A Peek At My Week! #157

News About Writing & Publishing: This Is The Current State Of Things

If you’re one of the few people reading this newsletter, I’m happy to see you! You’re part of something unique and very special to me, both as a writer and as a person!

• General News: 1) Believe it or not, I’m still not quite over that very nasty flu as yet! It seems like months that I’ve been sick and surrounded by other sick people, but at least I’m feeling much better – just dealing with a persistent postnasal drip and the nagging cough that goes with it! I haven’t been up to doing any writing lately, but hopefully I’ll be up to pushing out perhaps one more book before the end of this year. Stay tuned! In the meantime, I’ve been pumping out a lot of promotional videos and book trailers and the like – alas, the marketing aspect of being an indie author never goes away, does it?  2) A few weeks ago, I started creating music videos of some of my poetry on a free app called Udio, which allows users to create high quality music tracks complete with generated vocals! Here they are on my YouTube channel for your enjoyment!
  3) Last week, on my Friday off, I created a new promo video for Galaxii, featuring an awesome movie-style theme soundtrack! Apparently some people didn’t like it very much – even though it gained over 190 views during the past week (!!!) – so I went and made another, better one – linked below. Yes, I’ve been using a lot of AI-generated media lately, from music tracks to animation, but what’s a poor indie author to do? Hopefully the naysayers will like it better than the last one!

• Disasters Etc.: this past week and weekend has been a disaster for losing stuff! In this last week I’ve lost a memory stick somewhere that I used for data transfer, and then I had the unpleasant task of having to reload my laptop – the one that has my entire life on it! That went about as well as could be expected – fortunately I only lost a small amount of data on the laptop – a few folders on my desktop that somehow didn’t copy over to my mobile drive when I was backing stuff up in preparation for this chore last Friday! Things got complicated when I was reinstalling Windows 10 on the laptop, and had to take the hard drive out and connected it to my video editor via a USB adapter to sort out partition issues – and accidentally deleted the partitions on the Video Editor’s drive instead! It turns out that free partition tools will happily delete your partitions – but to restore them, you need to pay the fuckers blood money first! Talk about ransomware! Having to sort out all that bullshit took me until about 1AM, but by the time I struggled off to bed, the Video Editor PC was sorted, and I set about finally reloading the laptop the next morning. On top of that, on Saturday, my NAS decided it was the day it would quit on me. The tally from that single episode is: one dead mainboard, one dead power supply, and two totally dead 1TB drives – which only happened to hold duplicate copies of everything I’d backed up on them since January. Everything that was on them is completely gone, including backups of my writing archives going all the way back to 2006, and all the work files I used in creating all my Tina Talks Tech videos, the opening and closing sequences, templates, etc. Gone too is my entire digital music collection that I’d built up since the 1990s – over 30gb of music. Fortunately all the family photo albums and the like were backed up on my laptop and mobile drives, and most of my most-used software was backed up on old-fashioned blu-rays and DVDs! I’ve no idea what caused this catastrophic failure – it can’t have been a power surge because the NAS was on a surge-protected circuit, as were the rest of our devices, which are all fine. Oh well, the good news is that everything (minus the NAS of course) is back up and running again.
• Look What I Made!: On Saturday morning I’d finally had enough of the manky little plastic tripod my desktop microphone was on – the cats kept knocking it over, and frankly it really wasn’t very stable on its own anyway – so I decided it was time for a change! I built a custom mic stand for it using bits and pieces from the scrap bin in my workshop – pictures below, enjoy!
   
• The Big News: It’s still in progress! I apologize for not spilling all the beans about this matter, but I’m not allowed to divulge anything at least until “it” – whatever “it” is, has been ultimately finalized – which should now be mid-July, and I’ll be able to share my big news with you! Yes, I’m aware that the 15th is the middle of the month – and that’s today – but I still haven’t heard anything yet! As soon as I know, you’ll know!  I will leave this up for as long as appropriate.
• What Readers Say: I know I can’t please everybody (so I’m not trying to!). That said, it pleases me when I see that I’ve managed to please at least some people! If there’s nothing new below, just pop along here to have a look at all the reader’s comments I’ve collected so far.

Bibliography – A listing of all my books so far:

You can find them at and my shop page on . You can also follow me on my channel.