Hello my lovely darlings and in answer to the question, no, not half way yet. Straight out of the gate I’m going say that this one is going to be very different from my recent releases. Consider this to be something of a press release and it is likely to be shorter than the last two posts I did. What can I say? I’m after a task that I can knock down more quickly as I move into Summer Holiday season. Yes, for my international audience, I am from the U.K. if that wasn’t obvious from my spelling of English. It also explains my poor opinion of Empires. Let’s just say I have ancestral roots in a few of the lands and people that the British Empire stepped on to become the British and then to become the British Empire so I’ve never seen the British Empire as the great ‘civilising power created by manifest destiny and divine Providence’. My maternal roots go straight back to the Great Hunger of 1845 and finding out when I was in Year 9 (Ninth Grade) that some of Oliver Cromwell’s troops thought it was the height of entertainment to nail some of the babies of my ancestors to church doors really rather soured my opinion of colonial powers. That and at least one of my patriarchal bloodlines is a settled branch of the Romani peoples so I lost family members in the Concentration Camps. Makes me all the more proud of my great grandpa who helped put a stop to that period of history.
That and I happen to be living through the tail end of the collapse of the British Empire so I can honestly say that Empires aren’t even that good for the people who are meant to be proud of them. Yeah the ones who get the top of the tree when the Empire is healthy have it great, although one has to recognise that they have been historically the most likely to poison themselves. Examples of this? The Chinese Emperors’ habit of poisoning themselves with mercury and the Roman Elites’ consumption of lead infused grape syrup. Not to mention lead face paints and poisonous eye drops. Yeah, we humans are not known for our consideration of the long term effects and just what the hell was the corset? A twelve inch waist is not healthy on an uncorsetted woman because, unless she is very tiny, it means she is anoxic.
So yeah, living in the middle of a failing Empire isn’t exactly great. From the way I see it Britain is just about at the point Italy was in 500AD, fractured, failing, fighting itself and focused on finding a social scapegoat it can use as a target to fracture the population into bite sized pieces instead of realising that the best way out of this mess would be to give everyone a project we could work towards collectively. People would be more open to working to towards saving the environment if it came without blame and more community as well as financial gain to sweeten the deal. Apparently there are electrical generators small enough to turn by push bike cogs. Do you think a human powered power station full of banks of push bikes that turn hundreds of little generators would be able to power the local infrastructure? I wouldn’t mind a job some where like that if I was allowed an MP3 player loaded with unabridged audio books to listen to while I pedalled. And you wouldn’t need any where between three and six interviews to get the job, just a report from your doctor to say that your heart rate and blood pressure is fine and a gym kit. What do you think? Does it have legs? Is there someone out there in my fanbase who could get this going? As I said I wouldn’t mind being one of the pedal pushers if it was from ten o’clock to two o’clock so I had time to get the Major Distraction to and from school.
What can I say? I was taught if you are going to offer a criticism you should offer a solution with it so there’s my solution to global warming, the fuel crisis and unemployment – jobs that are a doddle to get and easy to do so you have plenty of mental energy left for either socialising or studying afterwards, choice is yours. Whether or not anyone in a position of authority has the will to make it work is something I don’t have a crystal ball for. Unfortunately I have a feeling they won’t. That is another theme I tackle in my books, the fact that authority can become so deaf and hide bound that it does not recognise solutions, salvation or even common sense when it sees it. And authority can mean government, kings, bureaucracy or even family. Trust me, family dynamics can be really, really rotten.
So, as we are now speaking about the book, how is the progress going on, going on? The truth is… not good. We’ve made it up to chapter five of thirty and I am thinking that I may need to look for a new proof reader/editors as my current one keeps having family crisis. I understand life gives you lemons because it has happened so many times to me that I’ve lost count of them but the best illustration of it would be 2020 when my own mother nearly died five times and none of it was Covid. It got to the point where the Major Distraction just had to see an ambulance to start panicking. I don’t really blame him as I started doing the same thing, I just had to function through it as you are not allowed to stop adulting when you are an adult. Other adults judge you if you do. It is a case of “Oh yuck, V. J. is having a case of the ‘big emotions’, how inconsiderate of her? How dare she inconvenience us with her feelings? Doesn’t she understand someone else always has it worse? She needs to toughen up, get over herself and think about everyone else, especially the children. They don’t need to know that grown ups get overwhelmed. She’s letting the side down. Yeash, can’t she do any better? She’s not being good enough.”
Yeah, life as an adult sucks. Life as a parent sucketh even more as you get double the judgement. Life as a SEND parent or a parent carer sucketh even more than that because the judgement goes through the roof.
So yes, I get it. As a mother of a SEND child in the Major Distraction and as a family carer I totally get it but I also have to get this career off the ground because more and more of the Support is being cut off unless you can pay for it yourself and therefore I have to have a taxable income. Therefore I need a proof reader/editor that is going to be reliable. This could be difficult as I’ve not got much in the way of finance behind me. I found out in 2024 that most start up business spend thirty two and a half thousand in their first year. I started this business with one thousand and I’ve only just clawed my way back up to having two tenths of that. I am running tight to the wind and hauling myself up by my boot straps and I keep delaying things to fit into everybody else’s time tables because if I don’t I won’t receive any more support with the Major Distraction, in fact I’ll lose what little I currently have.
That’s the other thing with being a SEND parent; for some reason the powers that be feel totally justified in holding support to ransom with the price being your behaviour. Don’t fit to their timetable? Support withdrawn. You ask for a meeting to be rescheduled because of conflicting care needs? Support withdrawn. You ask one too many times when the agreed support will manifest (and they never tell you how many times is the accepted number)? Support withdrawn. Your child doesn’t respond to the support provided or worse, activity collapses under it? Support withdrawn. They withhold information for twelve months plus? Fine. You miss one form deadline? Support withdrawn.
So yes, I’m hauling myself up by my bootstraps and life isn’t just handing me lemons, it is squeezing lemon juice into my eyes whilst standing on my fingers. I’m beginning to understand why rolling that boulder up that hill was such a torment to Sisyphus. Can one die from lack of sleep? Because I appear to be in the process of finding out. I’m mother to a SEND child, housewife and gardener (which is no mean feat as even with the hose it takes an hour to water said garden each day and even more in a hose pipe ban), part time carer for my Mother who is a dialysis patient, writer, artist, I’m supposed to be making some more friends, I’m meant to be looking after my own health and we now have a puppy who is to be trained as a support dog and protector for my mother as she has people in her childhood she really doesn’t want to meet again. That is seven and a half full time jobs so three hundred hours a week. One problem with that? There is only one hundred and sixty eight hours in a week. No wonder I’m tired.
So part way with the proof reading but not much further. If anybody know a proof reader/editor willing to work on a complete manuscript for under two hundred specy please let me know, I could do with the help. If they want to video call it to discuss the manuscript whilst they are marking it I can do that, probably not very well as technology has a habit of developing the cyber hiccups around me, as well as the fact that I am functionally half asleep pretty much all the time these days despite the coffee.
Artwork wise I’ve managed eight complete pieces plus two that have received the initial colour wash and one where the line drawing has just begun. All four of the main characters are done, a couple with multiple iterations. I have to admit Jeremiah was the hardest one to get right, although I’m not a hundred percent sure about Ulrich. Still I started work on Jeremiah and realised that I’d had plenty of training on how to draw average people in art class, I had not received so much on how to draw extremes. Someone really fit would be fairly easy as I have access to the book structure and function in man but someone who has an overly eager relationship with the buffet cart? Not so much. It took some searching to find reference pictures that gave me the guidelines that I needed to be able to draw Jeremiah properly. Thank you Paul Kidby for your drawings of the Dean of the Unseen University, they were a huge help. Prior to that Jeremiah kept coming out looking like a guy who had a beach ball stuffed up his jumper.
So that’s eight out of thirty one pieces of artwork needed, counting the cover. Just how am I supposed to do this by Christmas Time? Anxiety!
As for why it is taking me so dang long to do the art? I refuse, I utterly refuse to use Generative AI. I will not use it to write with, I will not use it to do my artwork, I absolutely refuse to contribute to the sloppification of the human mind and the desecration of the natural environment to feed data centres that have about as much human connect as a dull spanner to the back of the head. That is why it has taken me so long to produce the blog posts this year. I have to write, proof read, type up, proof read, record, edit, render and then publish each and every word that I have ever produced upon my blog or any other medium for that matter and this year I have no game sessions to act as a road map. That means I’m coming up with everything all by myself. It also cuts into the time I have to proof read and the like because I can’t be in two places at once.
I wouldn’t mind AI if it was doing the washing and the dishes so I had more time for my writing and my art but I object to it doing my writing and my art so I have more time to do the washing and the dishes. If there is going to be stupidity in the world, at least let it be human stupidity. We know how to deal with human stupidity, it was what the Darwin Awards were invented for after all. I’ll be for AI when it can create something like Rosie the Robot Maid from the Jetsons and I’ll say please and thank you to her. Good manners cost you nothing but can buy you the world. That and possibly protection in the event of an AI uprising as I’ve noted the printer works better since I started saying please and thank you to it. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of my phone. My phone may have been advertised as a smart phone, the receipt may have said smart phone upon it but quite frankly she is regularly as dumb as a box of rocks. I think my phone may be evidence that, unfortunately, Artificial Imbecility does not need inventing as it can manage it quite well on its own. This also doesn’t help with the career as although she can take photographs easily enough nobody seems to have explained to my phone that, as a smart phone, she should be able to send said photos to things like social media to make my advertising that much quicker. She also apparently does not understand that she should be able to take and send film the same way, hence why I have to film the vlog on a Wolfgang camera and then cable it to a laptop to edit. This would be okay except, for some reason only best known to herself, my Wolfgang camera closes the recording at about twenty one minutes of run time and then continues recording in a new file. Again no biggie, accept that it means I lose about five seconds of the take. That can be annoying but so far I’ve managed to work round that issue. It helps that I am deliberately leaving my vlogs a little rough around the edges. The way I see it, it gets back to the anti generative AI movement. If my audience can see me, see my background, see that my background changes due to where I have available to film, my audience is more likely to know that I am a real live, living, breathing, half asleep mess of an organic human being. It is why I don’t cut out every single mispronunciation that I make. An AI may mispronounce a word but it won’t double back and try to correct what it just said wrong, it will just keep going, apparently unable to admit when it has made a mistake. As I am a human when I make a mistake I double back and try to correct it.
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So there you have it folks, the progress on the books has slowed to a crawl but I am still attempting to push this boulder forward. I don’t know if I am copying Sisyphus who could never roll that boulder up that hill or Theseus who spent ten years trying to push a boulder over to get at the treasure underneath. We’ll have to wait and see. In the course of writing this I have managed to get back to the artwork so here’s hoping the momentum begins to rebuild.
For the blog posts over the summer holiday, I’m planning to re-release the Hestia Locator in stages with updated maps. I pray this is agreeable and that you enjoy the second edition of the world map.
Be safe my lovely darlings and be kind.
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