Oh that sudden sinking feeling

I recently had a crisis of confidence and ended up doing no work on any of my many projects. It is probably a good job it was an excellent summer and my time was taken up outside with the inevitable fix and maintain that seems to take up much of my time.

Why?

Well, working on the audiobook version was time consuming and a little daunting.

I first published using the single narrator format, which went OK but to make it more widely available required more tokens also I could use different voices for different characters and this was the main cause of the problem. As an author you have these characters in your head and picking accents is not an easy task. For example Arlo is from just outside Whitby, so asking for a Yorkshire voice gave me the real ‘eh by gum’ dialect’. Not what I was after at all.

Whitby

Whitby carries a particular kind of northern gravity — a place where land, sea, and story braid together so tightly you can almost hear the seams creak.

Whitby sits where the North Sea gnaws at the Yorkshire coast, a town of steep streets and salt‑bitten brick, where gulls wheel like scraps of torn parchment. The Abbey ruins crown the headland, ribs of stone silhouetted against a sky that never quite settles, always shifting between pewter and pearl. Below, the harbour curls inward like a cupped hand, holding fishing boats that knock gently against their moorings as though murmuring in their sleep.

There’s a tidal melancholy to Whitby — not sadness, but a sense of old memory rising and falling with the tide. You feel it in the narrow ginnels, in the smell of tar and fish, in the way the wind comes off the sea with a voice that seems older than the town itself. The cliffs to the east crumble in slow centuries, revealing seams of jet that Victorian hands once polished into mourning jewellery. Even now, you can walk the beach after a storm and find a shard of black stone that feels warm in your palm, as though it remembers fire.

And of course, Whitby carries its literary ghost: Stoker’s shadow, the shipwreck on Tate Hill Sands, the figure climbing the 199 steps like a rumour made flesh. But the town is more than that — more grounded, more human. Fishermen mending nets. Children with ice cream dripping down their wrists. The smell of vinegar from the chippies drifting across the harbour. A place where myth and everyday life sit comfortably side by side.

Anyway enough rambling on … Nobody reads it anyway 😒

Google

On a more positive note… As I did not want to continue with the novel feeling I had reached too far and failed I dropped back to my Fossil Geo app. And as my Eightieth birthday is coming up the familly took me to Switzerland where I went to the summit of Mont Blanc thus giving me ample opportunity to test in geologically interesting terrain. Few fixes and a rebuilt or two and it is now awaiting approval on the Google play store.

Cousins

And finally the annual cousins meet which went very well and where I think my enthusiasm for getting back to book two in the series returned. The cousins meet is where the hanson’s get together and chew the fat; anyway at the evening meal the menu had the item Sea Bass with - Saffron Velouté and I could not but help to see Saffron as a character in my book. So work proceeds in defining Saffron’s back story. Multiple Phd’s and off we go…

Finally probably the main reason for a new post

Lots of GitHub mails about security issues on the site - not my code but the support infrastructure so I have made the recommended changes and next job to publish to netlify.

Sorry this post has been a bit light on content but I don’t think anyone reads it any way so hey ho.