pacific Northwest) challenges and fights back against both regimes.

One of the problems with trying to write ‘hard’ science fiction is trying not to use too many ‘miracle’ technologies to gloss over a plot difficulty. To stick to the physics as outlined in the implied premise. Because all stories must have rules. For me this means no subspace communication, because subspace as envisaged is too chaotic for any coherent non-relativistic signal modulation. Like all communication in the days before radio or satellite, all messages have to be by download from orbit or in person, there being no direct, real time communication between solar systems in the assumed timeline. Transitioning subspace only being possible within an enclosed warp bubble of space / time.

Likewise with AI. I’ve always felt ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was a bit of a misnomer. Intelligence is not merely logical, nor measured purely in terms of IQ and requires a whole range of cognitive and emotional skills which require a non-algorithmic and often illogical non binary approach. My position is this; AI has no glands, it is not organic and can ‘learn’ only along predetermined lines. It has no environmental pressures like humans, and cannot relate emotionally to humans. No matter how complex, faced with innovative problems, machine intelligence can only apply the solutions it’s programming allows. Which will always remain that technologies greatest restriction. AI will be fine to do the mundane, the simple repetitive tasks, the routine. But for novel solutions? Humans will always have the edge on AI. So in my version of the future, AI will always need a human supervisor.

Similarly, all the other technologies (Nuclear fusion , Thorium reactors) I cite are within the realms of the possible, just not ready for implementing as the maths and attendant technologies haven’t been fully worked out yet, even though the technology is theoretically possible. Therefore some leaps of faith have had to be taken in the narrative (As with all works of fiction), one of which being that a subspace drive occasions an unexplained reverse time dilation. Not enough for drive equipped starships to qualify as actual time machines, but enough to require careful scheduling to avoid temporal near-paradoxes. It’s an interesting paradigm. Just like assuming that within our branch of the Orion spur of the Milky Way, humanity is the only sentient spacefaring species. During the imagined timescale, humanity does not make contact with another spacefaring species.

This is where I am with the story, one which has been stuck for far too long. Too many half written spin offs and well over a hundred thousand words of notes. Some worthy of converting, some not.

By the way. If anyone wants to help me out with sundry expenses like web hosting (And the occasional coffee) as I try to re-write ‘Darkness between the stars’ and other stories like ‘A Coelacanth in the Bathroom’ and a few others I’ve recently opened a buymeacoffee.com account.

Unfortunately WordPress insists I have a more expensive ‘business’ account to add the necessary widgets to make this work. Which I can’t currently afford. So I had to bodge a link manually from a cobbled together graphic placed on this sites primary sidebar for the time being. Yes, it does read ‘buy me a whiskey’ but for a basic $3 ask, I don’t think that should be too onerous. Certainly cheaper than a medium Americano from most western coffee shops.

My only regret for all the above is that the work has taken so long. I have other projects on the drawing board. Incidentally, for anyone who is interested in a copy of ‘The Cat Tree’ from 2019, I’ll pop in a direct link to both the print to order hardback and eBook versions via Lulu.com when I’ve got the final versions ready. Should have done that ages ago, but migration to Ireland and all sorts of other issues like rebuilding houses got in the way, for which I can only apologise.

All assistance will be gratefully appreciated.

There will be a short pause for a commercial break and a word from our sponsor while matters move forward. All serious questions will be answered but don’t expect answers until after I get home from my travels in March 2025.

On the communications front, my Twitter / X account has been restored, and I have been sternly warned that whatever it was that I was doing wrong, don’t do it again. Which puts me very firmly on the naughty step, unless of course I cough up 12 Euros a month or so to get a blue check mark verification. Said resurrected account by the way is @martynkjones, where I intend to post travel pictures and videos, pictures of home, bees, and news of any newly completed stories etc.

General musings

Powerless

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Living out in county Mayo as we do, we recently had the mispleasure of experiencing a particular storm which left us without electricity from the early hours of 24th January to mid afternoon on the 2nd February, over ten days.

The storm damage to us personally was fairly light. A couple of dislodged tiles, parts of our old famine era stone wall on the western boundary, two galvanised steel gates were seriously bent, a block built fence post shattered, and a number of branches felled. My two bee colonies were destroyed, once neatly ordered combs littering the landscape half way to Donegal and two outbuilding doors damaged. The shed doors and the gates have had running repairs. The felled branches will provide firewood for next year.

However, the electronic fallout was worse.

The resulting ten day long power outage wrecked one of my laptops, a Linux machine, leaving me with my remaining, and increasingly finicky Windows 10 laptop, which drops network connections at the drop of the proverbial hat. The Linux client can be rebuilt, and all data was successfully backed up. Just not for some time. I like Linux as an operating system, but on my current hardware it is unstable and more trouble that it is worth.

However, one of my digital alter egos will never recover. The decision by WordPress to insist on dual logon verification and a similar decision by Google and all the other online platforms means that he is effectively and digitally dead. The blogs in question will remain until the platform we subsist upon disappears, but they will never be updated again. Not unless WordPress and Google release the accounts.

Then there was the rapidly thawing mess left in our freezers, the monetary value of which was approximately 3-400 Euros worth of frozen food. This was hygienically buried in a specially dug pit just beyond the back garden wall. A task which took up time and energy between boiling water for washing and beverage production, temporary fixes to gates and shed doors, as well as keeping our one source of reliable heat, a log burning stove in one front room. Then there was the lack of water when our local water pumping station was without power, it’s backup generator moved to the south to ensure that Kerry did not lose water when the well-predicted storm hit. The brunt of the storm itself hit further north.

In advance of the predicted bad weather I had laid in a supply of drinking water and about forty litres of other water for flushing toilets. For the three days we were without any mains water, that was all that stood between us and some very unpleasant outcomes.

For ten days we struggled along, burning up almost a third of our winter log supply simply keeping warm with none of the conveniences of modern life. Effectively living like our parents and grandparents did in the 1920’s and 30’s without all of their social support mechanisms. Almost a hundred years back in a single night.

Had it not been for the timely purchase of two high storage energy banks to keep our mobile phones charged and a friendly service station with its own generator, then the sense of being dropped through a time warp to the early 20th century would have been complete.

On the tenth day we decamped in abject frustration to county Wexford, en route for France, on a holiday we had booked and paid for last August. On the ferry to Cherbourg, one of the last notifications we received from ESB, Ireland’s electricity generation board, was that our power had been restored. The twenty first century had returned! The heating and security systems booted nicely, so we can now not only control the heat within our home, but actually see who comes a-visiting while we are on holiday in France.

Which is where we are now. Currently in the historic centre of Tours, home to many of the rulers of ancient France, enjoying the sights, even if frustrated by the one way system.

We’re simply enjoying the slightly warmer weather and richness of French food, being reminded that the French are the very monarchs of baking. Which makes the next few weeks something to look forward to.

Given the last ten days, Angie and myself desperately need this timeout for recovery. The relationship between us was recently put under extreme pressure and unbalanced us both. Before we begin moving forward again, we both need to recover our centre, our inner equilibrium. That is what this break is to be about.

As far as writing is concerned I’ve been looking at the manuscript for ‘Darkness between the stars’. Frankly it’s a mess. In the 80,000 words so far, too much has been cut and pasted disrupting the story flows to the point where a complete re-write of the whole trilogy is in order. On the other hand perhaps I might do better disassembling it and beginning the project I first envisioned in 2009 called ‘Earth’s night’, a series of future history style manuscripts where the events of my ‘Stars’ trilogy underpins most of the events, assisting with some of the foreshadowing.

So long as no more storms or major power outages hit, or we decide to move continents yet again, I might actually finish something worthwhile.

General musings

Progress


Still pushing forward with ‘Darkness’ and it’s like wrestling with treacle. Progress is painfully slow and sticky. A word here, a sentence there and crow barring a couple of paragraphs in where they better serve the narrative.

The story is finally beginning to go in the direction I want, but it’s felt like trying to turn a supertanker with a motorboat. Not completely impossible, but painfully slow and constantly at the mercy of wind and tide.

Since I began writing this series in 2003 I’ve upended my entire life several times, moved continents twice, been through a double bereavement (on the same day!) and multiple trials and tribulations. Nothing too damaging.

However, counting blessings, there are many much worse off, but when you’re dealing with narratives running to over a hundred and fifty thousand words each, these life events do make it hard to keep track. Given that circumstance, this post should not be seen as a cry for any form of sympathy. I freely acknowledge I made this rod for my own back. It would be better to think of it more as a wordy grunt of frustration.

Prone as I am to gloomy episodes, to periodically cheer myself up between other work and house upgrades I’ve been following the ever-astonishing progress of SpaceX, whose test flight number six is due for launch around the 18th of November 2024. That ‘chopstick’ catch of flight five’s booster earlier this year was desperately awe inspiring and a moment I will remember for a long, long, time.

Will we see Mr Musks project on flight six go for the double, with the spectacle of the next booster and Starship storm down from orbit, finishing their flight hanging in mid air on their respective launch towers? Not being privy to SpaceX’s project schedule, that may be just wishful thinking, but perhaps we the public will have to wait for test seven? Who knows?

Certainly there is a sense of rapid progress in terms of reaction propulsion and a sense of a new future taking shape. All I know is that a hopeful future is only just ahead of us. All we have to do is reach out and welcome it.

General musings

Story ideas


Inspiration is a curious thing. It comes from anywhere and occasionally ties your brain in a knot before disappearing like smoke on the breeze. This weeks offering originated when we were on holiday recently and I put bare feet onto one of those rough sisal carpets.

The story has gone into my ‘oddball work in progress’ file tagged to a strange visual image of dust and close up of insect debris in an empty room that came to me as I felt the roughness under my feet. Haven’t even decided what sort of story it’s going to be.

Science fiction brain says ‘dimensional transition gone wrong’ or ‘temporal prisoner reflects’. Fantasy brain says ‘depressed alcoholic meets Caspar Hauser’. Oddball sense of humour says ‘Why not both’? I’ll see where it goes over the next month or so. If I don’t get distracted.

Still blocked over ‘Darkness between the stars’, the last book in the ‘Stars’ series I began writing in 2005. Not because I’m stuck for ideas, but rather can’t decide which way I want the story to go. There are just too many narrative lines flapping around. Lots of good dialogue and plot points but the whole project has become a monkey on my back. I’m compelled to finish, but can’t decide how.

For a writer, life is something that can to get in the way of the business of writing. For me there are still too many chores to do, bits of our new home to finish, things to make for the garden and sheds or interruptions just as my thoughts settle down.

The work is not the problem. I can push out two or three thousand words a day, but it’s the direction I’m having issues with.

Short Story

Video readings


Just a couple of video readings.

The Cat Tree. A short fantasy story about life, death and crawling out of the bottle.

Moonlit shadow. a tale about a certain midwinter festival from a differing perspective. Published in Leg-Iron books 2019 anthology “Christmas lights and Darks”

Moving continents yet again and setting up home in a new house, renovating, learning to keep bees etc has taken up most of my storywriting energy. That and the ‘pandemic’ getting in the way. Hopefully that will change in 2023.

Am recompiling ‘The Cat Tree and other stories’ as an E-book. Link will be posted on the sidebar when it’s ready.

Happy new year.