Now

This page is inspired by Derek Siver's now page suggestion and his Now Now Now movement. The purpose of this page is to share my current focus.

I've been helping my wife Clare as she has published the 4th and last book in her The Bellator Chronicles series, Alliance. It's been a long journey for her and I'm really proud of what she's achieved. I can't believe that she's got two series, and 8 books released!

We've been investigating Facebook advertising to help with marketing and that's been a steep learning curve. While we've not hit the big time yet, we're hoping that we can continue to grow her audience and get more people reading her books (and make some money along the way).

In making adverts, I've been doing a lot of experimentation with Leonardo.ai to generate some realistic photos. It's been a lot of fun learning how to write effective AI prompts to ensure you get dystopian book images. It feels quite trial and error but we've managed to get some decent pictures so far.

My quest to improve my health has been going really well and I've been doing a weights class 3-times per week since mid-July. I really love getting up early and exercising and I'm surprised at how much it helps to improve my mental health.

Now that Twitter is a terrible platform and so many of the people that I liked have moved off it, I've joined all of the other platforms: Mastadon, Threads, and Bluesky. I don't know which platform to post on so I've been investigating microblogging. It feels like hosting small notes on my website and then syndicating them to another place is the way to go. I'm still working out the details but I'm going to investigate more this week.

I'm stil attempting to read more and I've been reading more by using Spotify's new audiobook offering. It's helped me to "read" (listen!) to more books and you can check out what I'm reading here.