I'm Back in '26
2026 has been an eventful year for me. Not that all the other years haven't been.
Having enjoyed ten years of respite from 'busy' work, while managing our 5.5-acre olive grove and dealing with domestic chores, I've had an opportunity to see my life from a completely different perspective. But, things never remain the same, do they.
In 2025, I bought a new PC with 96Gb RAM and landed myself right back in the cold, hard, outside world. With that beast of a machine I gained a new lease of computer life that put me in front of my old writing desk, and (with an AI sidekick to give me inspiration) began taking renewed interest in my old job of writing Science Fiction.
I don't know if you've noticed, but...
I don't know if you've noticed, but the whole world has gone graphics crazy.
AI has some incredible capabilities, and one of them is creating graphics. I feel sorry for the graphic artist who has to compete with this aspect of creativity, but I'm on the side of the AI in this. Its ability to create meaningful images within a few minutes, sometimes seconds, has provided something that simply didn't exist before at this scale.
The Future Arrived While We Weren't Looking
Science fiction used to have an advantage. We could invent something outrageous, give it a few flashing lights, put it fifty years into the future and nobody could tell us we were wrong.
Artificial intelligence? Fantasy. Self-driving cars? Maybe one day. A computer in your pocket connected to almost every piece of human knowledge ever recorded? Ridiculous. Private companies launching reusable rockets? Come off it.
And yet here we are.
Audio Books on Sale
Where better to purchase your next audio experience, than from my website direct?
I have five audio books currently, and am working on providing another seven if I can get the work done in a reasonable amount of time. Unlike the other audio book platforms, I can invest all the profits into my next book. That's a good reason, if any was needed, to directly support my channel. At $7.99 a listen, it's the best value you will get - anywhere, in my opinion.
Is AI Really that dangerous?
Artificial intelligence is becoming more capable, more independent, and more deeply embedded in everyday life. It has the abiity, even now, to create havoc with our lives - that much is true.
What is less clear is whether that means AI is really becoming dangerous in the way many recent headlines are suggesting.
A Member Forum
Forums are not original on these types of sites, but I'm not a social media fan so I'm not going to suggest that my forum is for chit chat and pictures of your dog.
What it is, is a forum to discuss my books past, present and under construction, especially the latter.
Why a Reader's Lounge?
Why indeed.
I could have simply called it the registration area, or login account, but I wanted it to bring more to the zone than most people generally experience from author hubs. We're not renowned for doing much more than throwing up glitzy pictures of our book covers and slapping a 'BUY ME' sticker across the top. (Guilty!)
The decision to call it a lounge stemmed from the need to give you permanent access to the books you buy from me. Not good enough to download and forget, I wanted you to have a repository you could come back to when you needed your book on another device (it will give you three downloads). That meant a library.
Then I thought, why not have all my books in there to remind you of what you have already, and more importantly the ones you haven't purchased yet. So, that got added too.
Now, you have a private members forum, a listing of all your comments and reviews on the public site as well as a counter to add up the points I'm introducing to give back a little for your support of my website and book channel. The points can be redeemed on my books.
Could AI become a Virus?
Our televisions, refrigerators, cars and household appliances are increasingly connected to the internet. Could artificial intelligence use those connections to spread from one device to another? And what happens if we can't stop it?
The idea sounds like science fiction, but some of the technology needed to make it happen already exists as 'open source code' on the internet.