British Weather, Short Story Submissions, and an Ongoing Encounter with AI

Paul Jameson

8 minutes ago

2 min read

British weather has arrived. Cold and wet. A wind that blows through you. Dark and dreary and bloody beautiful after all the hot weather and drought, the stifling slumbers in hot houses, and a summer that seemed it would never end. Just in time for Halloween too. Marvellous. Cups of hot chocolate, woolly scarves and bobble hats. All is well and as it should be.

Yes.

I love the cold weather.

All the trees are changing colour, like fire with the grey or cold blue skies above, and the leaves are slippery on the ground. In fact this week I saw something I've never seen before. One of the storms - they call them names these days and I've always been pants with names - brought some real wind with it. Me, sitting in the lounge watching telly, was lucky enough to see thousands upon thousands of twirly-whirly helicopter seeds being blown off the trees that surround our house. Honestly they filled the sky. I've never seen so many and it was amazing. So much so the telly was off and I was glued to the window for about fifteen minutes watching them.

It was magical.

Truly.

And I finished a short story this week too. I decided novel writing wasn't getting me anywhere, as no all-consuming notion has grabbed me, and so I found an opportunity through HorrorTree to submit an offering to an online magazine for speculative fiction. HorrorTree is one of the few newsletters I subscribe to and I find it really good at identifying submission opportunities in this genre. So if you write strange things I'd definitely recommend giving it a visit. And if you write weird speculative fiction, the submission I put forward is for Experimental Thoughts whose submission window closes on the 30th November; plenty of time to submit and good luck if you do.

Finally, on a week that really was something of an indoors, hiding in the shed sort of week, I continued to inadvertently encounter AI (last week I wrote a piece about a little experiment I did with AI for my own purposes which you can link to here). Anyway this time I stumbled across it doing a survey exploring Music Streaming. I had no idea there was AI generated music, let alone music stations devoted to it. So I went to see what electronic, hellish soundscape it would be only to play the opening twenty seconds of one song to find it was really realistic - so much so you wouldn't know it was AI. With this and writing books, painting pictures and making music, it really is frightening stuff for artists. Far too powerful to be in the hands of mankind's lazy greed.

And that's it folks.

My week.

If there's a topic you'd like me to consider in a blog, a book you think I really need to read and review, or a TV Series you think I'd enjoy (and you'd like me to include it in my blog) drop me a line and let me know.

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