Jul 7, 2026
We went to Oscar’s sports day today. It had already been delayed twice due to the temperature, but third time lucky, I guess. It was similar, but a bit different to previous years.
During the last year the school has made a few changes and one of them is that all the kids are now in houses. There are four across the school, and Oscar is in water (the others are, of course, earth, air and fire) and over the year they can earn points for their house and at the end there will presumably be some kind of Harry Potter style ceremony where the winner is announced.
That’s the background and that’s why the teachers and support staff were taking the points more seriously this year. The kids got points for all the events they took part in and you know what I figured out pretty early on? They couldn’t have cared less.
If they actually cared about the points, they could have easily gamed the system by just having the people who were best in each event take part. That kid who could throw the most accurately would have done all the throwing and they would have racked up the points. But that’s not what happened at all.
The kids all wanted to take part in the events because they were fun. It didn’t matter to them whether they were good or not. It didn’t matter to anyone whether they were good or not. They took it in turns, they made sure everyone got a go and they had a great time.
It got me wondering why the school is trying to instigate the whole point system and it was pretty easy to figure out: because that’s what adult life is like. If you’re good at your job then (in theory) you get more points (money) and that kind of makes sense, but we do it to ourselves as well when we don’t pursue something because we perceive ourselves as being no good at it, completely forgetting the most important metric of all: whether we enjoy it.
Jul 6, 2026
An incomplete list of things that make me feel better and I should make sure I do more often.
I feel better when I…
– spend time with my family
– spend less time online, particularly on algorithm driven sites like Reddit
– do things to help other people
– am physically active
– read books and long form content rather than skimming through dopamine trap headlines
– don’t have to worry about money
– get on with the work rather than endlessly tinkering with the scaffolding around it
– have purpose
– eat well
– drink enough water
– know that I have used my time wisely
– put on new socks
– focus on doing one thing at a time
– slow down
– am not too hot and not too cold
– sleep well
– feel as if what I am doing has value
Jul 1, 2026
AI is a thing I’m still trying to figure out. I’ve gone from curious to skeptical to loathing. Right now I’m not sure where I stand because on the one hand it seems inevitable, but on the other it is an ethical nightmare built from stolen data and consuming the worlds resources more quickly than any other technology ever has. Conflicted barely covers it.
But if I’m being honest, there is one thing I’ve started using it for and it does it better than any other tool I’ve ever used: OCR.
I’ve always loved the idea of hand writing books. In the past I have completed first drafts of stories on paper and although I enjoyed the process, I could never bring myself to take the next step and type the thing up for editing. So all those stories (not many, but a few) are still sitting in a drawer somewhere or, more likely, lost forever. But this is where AI comes in. I can take a photo of a page, ask it to convert it to text and it does, with something close to 100% accuracy.
It has opened up this whole new way of working for me and I’m still not sure how I feel about it, but I can’t argue with the results.
What I’ve been doing with my current story is writing in GoodNotes on my iPad, exporting the page as a picture, and pasting that into Claude for the OCR conversion. So I now have close to 8,000 words of editable text that I can start editing without having to type anything.
Doing it this way does lose one of the advantages of writing by hand: the natural second draft you automatically create when typing it up, but I’ve never really gotten to that stage so I’m not losing anything. And I think my writing is better when I work by hand than typing, so I’m already better off.
I am conflicted though and maybe there are some less ethically questionable options out there. But this is the first time I’ve seen how AI can aid me creatively without actually having any input in the process. It’s not writing anything for me, it’s taking words I have already written and changing the format.
There is absolutely no way I will ever let AI create words for me, but this is a useful little service it can provide.
Dec 4, 2024
I’m still not feeling great. My side twinges and it’s difficult to get comfortable. Sleeping isn’t easy; I regularly wake up several times in the night and find it difficult to get back to sleep.
But I’m over the worst of it, I hope, and tomorrow I’m going back to work.
It has really thrown me. I didn’t know I could feel so much pain. Now I wonder when it will come back.
My dad suffered from kidney stones and there’s no reason to think this will be a one and done.
There are lifestyle changes I can make, and I intend to. I need to drink more water and eat less processed food. Citrus fruit is supposed to be good for parenting kidney stones.
The drugs I was prescribed were great for stopping the pain, but they didn’t leave me unscathed. I had weird palpitations in my abdomen. The antibiotics have wrecked my gut.
But it’s time to go back out into the world and try to hold onto these lessons. To take better care of myself.
—
Latest release: Sisterhood
Currently Writing:
- The Storm: a cozy apocalypse short story. Today’s progress: 1,047 / 4,844
- The List: a dark fantasy novella. PLANNING
- The Last Outpost: a science-fiction short story about a human colony on a moon of Jupiter. EDITING
Apr 30, 2024
It’s been a while since I last posted here and a lot has changed. Well, maybe not that much, but it feels like a lot. Enough that it’s going to change the way I’m approaching blogging, and writing in general (but more on that another time).
I finished working at Verizon in June last year, after 14 years with the same company. Since then I’ve been writing and doing a few other things. As of tomorrow I am once again employed and that’s going to take some adjustment. It’s a part-time role which suits me because I can carry on taking Oscar to and from school, and still have time to write and publish.
Even working part time, I’m going to have less time to spend on writing and publishing though, so why am I back to blogging, you might ask. Well, the simple answer is that I like writing here, and that’s a good enough reason. But it’s also because, while not having traditional employment, my time became sprawling. Things that I used to be able to do in a couple of hours took whole days. Returning to blogging feels like a way of fighting against that tendency.
While I’ve been away from blogging I have also been thinking about my upcoming writing projects and there are going to be some changes there. All for the better, I think.
Anyway, just wanted to check in and let you know what’s going on. I’ll be posting more regularly going forward so you shouldn’t have to wait so long for my next post.
Feb 21, 2024
I have always enjoyed super hero stories. One of the first films I remember seeing at the cinema was Tim Burton’s Batman, and as you can probably tell if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, I am a big fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Although super heroes originated in comic books, I have never been a big reader of them. I have tried a few times in the past, but it has never really clicked. I’m not sure why. For me, the best place to enjoy these stories is at the cinema or on television.
Last night, Tamzin and I watched the first few episodes of Extraordinary. It’s a comedy series, but not in the way I have seen comedy heroes done in the past. Most of the time, the superpowers aren’t played for laughs, but are taken seriously. The comedy comes from the characters.
The closest thing I can think to compare it to is Discworld, a fantasy comedy that still takes the world it has created seriously. Being in such rarified company suggests this isn’t a straightforward thing to do, and it got me thinking about my writing and whether I could manage something like that.
It also got me thinking about another super hero film we watched recently: The Marvels.
The Marvels got a lot of hate online, but we both really enjoyed it. Same with Thor Love and Thunder, which I would put as one of my favorite films in the MCU. But many people didn’t like them and it makes me think some people take these films too seriously. They are, after all, about people wearing costumes fighting crime. There has to be an element of fun in that.
But I think a lot of it is down to setting people’s expectations. And I think that’s an important lesson to take away from them for my writing. A show like Extraordinary is no less silly than Captain Marvel visiting a planet where they communicate by singing, but it was established in the very first scene that Extraordinary was a comedy, whereas The Marvels and Thor have dozens of films set in the same continuity establishing a very serious tone.
That’s what I’m taking away from this: set the tone quickly and make sure it is maintained.
