I had a vivid image of a scene (and the text to accompany it) as I was halfway inbetween sleep and wakefulness last night 🙂

While my ability to paint isn't great, I want to try painting the scene first, and then try to write the story ...

Will I get to it today? No idea 😛

#Writing #AmWriting

"The Wild Robot" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29623480) is beautifully animated, emotional, and heart-warming.

Sure, the story might not make sense logically, but who wants to talk logic when a story makes you smile, laugh, and want to hug somebody? 😛

#Movies #English #Hollywood

If anybody's looking for a post-holidy light read, I'd like to offer a light sci-fi novel for your consideration 🙂

It's about a man on the run from his wife's wrath, a bunch of bounty hunter clones, and assorted other miscreants:
books2read.com/b/mB1zAM

#Reading #Author #FediBooks #Bookstodon
A book cover with the title "Ho…

@OrionKidder You asking about places other than Amazon reminded me that my first novel is now out of Amazon contract. So I put it up on D2D today in the morning after our conversation 🙂

So if you want to get that, then that's available now from a bunch of places linked to here:
https://books2read.com/b/mB1zAM

More places should be added on as Draft2Digital get things going. It's not set in Sri Lanka but instead is in Afghanistan (don't ask me why 😛)

Totally different set of characters than the other book, but still the same universe 🙂

@OrionKidder I realized the same issue after I got into a deal with the devil 😛Given how the contract works, I have to wait till February (I think) for the book to come out of Amazon exclusivity ...

Once it does, it should be available from other online retailers (or at least, that's the plan at the moment). But till then, I'm stuck with Amazon 😕

@OrionKidder You're welcome 🙂Let me know what you think if you do read it.

@OrionKidder I have one which is not set in the western world, if you're looking for different perspectives 🙂

It's set in a future Sri Lanka ruled by a guild of thieves.

If you're interested, you can find it here:
https://books.farook.org/sir-lanka-files/

@trode I was using Cursor when a couple of people mentioned that Windsurf was better than Cursor 🙂

Personally, I like the LLM when it just completes the code that I actually want to write. Don't really want it writing code *for* me ... but I'm probably in the minority.

The biggest annoyance for me with Windsurf (besides the zombie files) was that its suggestions would pop up all the time and it was hard to see where the suggestions were and where my code was.

I'm back to VS Code again but am using the Codeium extension to see if that's less intrusive ...

Been trying out Windsurf as a VS Code replacement since some folks raved about it.

But I'm getting really tired of Windsurf because it seems to randomly recreate files that I'd deleted/renamed. I don't want no zombie files 😛

#Coding #IDEs #VSCode #Windsurf

@aerobender I do understand the cash-grab part, but if they'd actually made a decent movie then it would have left the door open for them to grab more cash the next time 😛

These were so horrible that I'd probably not even want to look at each franchise ever again.

Ah well, I guess we are well and truly in the age of mediocrity 😛

Wrote close to 4.5k for the Flutter kids book yesterday but it's become a massive chapter 🙂 Time to move on to a new chapter I guess?

#Writing #Coding #Flutter

@chrislee35 Just knowing somebody thinks it's a good idea is very encouraging 🙂So thank you!

If you have kids, or know some who might be interested, would be great to have some beta readers at some point. I try to explain everything but maybe I'm explaining things too much? Or not enough?

Knowing the right note to strike would help and would probably help the final reader too since they might not get bored or throw the book away because they are drowning in words 😛

Somebody quipped that "Sir Lanka Files" (https://books2read.com/b/mgw00v) is not fiction since it's about an island nation ruled by a guild of thieves 😛

I started the book during the aragalaya. Have a sequel in mind but I will have to wait a couple of months to see where things go?

#Writing #LKA

While the siren-call still lingers to do some coding, I finally managed to get going on the writing today 🙂

Got 2k words written on the third chapter of my book on Flutter development aimed at kids. I wonder if I'd rather be writing fiction, but this is something I enjoy too.

#Writing #Flutter

Is it just me or are the re-works of old movies just crap?

Just tried to watch "Hellboy: The Crooked Man" and "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" and they were both so inane and boring that we gave up after a little while on both.

#Movies #English #Hollywood #MovieUpdates

@crcollins I don't get it either 🙂But maybe some people see Bluesky as easier to use since they can see numbers for interaction since likes etc. are a single figure instead of spread across multiple servers?

I have been subscribing to QI and Engadget across a bridging service but that spews a bunch of posts on to my timeline every week or so and that annoys me. So I do prefer accessing those accounts directly on Bluesky but other than that, I have not found that much engagement on Bluesky ...

I've been using Bluesky for a couple of days now and it's rather interesting that some accounts that I really liked on Twitter (like QI and Engadget) are either not present on the Fediverse or tried to create a presence but became inactive after a bit.

But on Bluesky, they are very much active.

So why the difference? Is it a lack of interaction? Or the percieved fragmentation due to how Mastodon works?

#Mastodon #Fediverse #Bluesky

So ... based on feedback about the Flutter book, pivoted from an adult/programmer oriented approach to be more kid/beginner friendly and re-wrote the first two chapters to fit the new approach.

I was set to start on the third chapter when yak-shaving struck again 😛

I started thinking about a BlueSky client because apparently BlueSky engineers are overloaded and can't add the ability to filter out reposts. And I wanted it ....

So that's where I am today — coding. Hopefully, will get back to writing later today?

#Writing

So, I suddenly have the time to write, but have three different books clamoring for attention 😛

1. A Flutter programming book with 2 chapters written
2. A completed novella that needs to be totally re-written
3. A new novel in a new genre that's suddenly very interesting

What to do?

#Writing

The audio book for my second novel, "Sir Lanka Files" is now available! It's about the humorous misadventures of a private detective in a future island city ruled by a guild of thieves. More details here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B0DQ63PSMR/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-424788&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_424788_rh_us

Shout out to Brad Derry (https://bradderryvo.com/) for the great voice work! If you need somebody to voice your audio book, he's the one! Check out the book sample (at the link above) for Brad's excellent work!

#ScienceFiction #Humour #AudioBook #Writing #FediBooks #Bookstodon