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Poe’s famous line of “Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear,” may have had a point at the time but it’s now time to rethink his original position.

In short, “don’t believe a damn thing unless you were there and even then, be suspicious of your memory.”

What a way to live!
Let’s examine the current state of the art. This isn’t science fiction or fantasy, it’s here now and being unleashed.
And no matter what “Fake News” is being bandied about in American politics, we’ve just scratched the surface.

Faking A Voice

Well, yes but how can they really fake somebody’s voice? You can tell the difference between fake and real. Right?  OK then, here’s a company that’s about to prove you wrong.  Understand this is at the demo level and hasn’t yet hit the market or perfection.
But how far out can it be?

Faking An Image Of Somebody Talking

You mean you haven’t seen a cgi (computer generated imagery) movie yet? Seriously, with a decent skill level and software anybody can be seen to say anything.

It’s Now Simple

Combine the fake voice-sound and the cgi-video and you have…
That’s the world we’re headed towards at the speed of technological intrusion.

And if I can think about it, there’s a backroom political operative that’s planning on doing it.

But Here Come The White Hats

When it comes to voice recognition, there are white hats among us. One group at M.I.T. is working with technology to assist those with social recognition skill issues.  Those are good people.
And then there are these folks who’ve already recognized the negative issues around fake voices and fake news and are working on a system that will help you identify fake voices.

This Is Your Very Real Future

I’ve been working on some new stories and somehow my ideas and thoughts carelessly wandered  down this rabbit hole of voice recognition.

• Given accurate voice synthesis such as Lyrebird, how do you tell the real from the fake moving forward?
• How do you make decisions about future policies and political leadership when this technology exists and is likely to be used by the opposition.
• Not only are we in a “he-said, she-said” kind of info-war, we’re in a technological battle to identify or at the very least, label your opponent as having used “fake” data.

I can hear you saying, “This is terrible but it really doesn’t apply to me in my personal life.”

This is clearly a problem for anybody in a leadership position at the moment but it doesn’t take much imagination to ask what would happen if somebody mimicked your voice in a conversation with a banker or spouse.

Now that I have your attention.  This is me speaking to you and not some robot.
Yet.

Just when you thought it was safe to go into the water…
As I’ve said, publishing is a bit of an adventure at the moment. Sigh.

Ebook Publishing

There are two basic strategies for publishing in the online world. The first is called “deep”. Publishing deep means that you put all of your eggs in the Amazon basket, use all their programs, and the resources of this 900 – pound giant of the publishing world.
The second is called “wide” and this means using all retail publishing platforms to distribute your work across the widest possible audience.
I had originally decided to go “wide” and had published books on the Pronoun platform. Those were the links in the author report for April.
But between the time I had written that post and then published it, I had changed my mind and decided to go deep with Amazon.  I forgot to update that post.
I’ll have more to say about that decision as I move forward, but for now everything is going up on Amazon.
The only book that is “wide” at the moment is 2047 and that is available for free on all platforms now including Amazon.

Newsletter Readers:

57 (down a few)   Note this doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I’m quite used to having readers unsubscribe when they decide they’re no longer interested.  It costs money to send these emails so when people are no longer interested, unsubscribing is far better than simply deleting without reading. (or worse assigning them to the spam folder).

Ebook Updates:

I hoped to get the last ebook in the Future Forward series done and uploaded in May. Got it written but not in time to get it edited and laid out before the end of the month screamed by.  That’s now part of June’s objectives and I’ll send out a note when that goes live.

The Next Book Series (Working Title: The Next 100 Years)

I’m working on the next book series and I’ll be putting it out bit by bit to the list as I write it.

Note each story/chapter will only stay live on the website for two weeks and then it will be deleted. So if you want to follow along, visit the site to read the story – or wait until the ebooks are published for the entire thing all at once.

Podcast Updates:

Hmm, didn’t do any.  But I’ve been making about my latest thinking in this area and it’s looking like I’m going to continue with the podcast. I’ll tell you why and how in another post once I get all the details and thoughts arranged in some coherent order.

Sales Updates:

2047 is free now across all platforms. In May, there were 21 downloads on Amazon and 11 downloads on the rest of the world’s ebook platforms (mostly iBooks).
Sales were non-existent for the other two ebooks.

Bottom Lines

The month was a slow grinding back to production and a shock to my system when I figured out one critical piece of the publishing puzzle (more to come on this in a separate blog post).
But the words are flowing again and that’s the important point.
The increased rate of free downloads means people are reading the ebooks. So that’s good even if it hasn’t yet translated to increased subscribers here. At some point it will.
 

April was a month that saw me grind back into production.  I don’t use the word “grind” lightly as the gears were somewhat rusty and out of alignment.  Moving from the enclaves of Florida back to the freedom of our island created a serious dose of culture shock. (And not to put too fine a point on it – temperature shock for the person I live with.)
It’s also taking far too long to unpack (having sold the Southern place, my island office has two sets of office equipment in it – 2 printers, 2 chairs etc)
Cleanup time ahead…
As for grinding back into “production” – well, that may be a bit overoptimistic as well… [Read more…] about Author Report April 2017

 
Before you talk about not being able to pry your phone only out of your cold, dead, steely hands, let me offer a few thoughts.

My first mobile phone was the size of a shoebox. It sat on the middle car console, plugged into a cigarette lighter and had spotty coverage. The battery for the darn thing occupied most of that space.
My current phone is an iPhone. The battery size is something out of another world when compared to that big old shoebox.

Let’s look at some options that exist now.  We’re not talking future tech here, we’re speaking of things that work and simply need organizing into an operating system. [Read more…] about How You'll Want To Replace Your Cell Phone In A Few Years

OK, when it comes to the January/February/March 2017 Author report, it’s “the less said the better” kinds of reports.
A dental surgical “event” in the second week of January pretty much took care of things for the next three weeks.  The surgeon said, “You can resume normal activities in two-three days.” Yeah right. In my case, it turned out to be 2-3 weeks.
I wasn’t impressed but decided if my body was sending the “rest message” then I had really better listen to it. Part of that was a general fatigue caused by my  workout program at the time.  The resulting backlog in my non-fiction work and lack of motivation pretty much took care of the rest of the first three months.  And very few fiction words found their way to life.

I confess I’m not pleased with this but it was also a quarter of some other major life events that aren’t relevant here. Adding them all together necessitated production in other genres of my writing world but took me out of the game in fiction.  That has now been taken care of and a major pivot is underway.

The Podcast

Was put on hold. When you don’t have bottom teeth, your tongue doesn’t work and the mic picks up the “s” sounds so the resulting recording sounds very much like Voldemort when he’s in snake-mode.
The temporary bottom tooth went in last week.
But…

We’ve Sold Our Florida Home

And we’re packing up to move back north to Canada. (It’s a long story) If you’ve ever moved – you understand the packing drill. Well, just add an entire pottery studio to your list (yes, my better half’s a potter.)

Book Sales

Thanks to whoever purchased them. 🙂
Word counts (numbers of word written) for this period managed to find the basement without much help from me. I don’t think I’ve written fewer words in a quarter for a very long time. (insert author whinging sounds here.)

Books and the KU program

I’ve withdrawn them from the KU program in any case. I’ll be uploading to other channels in the very near future.
Going for what they call a “broad” distribution rather than narrow.

The Future:

It was an “interesting” quarter from several different perspectives.
The surgery obviously knocked me back further than I’d like to admit.
Along with feeling better has come a review of all my writing and objectives. I’ll have more to say on this in the near future (or at least in more detail) but from the fiction side of things, I’m expanding.

Writer Development

If I don’t take care of getting better in my own professional development, nobody else will do it.

• Took a course on podcasting. Will be making changes in upcoming podcasts.
• Finished a great course on Depth in Writing

Those were the highlights of my quarter.

So What The Heck Have I Been Doing

The short form is I decided to practice what I was learning in the workshop. And the best way to do this was to rewrite (one time) the two books I’ve already published.
Those who purchased them will get the rewrite free (there’s going to be enough there to trigger a redownload-alert from Amazon et al)

Summary:

Not a sterling quarter for sure. From your own life you know there are times like this and hopefully you too found a way to bounce back.
I will simply say I expect April will start the turnaround and you can expect to hear more from me – some more short stories etc etc.
If you find yourself interested in the short stories or posts here, let me suggest you subscribe. I send out full summaries to interested readers.
 

Sunny, cold mornings in the midst of summer don’t stir memories as do the fires of fall or the stirrings of early spring.  Fall days bring reminders of chores to be done, of days lost to staring at computer screens and trying to make some sense of the world. The spring days brings a renewed sense of hope and fresh air to my world.
I sit trying to understand a world where the old ways have begun to accelerate their demise – cracked in the world wars of the last century, and the incessant smaller conflicts. Chunks of our humanity have been removed in the technology explosion of the late century, the chip-driven, world we live in is far removed from those days of slow Sundays and pleasant parks.
It is a walled world; a world of fear on one side with immense but unusable power and the pounding of the mass outside the gates looking on.  Gates don’t last forever, particularly electronic ones, and this one is crumbling under the pressure.  There is a rush to get in on the final days of the empire – to get enough to protect oneself and family and to grab a taste of the good life while it still exists in all its excessive glory.
I don’t remember mornings like this from my childhood. I was blessed in that my childhood was gloriously normal, spent doing childhood things like building tree houses and fording swamps on the way to conquest and adventure.
It’s all a blur of things that children find important – that the neighbor farmer shot a crow every year and hung the carcass in one of the fruit trees to keep the crows away from the corn.  That his wife was up every morning at sunrise to weed the endless rows of vegetables by hand – one elbow on her knee supporting herself as she bent over pulling weed after weed from the spotless fields of plants.  Of carrying water from their well to our house before my dad dug our well by hand. Of my brother falling, fracturing his skull but living for another 30 years and being so proud of his bandage-hat. The horseshoe scar was a forever-reminder of that adventure.
I remember hot days beside the swimming pool playground (it cost a quarter to go swimming – big money in those days) and we’d sometimes swim in the pool and sometimes swim in the creek beside it.  The creek had currents to float on (until you hit the shallows and bumped painfully across the rocks) and the pool was chlorine crystal-clear to hurt your eyes.
I remember those days and marvel at the end of them; lost in the progress of the chip. And I mourn that lost innocence.
But the wonder of these days entrances me.

• How fast we all move.
• How far our horizons could be.
• What separations we’ve created in our lives and societies.

If the printing press brought on a hundred years of civil unrest in politics, religion and society, how long will this computer impact last?
And more to the point, who will survive afterwards? And what will this world look like?
Even more to the point, what are you doing to make it more human?