Chris James's Blog, page 2

1 November in Poland (2024)

All Saints Day seems to roll around more quickly each year. This evening, Youngest Daughter and I packed up the camera and tripod, and mooched down to the Roman-Catholic Cemetery in Stara Miłośna (Cmentarz Rzymskokatolicki w Starej Miłośnie) to take the photos below. I’ve been living in Poland for 26 years now, nearly half of my life, and this tradition never ceases to amaze me.

Enjoy the last few days of crumbling global peace, peeps. This time next week, the most militarily powerful country on the planet will be sliding either into dictatorship or its second civil war. Either way, the West’s enemies will be celebrating guiding the USA into destroying itself, and the next global conflict will have taken a major step closer.

Home Improvements, Pt. 94: the terrace

The last few weeks here in the James household have been taken up with the terrace being reclad in stone slabs. When we originally built the house, we had the terrace tiled. Below are two shots of it from 2015. At first glance, it looks great, but the problems had already begun. The thin tiles were breaking off, unable to cope with Polish winters, and those upright beams had started rotting at their bases and needed replacing:

During Covid, all the tiles finally broke up and the terrace has looked a mess ever since. We finally found a crew to redo it, and we decided to go back to basics. I dug out all of the earth and plants around it to leave this:

This week, the crew we hired finally finished the work. We still need to tidy up a couple of things and of course the grass, etc. needs to grow back. In addition, Mrs James will plant some tulips in the new beds you can see either side of the steps. For the eagle-eyed among you, you may notice that the facia board above the steps has been cut away. That’s because the sand and slabs added 8cm to the height of the floor, which meant I hit my head going up the steps. Still, it looks nice now

Oak miscellaneous pot

Eldest son and his fiancé moved into their first home earlier this year, a modest one-bed flat that is ideal for a young couple just starting out. As there isn’t a vast amount of spare room, I wanted to carve something for them hopefully useful as well as long-lasting, so came up with this “miscellaneous pot” carved out of a piece of young oak firewood, part of the vast haul I brought out of my local forest a couple of years ago.

The idea is that it sits somewhere handy, near the front door or next to the microwave, and they keep in it those small things they share, like the key to their storage lockup in the basement or car keys; a place where they can always find small but important things. And yes, you bet I carved it out of oak because I have one eye on the future, with an elderly man or woman decades hence saying to a young child, “Your great-great-grandfather carved that over 100 years ago. The ’24’ on the back refers to 2024, not 2124!”

Anyway, temporal aspirations aside, here are the before, after, bonus-after, and suggested-serving shots

Pine wood spirit

This is not my first attempt at carving a wood spirit; the first will certainly go in the fireplace as soon as the evenings become chill enough. But this fellow shan’t be the last, either. I carved it from a spare piece of pine column that I first cut in half diagonally. This is a bit of a cheat because it means you already have a centreline to work with to help you with the facial symmetry (as opposed to starting from a flat surface). The first pic is the before shot, where you can also see my Dremel flexshaft on the left, burrs behind, and mask and goggles on the right. The second the carved spirit. The third is after a couple of coats of varnish, and the last is where it will hopefully reside in the living room for a while

KDP All Stars and an oak mushroom

Firstly, many thanks to my UK readers: with over 155,000 KENP pages read in July, Amazon decided I was worth a discretionary “KDP All Stars” bonus. These bonuses are given for “KDP Select e-books that delight readers”, and mine was awarded for Aftermath (88,000 pages read in that total above). It’s really very nice indeed that so many UK readers have been, a-hem, so delighted with the new release Thank you, all.

It’s also inspired me to be a touch contrary. The usual strategy with a now-completed seven-book series would be to make the first book dirt-cheap or even free, to entice readers into buying the whole series. I won’t do that because I don’t think it’s fair on all the readers who’ve paid the full price for Onslaught. So, I’ve decided to leave the last book in the series permanently at the introductory price of USD 2.99, because if a reader stays/has stayed with the first six books and wants to find out how it all ends, then they deserve a bonus.

In the meantime, I’ve kept a promise I made to myself a few years ago that, when I finished The Repulse Chronicles, I would have a crack at wood carving. After several weeks of whittling with hand tools and grinding with a rotary tool, I’ve managed to make something that doesn’t look a complete mess. The mushroom started as this piece of firewood:

And here it is with a fresh coat of stain, and then among the flowers in the garden. This is a fun hobby that is also challenging, so this blog might very well morph into a wood carving blog. Stay safe, peeps and thanks for reading

Subversion

Watch this video of a KGB expert explaining how Russia works to destroy its enemies. The speaker, Jurij Bezmienow, gave this presentation 41 years ago, when Russia used to be called the Soviet Union and Vladimir Putin was just one of thousands of KGB men working to undermine the West. Listen to what Bezmienow says and understand how, today, Putin and the entire Russian state is using the West’s freedoms against us, how Trump, Musk, the entire British Conservative Party, and thousands more traitors, turncoats, useful idiots, feeble-minded simpletons, and fifth columnists are slowly ensuring that Putin will realise his stated aim of making the West pay dearly for winning the Cold War in 1989.

Forty-one years ago, we knew very well who the enemy was. But now? Today, Russia has billions of bots and tweets and posts to feed like bacteria on Western leaders’ cowardly indifference. This video explains precisely how Russia is destroying us today, thanks primarily to an unregulated internet, which has increased Russia’s power to attack us immeasurably.

Publication day for Aftermath

Today, The Repulse Chronicles, Book Seven: Aftermath was published on Amazon Kindle.  If you pre-ordered the book, then you have it on your device now.  I do hope you enjoy this last part of the story.  Thank you so much if you’ve stayed with this series over the seven years it’s taken me to write.  Aftermath is the final book, and probably the last novel I will write.  Today, it’s summer in the forests of southeast Warsaw: the days are long and warm and the garden is verdant and needs work and I want to spend time outside.  By the end of October, when darkness falls at 4.00pm, my opinion might change.  However, with The Repulse Chronicles complete and only sketches of stories set in other subgenres of science fiction for me to mull, for the first time in ten years, I don’t know for sure where the next novel might come from, nor when.

I wrote my first novel-length manuscript 20 years ago, so it’s reasonable now to assess whether I have reached the objectives I set out for (well, hoped for).  The genre fiction publishing landscape has changed remarkably since 2004.  The first earthquake was the introduction of self-publishing; the second has been so-called artificial intelligence.  It’s taken me seven years to write The Repulse Chronicles, around 600,000 words over seven novels.

ChatGPT will do the same for you in a day.

Don’t take my word for it.  Open ChatGPT and tell it to write you a full-length novel.  Set your parameters, e.g. “Write an 80,000-word science fiction novel about aliens who are a gas-based life form invading and attempting to take over Earth”.  The AI will write it for you in front of your eyes, one chapter at a time, and then ask you if you’re happy with each part.  You can change your parameters or thicken the plot, e.g. “Give the protagonist a drink problem,” or “Give the antagonist a drug addiction”.  Yes, what the AI churns out will be trite, hackneyed and cliched.  But it will also be fast-paced and typographically flawless.  And it’s only going to get better at what it does.

Today, to say a book or a film seems like it’s been written by AI is an insult.  In five years’ time, it will be so accepted as to be unremarkable and unremarked.  In ten years’ time, people will wonder how anyone ever wrote anything before AI was there to guide them.  Moreover, today there are over 50 million books for sale on Amazon.  This number is likely to increase dramatically over the next year or so, as goldrush “entrepreneurs” hurry to upload millions of stories churned out by AI in minutes.  As it was with the self-publishing revolution 15 years ago, so it will be again with AI.

Suddenly, it seems to me to be incredibly quaint to talk about taking a year to write a novel.  A bit like deciding to invest in a forge and anvil, and dragging them down the nearest highway/motorway/autostrada, and firing up your furnace in the hope a traveller might pass by whose horse needs shoeing, while thousands of cars race by every hour.  That’s the difference AI is going to make not just to novel-writing, but to all forms of storytelling.  What hope the farmer with his scythe, while the combine harvester gobbles up everything around him?

Then again—and not for the first time—I could be wrong.  The only thing I am fairly confident of is that, in a few years, we will not be able to tell difference between AI and non-AI content.

But I count myself incredibly lucky.  I’ve managed to snag readers despite the overwhelming competition, and the last few years have especially been very satisfying.  Readers have contacted me to thank me and ask when the next book is coming out, and I’ve enjoyed interacting with all of you.  One of my favourites, among so many, was the reviewer who last year complained good-naturedly at the outrageous cliff-hanger on which Operation Repulse ended.  I smile when I think that for that reader, the waiting is over.

It only remains for me to offer once again my sincerest thanks to all of you for spending your valuable time on my novels.  There are enough classics of literature to keep even the keenest bookworm occupied for more than one lifetime, and that you chose to spend some of yours on my stories means the world to me.  Thank you.

To finish, here’s a temporal comparison: Youngest Daughter in 2017, when I published Book One, Onslaught, and today, on the publication of Book Seven, Aftermath.  I’m a lucky dad, and I’m very grateful for that, too.

Almost there

In only two weeks, the Kindle edition of Aftermath will go live. If you’ve already pre-ordered it, thank you. If you can’t wait the two weeks, the paperback is already available, although I don’t recommend buying it because it’s more money (only for you and Amazon, natch). The editing over the last few weeks went more quickly than I thought, possibly because it’s a slightly shorter novel than the others. On the plus side, it’s nice to have this last novel ready in plenty of time.

I’ll be back on publication day, in two weeks, to explain why Aftermath is probably going to be my last novel. In the meantime, I thought you might like to see some behind-the-scenes stuff. As readers, we obviously form our own images of the characters we read about, but here are some photos of complete strangers I took, and to whom I ascribed characters when I began The Repulse Chronicles. These are all people who happened to be in the Croatian town of Korcula in late July 2017. At the end, there is a picture of a sunrise over the Croatian countryside that I also took on that vacation, and which has been the background of my social media header images since then.

It’s been a long road, but the end is finally in sight.

First, some of the politicians:

English Prime Minister Dahra Napier:

Her Director of Communications Crispin Webb:

And the Head of MI5 David Perkins:

A few of the soldiers:

Colour Sergeant Rory Moore:

Captain Pip Clarke:

Sergeant Jack Heaton:

And two of the civilians:

Turkish engineering student Berat Kartal:

Trainee nurse Serena Rizzi:

And finally the sunrise:

A May vacation and a nice surprise

In Poland, 1 and 3 May are public holidays, so if those two dates fall on working days in the same week, most peeps in the country take the other three days off and snag a week’s vacation. And Mrs James and I are no different. Below are some pictures from our travels this last week: first, we scooted down to the Slovakian side of the Tatra Mountain range for some light climbing in the national park there and a visit to the Vrbov Thermal Park, a must if you’re ever in the region. After a couple of days, we headed down to Lake Balaton in Hungary, getting some cycling in while visiting the stunning castle ruins at Szigliget and the remarkably well-preserved Festetics Palace at Keszthely. To be honest, you could spend a month around Lake Balaton and still not see half of the history and culture on offer.

When we got back yesterday, I had a very nice surprise. You might recall last year that Diana Wallace Peach was kind enough to interview me on her blog. On her own recent vacation, she and Mr Wallace Peach read the rest of The Repulse Chronicles and she has been kind enough to include her thoughts in her monthly book review. Do click through and read her reviews of other authors’ books as they are extremely well thought-out.

Keep safe, you dear peeps, and here are the vacation pics:

Slovakia:

Around Lake Balaton, Hungary, including the castle ruins and palace:

Aftermath and tulips

Spring has sprung here in Warsaw, so below are a few pictures of Mrs James’s tulips. Every year, we spend many pleasant coffee moments sitting in the garden and admiring the results of her hard work the previous autumn. For the tulips, scroll down. In the meantime:

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’m not given to authorly naval-gazing. But finishing the first draft of The Repulse chronicles, Book Seven: Aftermath, did give me reason to pause for a while. When I began the series in 2017, I never quite believed I would reach the end. In 2016, the modest success of the original history of the war in Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 led me to create the Chronicles series, and as the years passed, the series has has gained a loyal readership. The Covid pandemic played a major role. When it began, I’d only written the first two books and had started a new job that promised to take up a lot of my time. Then, suddenly, we were in lockdown and I was saving two hours a day not having to commute. Book Three saw a notable increase in sales which, in turn, spurred me on to keep writing subsequent books. Then, this week, I finished the first draft of the last book.

There is still a long way to go with it, as all of the editing and proofreading remains outstanding. Hence, I’ve set the publication date for 30 June. In my experience, 10 to 11 weeks is about the soonest I can go from first draft to a product of publishable quality. For those of you who are waiting, I will confirm that the cliff-hanger on which the last book, Operation Repulse, ended is resolved head-on (and then some). Now, I and the small army of people behind the scenes who help me, will make sure the text is in the best possible shape for you. As with all of my books, the Kindle pre-order is live at the early-bird-catches-the-worm price of USD 2.99 or equivalent. The cover on the right there links to the UK page, so if you’re in the US click here, in Canada click here, or in Australia click here.

For me, this week it was quite strange to type “THE END” on a novel and not immediately consider the next book in the series. Because there won’t be one. Thanks for reading. Take care and here are the tulips.