Well, it's now just over a month since I left a blog here about Talkie ai and a story I had produced using it. Since then, I've spent a lot of time using and very much enjoying Talkie.

The far right column in the My Stories page has the title Published, and shows that every one of my stories has been published.

That seems to indicate there must be a way of loading stories without publishing them. How, and does it mean I could load every chapter of a story I'm publishing in parts, and then publish each chapter at some later date?

...or is it Seasonal Affective Disorder?

There seems to have been an awful lot of anger in these blogs over the last month or two.

To take your mind of it, how about

Christmas is a coming
and the goose is getting fat
If you start getting angry,
kick the cat

Oops, I never was a poet and that will incur the wrath of the cat lovers! They'll bomb me.

Can anyone else do better?

I think the word Standalone originated in the computing industry to mean capable of operating on its own without needing help from another similar thing. So when a story is described as Standalone, to me it means a story you can enjoy to its full, without having to read or refer to another story. Consequently, the episodes of a serial are not standalones, but a series would normally consist of a number of standalone stories.

I recently posted one of my stories (The Human Cuckoo - Book One) from a trilogy I have published on Kindle, partly as a teaser. The story is complete and standalone.

Since I do not intend to publish the other two stories from the trilogy, I marked it complete and a solo. However, it keeps getting reclassified as a series, which it is not, and I suspect some software is seeing the Book One and automatically assuming there are going to be other books.

Is there any way of preventing this?

Why do some men cross-dress? It's a question which confounds the experts, which even the cross-dressers themselves cannot answer, and to which many others will reply, with various degrees of intolerance, "Because they're weirdoes."

We all know that when it comes to criticism, one gal's meat is another's poison. But some authors positively encourage criticism.

For UK readers, it's encouraging to see that M&S are running a special offer at the moment: Ten pounds off off when you spend fifty pounds or more in women's wear.

I shall get dressed up, then go buy some food and ask for my discount.

Should be interesting!

It's been ages since I played any game on my PC apart from the standard Solitaire and Minesweeper, as I find the violence that seems to accompany most as pretty mindless.

I recently came across Iron Roses, an adventure story which I really enjoyed, played in the 3rd person, featuring guitar playing Alex trying to reform her group. Set in a US city in the middle of a garbage strike, there was lots of realism far removed from the fantasy worlds of many games. She even had a gay friend! To experienced gamers, the tasks were probably pretty trivial, but they were just right for me.

In experiments in Spain, men are being put into virtual reality as girls to determine their reactions when, as virtual girls, they experience violence. An interesting story.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/8918282.stm

It can surely be only a matter of time before we are able to use such software for our personal use.

As a CD, my dream ambition would be to totally pass as a woman - not just on a casual encounter, but in a work or social situation on a day to day basis. I'm realistic enough to realise that this is unlikely to happen unless some of the devices I read about on this site really become available.