On Lemons, Lemonade and Robot Tales

Life is still serving us lemons, and I'm overwhelmed with trying to turn them all into lemonade. but I found this article through my feeds on Defence News.

I also have a friend who is working on 5G connectivity for the Army, link in the picture below. 

 

So, as you can imagine from reading my books, these are both very interesting projects as they show I wasn't too far off extrapolating the tech needed for my near future Mil-SF stories.

Currently I'm wrestling with a short story, project title: Omake – Japanese for Extra –The story of what happens to the lost robot explorer team seen briefly in my second novel.

I had planned to include this as an epilogue in Strike Dog, but readers thought it left too many questions hanging like a loose thread, and so I cut it out. Since then I've gone and expanded what was a couple of short paragraphs into several thousand words of odd snippets.

My plan is to turn these into a bunch of short stories about an android and robot dog.

But first I have to knock all the fragments I've written into a coherent narrative, rather than the number of short 'cool' scenes I have compiled.  So, I intend to use the Omake name for a collection of these shorts, as and when I can get my ass into gear.

And, I haven't thought of a good title for the first of the tales of  the android and his robodog, and what happened to them, their discoveries, and the consequences for them and mankind.

Keep well, stay safe, and catch you all on the bounce.

October, September Flew By

I could ask myself where did September go, but what's the point? No posts here, but I did put one on my Facebook page.

I usually post here and there, but what can I say?

In a world where brain eating amoebas were found in water supplies in the United States, as just one example, it seems the best thing to do is batten down the hatches and ride out the oncoming storm.

So I just didn't bother.

However, I thought for those of you who don't follow me on Facebook, I'd post a link to my author page, which can be accessed by clicking the picture above.

In other news, I've been working on my models, which you can see on my other blog.

Meanwhile, I'm using the model making time to meditate on issues that perplex me, as one does; or at least I do.

I'm boggled when friends say they think I'm trying to change their minds with my pieces because I thought I made it clear that they were my attempt to argue through and understand the baying mobs on social media.

As I said to friends, fact don't change opinions, and if I wanted to try and change a persons opinion I wouldn't start with facts. For a start one has to know if the other person wants to change their opinions or needs to for practical reasons.

Even when those criteria are met, it's hard to change people's opinions/beliefs. It just is. Otherwise how does one understand therapeutic outcomes being so low, or relapses after a successful course of treatment?

Emotions are the key to our beliefs.

These start when one is born, and the environment you're brought up in feeds your experiential growth. Leaven with classical and operant conditioning, and by around the age of four or so you have the foundations laid for who you grow to become.

As time goes by, more core beliefs are laid down, and we build our assumptions on them.

By your teenage years your thoughts are driven by hormones, genetics, and experience. This is why it's difficult to change beliefs and or habits. Not impossible, just hard.

Harder than you think unless one has an epiphany from a traumatic event.

Anyway, that's all I have to say for now. I must get my act together and write more, but one step at a time, because change is hard.