St John the Baptist Church Baxenden

7:30 a.m. and I am 2/3 of the way through my morning walk. It’s rained earlier this morning and the seat is wet. I have put out a Japanese version of my short story, Writing Day.

AI voice, Google translate and a Japanese audio book

Last night I trialled Play.HT which is an si powered voice cloner to see if it could clone my voice. Ultimately this is about creating an artificial voice just like mine to create audio books. The experiment was partly successful because although the voice created by play.ht (which is one of the best voice cloners on the market)was similar to mine, as I moved the test onto reading out one of my shorter works, several snags became apparent.
So the good stuff – the voice was vibrant and similar to me – it also had little difficulty with enunciation.

The tricky stuff – an important part of reading out is knowing what to stress and when to pause. Play.hT chose its own way which although textually accurate didn’t sound great. Fixing this – well I have the sound editing software but as the clone is recognisably different to my voice, and that would defeat the point. Aside from that the bit rate of the wav files is 24000 and I use 44100 – again all fixable. Also I ended up loading individual paragraphs and downloading a wav  for each. All doable but when I got to the end of this I concluded that I wouldn’t have been much longer recording myself and editing the duff bits.

The free version of Play.HT let’s you record up to 12,500 characters per month (including spaces). That equates to about 3,000 words – that’s about a quarter of the pace I currently record at

Anyway moving on from voice cloning, I also trialled Google translate – using the same short story – the title of the story is Writing Day and it comes in at just under 3,000 words.

My target language was Japanese. Google translate had a character limit which limits what it can do to around 300 words at once. As it also generates the kanji (Japanese characters) I made a record of these but my primary purpose was to record the translation and create a wav file. This was done – all that remains is to create a book placeholder as a kindle author – obviously using the kanji text – upload the recording, set the front and back matter and upload a cover…. and I’ll have a Japanese audio book.

The cover is the hardest. It always is. Anyhow time to get up.

Oak Hill Park + Tower of God New World+ Work in progress

Looking up Oak Hill Park, September 24th 6:20 pm

It’s pretty windy out, and this can only accelerate leaf fall. The walk up hollings Lane was punctuated by a brief fiddle on Tower of God: New World. This is a mobile game based on a crunchyroll original anime called Tower of God – as for the mobile game, art animation and voice acting are good however the gameplay is creaky which I imagine to be down to a five-year-old plus Huawei P20 – pretty old for recent released games. Game elements at level 1 are pretty formulaic let’s see how this goes.

Having just reviewed Samurai to the Stars, I’m taking a walk to freshen up. Not sure yet which work I’ll focus on once this is published. That’s several projects which are fairly well advanced eg

Men for the Stars (dystopia, space fiction)

Joe and the Xenophids (space war, space horror)

Lucky (space opera)

Demon Fire (RPG fantasy)

Door Witch 2 ( RPG fantasy)

Brant (heroic fantasy)

plus The Central Sea (historical)… anyhow it’s getting dark so time to go home 😮:-)

St John’s Church Baxenden, Samurai to the Stars, Creative Orbits, Connan

At 6:45 a.m. on the 24th of September, it had been several days since my last morning walk in Baxenden – I was busy in Chester with the wedding of my youngest daughter, Carley.

Pre hand fasting

I walk down Hollins Lane to Accrington – I am facing north west – gusts of wind bring in the airs of autumn.

Looking along Hollins Lane towards Accrington

It’s a nuisance to wrestle with Google speech which this morning, in its continuing struggle with English interposed Elvis for eldest – are they so similar? Anyhow, today I may go and see my eldest brother.

In 100 yards I take a right into Oak Hill Park and walk past the bowling green.

Steven Cashmore my editor has sent me the proofread Samurai to the Stars.  A high level review of his comments tells me there are no deal breaking glitches to deal with apart from using 4 points of view (haha!) which are in fact essential to development of the story. I have already listed out his track changes comments and  shall spend some time today going over other minor glitches. All in all this is a very satisfactory development.

Samurai to the stars is a tale of a tournament with a twist, the tournament is the price of entry to the stars. The cost is high as it requires the destruction of all civilized values.

Here I am at the entrance to St John’s Church I’m just sitting by the cenotaph near the front gates, looking across a valley that used to host the railway line from Accrington to Rossendale. A persistent wind blows into my face – I am facing south west.

My thoughts circle back… it’s common for artists to burn each other as their creative orbits are all too often, delicately balanced – with hope that Conan (Cimmerian spelling 😯) takes the next step. Conan is a Dadaist dramatist.

19.09.23 Morning walk+ Brand + the BBC

5:45 a.m. looking southwest towards Accrington town centre. Hollins Lane is a row of houses to my right and I am just approaching the post box on Royds Avenue.

It has been burning steadily through most of the night and I fear that my morning walk will become a drenched trudge through the rain. I cut short this morning’s plan to cut through Haworth Park up to Royd Avenue and back down to Hollins Lane.

The Russell Brand scandal (brandal?) continues together coverage in the media which is kind of  Bizarre as many of them would have been aware of his exploits for years. His father has been sucked into the mire which conjures up the thought the misdemeanors of the young are a plague on the parents. I suppose there is another tourism approach the powerful at peril of the taint marring your life. There is a question of public policy when publicly funded bodies such as the BBC become embroiled with the shameful exploits such individuals. For example many young men might say if I do as I please even the BBC will turn a blind eye – which means society won’t bother too much. And doubtless those who have denied themselves a lifestyle of reckless promiscuity to stay ‘true’ have been given a wake up call.
The BBC staggers from one moral crisis to another I wonder how long it can go on.

18.09.23 Hollins Lane Baxenden + Russell Brand+ British media

It’s 5:10 a.m. on the 18th of September 23. I’m looking north west down Hollins Lane towards Accrington centre. It’s a 15° c mild morning and the streets are wet from recent terrain

I’m just pondering the news that national broadcasters such as the BBC and channel 4 have woken up to the controversies of celebrity culture, in particular odious creeps such as Russell Brand. Mass media makes up its own rules as it goes along – it’s participants, news people and reporters of all tastes and proclivities exist off a diet of dirt they are part of which is later packaged as an uncovered exposé. So the greedy for fame the needy the gullible are all sucked into this rather dark web – joy of metropolitan mass media; joy of British broadcasting. You’d have thought after Saville the BBC would have at least cottoned on to the duties inherent to being a publicly funded broadcaster – but well Brand must have been one of many ongoing concurrent matters where they didn’t care or were just willing to pretend the mess was nothing to do with them.

Looking north east through Howarth Park 17.09.23

After three days working from home – time to let off steam.

Well I’ve had my third covid test and this is the second negative oh my goodness the nonsense of bureaucracy applied to the common cold – unless of course the rumours were true and this is in fact an escape from a Chinese lab. It’s funny how you are expected to believe two half truths one that iy wasn’t none made and two that it’s a deadly absolute killer – aided and the betters by social media giants well that unedifying bundle of nonsense is now wrapped up in a public enquiry they’ll say 15 or 20 years by which time the main actors responsible for diluting our freedoms will be long out of the public eye. What is skive working from home is. Banks, civil servants, customer service – a contrived excuse to do as little as possible.

Onto less angry matters : my next work went to my editor and it’s a samurai take on the theme of Predator. I’ll concede my samurai knowledge improved by researching and writing.

Anyhow this work is called Samurai to the Stars.

Japanese Ghost Stories

Japanese Ghost Stories

Last Saturday I went to Burnley Artisan Market and this was an opportunity to catch up on reading and other matters so I took a book of Japanese ghost stories by Lafcadio Hearn. This volume presents 34 short stories. Hearn spent the last 14 years of his life in Japan during which apart from marrying Setup (Setsuko Koizumi – a girl from the samurai class), fathering 4 children, his work as a lecturer and at Tokyo Imperial University and his articles for Harper’s Weekly, a US publication set about collecting traditional Japanese folklore. These folklore tales were published in English and played an extraordinary part in shaping the views on Japan of the secretary to General Douglas MacArthur and head of psychological warfare, which in turn shaped the settlement following the second world war. Hearn’s work was retranslated to Japanese and is highly regarded in Japan.

As I progress into Japanese Ghost Stories, I can see similarities in tales, spirituality and symbolism and unlike many works marred by author ego, there is a comfort and balance in the portrayal of goblins, phantoms and ghouls because these mirror the ethos of much of the anime I watch.

The blurb at the back of this Penguin Classic talks of ‘terrifying tales of striking and eerie power.’ To the untrained Western eye these might seem terrifying but it doesn’t take a jaundiced eye to see balanced plots where where the resolution comes from within the story rather than deus ex machina or wishful thinking or power fantasy.

Recommended for those with an interest in anime and Japanese culture in general.

Night Cafe – Xenophid-human hybrid

https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/B08AHSqMJuQGCNnZZ1pw

Night Cafe calls its offering AI but I think of it as more of an image generator – themed to prompt words.

Using Night Cafe

There’s an internal economy which limits professional quality output to fee paying users – which I think is only fair. There are probably questions to be asked on the source of its content library – clearly if someone’s work is reused multiple times – my guess is they will not be entitled to royalties and neither will have recognition as artist.
Complex.

Technical details used in generating this image

Style: Preset Anime 2
Model: SDXL Beta
aspect : 9:16 (mobile)
Seed: QXHdBlvScURDSor62V–2–tr9ac_11.3636x
image 3 of 4 upscaled to 4363:7999

Anyway this picture aptly captures the feeling of Joe and the Xenophids not yet published and one for the future.

Flavour text (taken from Joe and the Xenophids)

It’s war.
It’s interstellar war.
And… humanity have gradually been hunted down by the xenophids until all that remains is Earth.
Before the final assault, they send an agent – forged from a captured specimen and subjected unimaginable pain in xenophid laboratories, to create a xenophid-human hybrid.

It’s nice to generate something that ties in with what’s in your mind’s eye.

PerfectIt – Review

PerfectIt – this is a literary tool for writers, editors and people of that ilk.
My Ukrainian family have gone to Poland to pick up their passports and my car is in for a service which is due. I hope it returns unscathed as today I will be without wheels.
Last night I tested PerfectIt again. For this I chose two part complete works and a fully complete work.

These were:

1 Men for the Stars – this is a riff on Heinlein’s work with an overlay of realism and near future noir / dystopia, taking in a number of present day preoccupations such as migration deculturalisation acculturation etc. It currently comes to 33,000 words

2 Demon Fire – this dwells on many anime themes including some of my favorites such as Demi humans, Host clubs what does it mean to be a teenager who doesn’t fit in and of course not forgetting memories of school days. It cocks a snook at the naive idealisation of the past in matters such as Wicca, purity, natural harmony not to forget transition from the real world to the imaginary (isekai for those that know). It currently stands at 38,000 words and is half done.

3 Samurai to the Stars – not withstanding the similarity in title (to the above) this dwells on Eastern principles drawing from Zen, the warriors spirit of Samurai, self-reliance in the face of overwhelming threat, the philosophical concerns over First Contact with Aliens eased by a healthy serving of anime influence. This book comes to 50,000 words what is not yet published.

The interface runs as a tab within Word, which means you can activate it as you salivate over the immaculate results of your creative process. Here’s a snip

PerfectIt checks for variations in abbreviations, hyphenated words, it can check for similarly spelled words (including archaic variations eg spelt and spelled); preferred spelling, accents, Numbers in sentences, common typos and phrases to rethink, and it also sports wildcard find and replace, as check box below. The checks I ran showed if I put in the effort to tidy up my work, there was less for PerfectIt to do. When you run it you can choose which checks you want:

Once it finishes it will produce a report which can be saved as a text file. Here’s a sample report from Demon Fire – you can see I’ve got plenty to do on this!!

PerfectIt does its job. – the catch is this you can’t buy a copy you have to rent and at £71 per annum, although not unaffordable I simply don’t have the rate of output to justify this outlay. I write as a hobby – about 50,000 words a year – it doesn’t make any meaningful money so lashing out on it doesn’t make sense for me. My editor provides edit-inputs this product can’t offer, and only when I need them, so to me this is ongoing extra expense.
PerfectIt would be good for editors and those who write a lot – say upwards of 100k words a year, especially those who prefer not to use an editor.

You get a 14 day trial period.

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Postscript – Process

I eventually went back and tested unpublished works I’d lost confidence in, over the years. Image below shows which titles were done and respective wordcounts – in all 200k. This kind of led to a reawakened zeal on completing them (LOL) So I dusted off my process from my first first-draft up to recently.

Process Notes

1. It took me a lot of time and patience to get to grips with my first draft – in the end I decided that there was only so far I could go – wrestling with English while curating ideas – something had to give. I’ve sat on old drafts rather than mangle them further so I can at least go back and appraise where I got up to. I use Word and Excel to track changes – invariably this is from the original form of words – the exact words are important to my creative process.
2. Most of my writer needs are met by workarounds. I use WriteItNow, ywriter, and Scrivener in order of preference, depending on the work. The catch is you also accept the respective downsides of each. Why is Scrivener at the end? Its backup feature (essential for me) is too unfriendly. Big fails are idea tracking where it’s a sledgehammer to crack a nut when all that’s required is a credible back up system.
3. Once I’m at first draft I add a scheme of invented words – not comprehensive at this stage because the next step is wait a few weeks so a decent perspective can kick in.
4. Then it’s all about spelling consistency; I generate an appendix of invented words – maintaining one in writing mode ain’t fun. Once this is done – yWrite is handy for word usage with Word handy for words not in dictionary. Word dictionaries could do more but at the moment separate novel dictionaries in Word is too fiddly. So sort out invented word consistency. Then separately – this is kind of where PerfectIt fits – test punctuation and word usage.
5. Once I’ve cleaned up as much as I reasonably can, I send the work to SfEP. The edited work comes back to me marked up in track changes. As noted above I continue to use Word and Excel to track responses and changes – all the while keeping an eye on word usage stats and measurement of progress.
6. Ahh – joy of writing.