What I'm Doing Right Now What I'm Doing Right Now

Bloody hell, it's October already. A lot has been going on, which means no Now updates since July.

I guess the first update is that I'm now taking Wegovy diet pills. I'm severely overweight (134kg), and I need to get down to 100kg (although 90kg is my ideal target). Everything else has failed - healthier eating, sports, sobbing, swearing - so the pills are the last chance saloon.

However, it hasn't all been entirely bad. Two years ago, I was 155kg, and was told I was shortening my life, or at the very least making myself a prime candidate for Type 2 diabetes. But now, at 130-ish kg, the weight stubbornly refuses to come off. The side effects of Wegovy are horrendous (I'll spare you the details.)

The book writing and publishing have taken a bit of a hit. I had to let several people go for not producing what they promised, so it's just me and one other author. Book sales on Amazon in general have been going down and I've been doing everything I can think of to get the sales back up and cut costs. I'm cautiously optimistic that I may have finally stemmed the blood flow.

You may be wondering why there's a picture of a mad scientist here. That's because, in my attempt to diversify my income, I've started building some apps to sell online. These will be sold under the banner of Glass Dagger Labs and the scientist is the Labs icon.

The first thing to go out will be an app called Rogue Cover Foundry (however, I'm not sold on the name, so I may change it.) It's an app - currently in beta - that many authors will hopefully find useful. It generates paperback covers simply by adding some information and the size of the book.

Another app which is going through the Apple approval process is something called TextWasher. This is an app where you can put in formatted text, press a button, and you get plain text at the other end. You can also convert that text into other formats. But predictably, it's held up in the Apple approval process to get it into the App Store. C'est la vie.

I've also been diving a lot more into AI, figuring out the limitless possibilities, and building tools to hopefully streamline the work process more. It's absolutely fascinating. I'm looking at AI voices for video voiceovers, I've made an app using Whisper to make video subtitles, and I'm trying in vain to find a half-decent video generation tool that doesn't cost the GDP of a small country. I've tried Higgsfield but I'm not totally convinced about it.

Current Focus / Projects - July 2026

I'm building the publishing company, Glass Dagger Press, along with a colleague, Romy, and two authors who may or may not actually produce an actual book sometime this century. We're producing and publishing around two books per month right now. Well, Romy and I are. The other two are just...let's just call it 'procrastinating'.

Next, I'm overhauling this website so every reader is redirected to the site for things like buying books, signing up for the newsletter, or to tell me how much I suck at writing books. (I don't, but that doesn't stop a lot of people saying otherwise.)

The website now runs on static HTML and CSS pages. This makes the site extremely fast, much more simple in terms of code, and the site feels "cleaner" as a result. But updating pages is now a bit of a pain in the ass, without a CMS to do all that tedious stuff for me.<

I'm also discovering the genius of Codex, making lots of really cool apps and webpages. I also tried getting Codex to monitor my Protonmail email and draft replies, but it was very brittle, constantly breaking, and I had to close it down.

Simplifying my social media is the next one. I think it will just be Instagram, and occasionally LinkedIn. I've tried to care about Threads, but I really can't be bothered with it. I have a severe case of fuck-it-titis with most social media.

Got a trip planned for the end of the month, another in September, and I am also considering a quick dash to England to visit a school friend who I haven't seen in almost 40 years. We keep in touch via Instagram and WhatsApp, but I would love to see him again in person at least once before we both croak.

I'm also hard at work trying to get better at chess. My ELO is currently 800, which is OK, but not totally great. I keep getting beaten by chess apps on my phone. So I'm studying tactics and seeing if I can get my ELO up to around 900. I'm also trying to solve a Rubik's Cube, and failing badly!

Simplifying my life seems to be the overall project of my life this year. Reading, meditating, sleeping, working less (that part isn't working yet), separating myself from the negativity and poison in my life, and spending more quality time with my wife and dog. Not to mention paring down my possessions to the stuff I really want and need. Simplicity is the watchword of my life now. As Derek said on his site once, I'm preparing my "no".

Want to hear my no? "Thanks but no thanks. I'd rather swallow a lava lamp." Yeah, I'm not known for my diplomacy.

I'm going through my phase of reading mostly fiction at the moment. My overloaded brain can't seem to handle too much non-fiction right now.

I've just finished Frederick Forsyth's Revenge of the Odessa, which is the sequel to The Odessa File which he wrote back in the 1970s. It was quite good, but it was quite jarring with the Washington DC subplot, which took you out of the main story and gave you characters you really couldn't care less about.

Then there was Exit Strategy by Lee Child, which was meh. I think I'm rapidly going off his books. I also read Evil in High Places by Rory Clements, which was VERY good. It was about the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, and a murder which has to be covered up because of the intensive Olympics news coverage.

One non-fiction book which I am slowly getting through is The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984, by Dorian Lynskey. I have enormous respect for George Orwell, his books, and his journalism. In fact, I am also going through his Collected Essays, a thumping 1,400 page door-stopper. I've been working at this book for something like four years. I'll finish it eventually. I owe it to George.