Keith's May newsletter

Hi Folks

June already huh? Time really does fly when you’re cold and miserable. Ah well, at least we have a general election to look forward to. The upcoming bonfire of tory ambitions will keep us warm for many months to come.

Ambition Interrupted

Had a weird moment this month when a job application got rejected before the application period had come to an end. That was a bit of a kick in the teeth. Was it really that bad? I don’t think so. Anyway, since I think I would be good at the job I have rejigged my CV to be a bit more blatant then applied for the same job at the same organisation but in a different area. If I get rejected outright again I’ll assume it’s some sort of prejudice and move on. You can show someone that you are right for something, but if all they see if the wrong there’s nothing you can do about that.

News From The Steam Factory

Start of May I realised that International Steampunk Day was on its way (Friday 14th June) and I had nuthin’ for it. No book, no one-page RPG, not even a dirty limerick. That was not good. Won’t get anywhere in the world of steampunk when you don’t celebrate the one day dedicated to it.

I’ve been toying with the idea of a free book of short stories for a while now. Something to introduce people to the world of Hammersmyth and get them into the series as a whole. I have some short stories up on my website but I doubt many people see those. I need something downloadable that feels like a gift. There’s a lot of good will in something like that.

I only had three/four short stories at the start of the month, so I’ve been frantically writing two more - a Nomko short story and an Agnes Goodenough one. They are now done and I’m in rewrites on both. I hope to get all that done this weekend, when I will be formatting and publishing the book by close of business Sunday. Why the tight deadline you ask? Because I want to make the book free, but to do that I need to publish on Smashwords where I can give it away for nothing, then publish on Amazon where I can’t, then ask Amazon to price match Smashwords so it is free on there as well. It’s a whole palaver that will take time and I only have two weeks to do it all.

I also needed a cover so, lacking time and money, I decided to do one myself.

Above is the process I went through coming up with the cover. There were of course many more iterations, but these were the main ones.

Coming up with a cover is hard. People liked no. 2 but it was too serious for me. I liked no. 4 until I found out the image was AI generated. It was only once I realised that this cover needed to be more of an advert than a book cover that I saw a way through. No. 8 is more or less the final cover except I’ve moved the background image around so it’s not so busy behind the text. You’ll see the final cover when it comes out Sunday (but shhh, don’t tell anybody, I’m not announcing the book until the 14th).

When I’m Not Writing

As mentioned above it has been an intense time for work this month, both the paying and non-paying kind, so there hasn’t been much room for reading. What I have been doing though to help wind down is play Hidden Folks.

Hidden Folks is a fun little game that does exactly what it says on the tin. You get a big ol’ map and you have to find the Folks listed to move on to the next one, clicking on doors to open them, pushing buttons to make things move, and generally faffing about until you find what you were after.

It’s simple, easy to play, and only mildly frustrating. There’s always one Folk that is hard to find. Thankfully you don’t need to find them all to move on, only 80-90%, but me being a completionist I had to find them all. This caused me only mild consternation, not enough to rage quit the game.

If you’re looking for a nice, simple, silly game to distract you I recommend giving it a go. It has an “Overwhelmingly Positive” review rating on Steam, and justifiably so.

And there we have it, my month in review. As the subtitle suggests it has been something of an emotional rollercoaster. The highs of making progress on a project vs the lows of getting rejected for a job interview. I know that I’ve been in a bit of a funk as my motivation to do yoga has been non-existent. I’ve still done some now and then, but there’s been more than one day in a row where I couldn’t be bothered. I think I need a holiday, so last night I booked accommodation and train tickets to go to The Town That Never Was at the end of June.

Held as always at Blists Hill Victorian Town in Ironbridge, I’ve been there many times before. I even had a table there one year, although it’ll be a while before I do that again. With all the costs involed I barely broke even. I need a lot more product to sell, ie. a bigger variety, before that becomes a viable prospect for me.

Anyway, it’ll be nice to get away for a while, not to mention dress up and maybe see some friends along the way. I just hope the weather is still nice when the end of June rolls around. The accommodation I’ve booked is a 20 minute walk through the woods from the site and I no longer have a car.

Okay, thanks as always for reading. Have a fantastic June my lovelies and I’ll see you at the other end.

Toodle-pip for now.

Keith

PS. I know nobody asked, but here’s a dirty steampunk limerick to keep you going. ;-)

There once was a stoker called Doyle
Whose wife he could never quite spoil
Despite all the coal
He chucked in her hole
He could never bring her to the boil