Tag Archives: blog

November, F1 and The Big Move

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Once again, we are back in that time of the year that I so dislike. It’s cold and getting colder. We’ve already had the two worst days of the year, in my book anyway. Hallowe’en and bonfire night.

How Hallowe’en has been sprung on to us I really don’t know. I’ve always thought of it as just an excuse for kids to knock on my door and demand sweets. When I was a child I don’t think I had ever even heard of Hallowe’en. Certainly no one I knew dressed up and knocked on doors expecting sweets. These days it seems to be a major event with shops full of Hallowe’en themed produce.

Back in the 1960s my childhood friends and I did put together a ‘guy’ and push it down to the local shops in an old pram where we exhibited our creation – basically a dummy made up of old clothes stuffed with rags and paper – to various passing shoppers in the hope that they would toss us a few coppers. Anyway, these days I turn out the lights and never answer the door on Hallowe’en and just turn up the volume on the TV on bonfire night.

F1

What is rather odd about the current F1 season is that here we are in November and there are still three races left on the calendar. I don’t subscribe to the Sky F1 channel so to watch F1 I have to wait for the highlights edition from Channel Four on terrestrial TV. Now we’re at the end of the season which really is going on far too long these days. C4 don’t even bother to send their usual crew to these last far away races. No David Coulthard and Lee McKenzie hosts the show from somewhere in London. There is a real feeling, certainly for me at any rate, that I’m ready for the season to be over. Twenty three races is just far too many. It must be difficult for the teams too as they have to get their new cars ready for the next season.

Even so it’s been quite an interesting season. Some time ago Lewis Hamilton left Mercedes to drive for Ferrari and Mercedes promoted young newcomer Kimi Antonelli to fill the vacant seat. George Russell must clearly have felt that now he was the Mercedes number one driver and given a good car he would be able to challenge for the world championship. Sadly for George things just didn’t turn out like that because Kimi has turned out to be a real natural talent and only a few weeks ago locked out the championship despite there being three races remaining. George was apparently so unsettled by this turn around of events that he declined to attend the post race press conference earning himself a 5000 euro fine at the Mexican Grand Prix. I’m not sure what that actually says about George. Was he that upset that he couldn’t answer questions about the new boy becoming the world champion?

Kimi Antonelli is the youngest ever world champion at only 20 years of age and he is actually only the third ever Italian world champion. The previous one was Alberto Ascari in in 1953 and before that Nino Farina in 1950 who was the sport’s first ever world champion.

The big disappointment of 2026 has to be the performance of the Aston Martin team. Top designer Adrian Newey who designed the race winning Red Bull cars of the past few years was lured to Aston Martin by billionaire owner Lawrence Stroll. However, despite a massive pay packet, the Aston Martin team have gradually moved from the back of the grid to round about the middle and it has taken them all season to do that. Fernando Alonso is the oldest driver on the grid and he seems set to stay on for another year in pursuit of a last championship or a last race win. Alonso has a lot of talent as a driver but he also has another talent which is choosing the wrong team to drive for. If only he had stuck it out at McLaren. Still, it would be nice to see Fernando on the podium once again.

The Big Move

This week I’ve decided that it’s time to give up my rented house in Manchester and move full time to St Annes on the Fylde coast. What has been really difficult is getting everything packed up ready for the move. I’ve been back and forth to the tip so many times getting rid of stuff that has been in this house for years. My mum and dad moved here in the mid 1980s. Prior to that we lived in Handforth but dad still worked in Manchester, cycling to work in all kinds of weather. When they moved back here he was happy for a while, especially as he was near to his brother, my uncle Raymond. Sadly, not long after moving Raymond died and dad was crushed.

He felt, I suppose, how I felt when my brother Colin died. Colin was younger than me so I just always assumed it would be me who would go first. Colin and I used to meet up in Manchester for a few beers and a wander around all our old city centre haunts. In recent years he found he couldn’t walk far so we tended to go to a local pub that was just a short bus ride away. Sometimes he would just get a taxi to my place where I could try out my limited cookery repertoire on him. The last time I ever saw him I cooked pizza from scratch and I’m happy to say it was a pretty nice meal.

One Last Memory

A lot of years ago I wrote a poem about the last dog that mum and dad ever had. He was a rescue dog called Bouncer as apparently, he was continually bouncing up and down. If that was the case dad certainly cured him of that.

The King of the garden is dead

And now the vultures come

For once before they would fear to tread

But not now, now the King is dead.

 

The King was a battered mongrel dog

Who kept his enemies at bay

And no cat would dare to enter his domain

Whatever the time of day

 

The cats roam fearless now

And in the midday sun can quietly lie

Or dance and play upon the ground

Under which the King’s bones do lie.

 

His memory seems to linger though for when I spied a feline gang

And called out ‘CATS’ as in days gone by

Tomcat, tortoiseshell and tabby too

Pelted hell for leather and rushed away

 

Now once again they fear to tread

This garden, this hallowed ground

And that mongrel dog, that former King

Who kept this land free from cats -His memory still lives on

Bouncer made sure no cat would ever trespass on the back garden and even today I too chase away the cats. Bouncer outlived my dad otherwise dad would have buried Bouncer in a corner of the garden somewhere.

Good job really. I wouldn’t want the cats to dance on his grave when I’m gone.

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Writing the Blog Post

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve spent quite a few years writing my blog posts. I started back in 2014 with the idea of creating posts to help promote my short novel, Floating in Space. Now, 730 posts later, I often wonder how I might have gone on had I achieved my schoolboy ambition of becoming a journalist. It’s hard enough writing a new blog post every week but what if I’d have had to have written something for a newspaper every day? That would have been a pretty tall order. Come to think of it, writing a post every week can be a bit of a challenge. Anyway this week’s post is about how I actually go about writing a blog post.

What is quite handy for me is that I haven’t restricted myself in a way other writers who belong to a particular niche have. For instance if this was a cinema blog I could only write about films, just like a book blogger can only write about books or a cycling blogger must confine himself to cycling. For me I write about anything that happens to take my fancy, although usually I stick to books, films, the occasional Formula One post and things that happen in my life.

Most of the time I’ll come up with an idea for a blog post while lying in bed. Not only that, I’ll also begin to write the blog in my head, so that when I’m fully awake I’ll have a sort of template in the back of my mind all ready to write out. Sometimes that process can go on for about a week, sometimes longer and sometimes shorter but at some point I’ll need to actually start writing. If I can’t get to my laptop I’ll sometimes jot some ideas down in my notebook.

The notes you can see in the picture here are for one of my frequent film connections posts in which I try to connect various films, actors, directors and personalities together and use those random links to tell a few cinema stories to my readers. In this one I’ve tried to connect Douglas Fairbanks to Marlon Brando.

After the note making process I’ll usually need to drink tea so I’ll drag myself up out of bed and into the kitchen where thoughts of food will begin to enter my mind. I like to start the day with a combination of various things and I’m now talking about eggs, bacon, sausages and hot buttered toast.

A good breakfast is important for a blog writer and after scoffing some food I’ll usually get down to checking my emails and scheduling the posting of numerous links to my blogs in places like Instagram, Facebook, X and so on.

After that more tea is generally a good idea and I like to leave blogging alone for a few hours and watch a little television. A good World War II documentary or a classic film noir are the sort of things I like to watch when I have time to myself in an afternoon. After a little TV entertainment I usually find that the new blog post has settled down in my head and I’m ready to start work on my laptop and get a first draft down on paper. Well not actually paper but Microsoft word. I’ll work on the post a number of times throughout the day and in fact throughout the week, then when I’ve finally got something I’m happy with, I’ll transfer it over to WordPress.

Then it’s time for another brew. I don’t think I can really stress enough the importance of a good cup of tea in the blog creation process. I drink numerous cups of tea throughout the day and it gives me a break from typing but it’s important to relax and I always think it’s quite fascinating how the post develops while I’m actually focussed on something else, reading a book or watching TV while the blog post matures a little up there in the old grey matter.

When I’m ready to once again focus on the post, I find that most of the time something new will come to me, a new idea or even just a new way of looking at the subject and then I’ll just update the post when I sit down again with my laptop.

Now that the post is on WordPress I can access it on my iPad and that little change from laptop to iPad always gives me a new perspective so I’ll refine it a little more before passing it to Liz for a quality check and final proofreading. This is the point where numerous embarrassing errors are spotted like spelling, grammar, repeated words, punctuation and so on. Then I’ll add the graphics, pictures and videos and everything is ready for my publishing deadline of 10am on Saturday.

For the graphics I mostly use a simple site like Quotescover but when I’m feeling really artistic and creative I’ll use Adobe or Canva. Sometimes I’ve even asked chat GTP or Claude to produce a graphic. I’ve not always been totally happy about those results and usually I prefer something I’ve actually worked on myself although recently I asked Claude for a new graphic for the website and it came up with this one which I think is rather good.

Not long ago I was watching the classic film Treasure of the Sierra Madre. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a bunch of Americans prospecting for gold down in Mexico. The leader of the prospectors played by Walter Huston in the film, explains the value of gold in this way: A thousand men go searching for gold. One man finds an ounce of gold. His small find represents not only his hard work but the work of the other 999 men who were unsuccessful. Gold is worth so much because of the effort that went into finding it. Now I could argue the same point about this blog, that even though it is free to read this humble post, it’s actually worth quite a lot because of the hours, weeks and sometimes months of effort that went into preparing it, writing it, editing it, making the videos shown here and designing and producing the graphics that adorn this and all my many other posts.

Of course once the post is finished and ready for publication that isn’t the end. Next I’ll start planning where and when to publish links to the post. On a weekday I’ll publish links on all my usual social media places, Facebook, X, Instagram and so on. On a weekend I publish a post every two hours over on X and I’ve started making short videos that go out on Instagram and TikTok which have pulled in a lot of new readers and followers.

So as you read this post you now might be thinking, wow, what a great deal you’re getting! All that effort, just for you. Should you click on one of the links for Floating in Space or A Warrior of Words or Timeline and maybe buy a copy? Personally, I’d say ‘yes, you should’ but even if you don’t you can catch a new blog post every Saturday at 10 am UK time and don’t forget to have a scroll through all those previous posts too.

New post published, now I can relax. The only thing is, what shall I write about next week?

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry collection.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

Click here to visit amazon and purchase Timeline, my new anthology.

A Writer on Holiday

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s always great to get away from things and to take a break. Writers though just cannot stop writing even on holiday. Well at least I can’t. I’m currently on holiday in a motorhome in France so how do I mix relaxation with writing? Let’s see if I can successfully answer that. Here we go.

Morning.

It takes me a while to get used to sleeping in our motorhome. It’s only small and there is a little dip in the bed just at the point of my lower back which has given me some backache in the past but lately I’ve learnt to either avoid it or just live with it. Another issue that affects our sleep is the way the van is parked and parking properly is very important. A tilt to the left and Liz will be rolling over and crowding me. Over to the right and I’ll be crowding her. A slight tilt forward and we tend to slide off our pillows and down the bed. If we have to have a tilt it’s better to tilt back toward our pillows but we do have chocks which we can slip under the wheels to level us up. My place on the bed is over by the window and there is no way out for me except by climbing over Liz so one of my rules is to not have beer prior to going to bed. Otherwise I’ll be waking in the night wanting to wee and struggling to get out.

On holiday I find myself waking up pretty early. I’m not totally comfortable sleeping in the motorhome but I usually wake up with my head full of various thoughts for either a blog post or a short story. I tend to lie there and get those thoughts in some sort of order before dragging myself up.

I’m usually the first one up so I’ll shuffle over to the small bathroom for a wash and a shave.

Despite being late September it’s still very warm in the Loire so in a morning I can handle a wash in cold water but when the warm weather comes to a close I’m less inclined to do that. I can switch on the water heater but usually I just put a pan of water on the hob.

Despite the bathroom being small, actually very small, there is a basin, toilet and even a shower in there. To shower it’s important to switch on the water heater first, pull round the panels that keep the water away from the toilet and basin and then switch on the water. In a motorhome I’m always aware that there isn’t an endless supply of water so a good idea is to apply shower gel liberally to the body, switch on the water and get washed as quickly as possible using as little water as you can.

Note to self: Don’t drop the soap as it’s pretty difficult to bend down and pick it up in these cramped conditions.

Shower over, towel yourself down, get dressed and get the kettle on before hanging your towel out in the sun on the bike carrier to the rear of the van.

Next I’ll check my emails while the van chef, Liz, gets herself ready too.

I’m a big lover of breakfast, in fact I’m even tempted to say it’s my favourite meal of the day and I love a standard English breakfast. Bacon, sausage, black pudding, mushrooms, tomatoes and eggs, preferably poached, served with toast. That can be a little difficult on the cramped three ring stove in the van so lately we’ve been having a bacon omelette with some French bread. I’ll either walk to a bakery if there is one nearby or we usually have some bread in our little freezer which always keeps pretty well and defrosts quickly in the sun.

Noon

Another option is to not have breakfast at all but to save ourselves for lunch. In France there are many places that serve a cheap lunchtime menu which will consist of a buffet starter, a simple main meal, a cheese course and a dessert.

We found an excellent restaurant near to Parçay-les-Pins called the Restaurant De La Gare, the Station Restaurant. The buffet starter is always my favourite and I fill my plate with pâté, cold meats, coleslaw and various salad items. A basket of French bread will appear and is usually topped up when it gets low. Vin de table is provided as well as some chilled water and a large bottle of cider. Not bad for 15 euros each!

OK, breakfast (or lunch) over it’s time to grab my laptop and tap out in rough form my ideas for this week’s blog post. Sometimes I can’t be bothered to drag my laptop out of its safe place in the boot so I’ll just write notes in my notebook. The notes you can see here in the photo are typical notes for a one of my Film Connections posts.

We will usually be parked in an aire in France and these special parking places, reserved for motorhomes, tend to have all the necessary things we might need. A very important thing is a place to empty the van toilet. It’s not a pleasant task but I tend to empty it whenever we get the opportunity. A lot of French aires have a water tap to help you rinse your toilet cassette but many require a token, a jeton that is usually available from nearby local shops although there are many aire de camping cars that are completely free.

The van navigator (Liz) will usually have perused google maps for a plan d’eau, a French swimming lake and we’ll be off to find it. We usually factor in a stop for some French bread and some more French cheese as well as a box of wine. This year is probably the first in which we haven’t really been interested in cheese, having said that I’ve still enjoyed the cheese course in a restaurant.

It’s important of course to keep a check on our fuel. We usually fill up with diesel at French supermarkets as they tend to be cheaper than the usual petrol stations, however we were chatting with a couple of English people in a restaurant one evening who told us that ‘TotalEnergies’ petrol stations were considerably cheaper than the supermarkets. It seems that they are under the control of the French government and they are keeping prices lower, approximately 20p a litre for diesel, but consequently most of them had run out and those that hadn’t had long queues.

Our fridge and cooker are powered by LPG, liquid petroleum gas and we always keep a look out for stations that provide gas. The big problem when we first came to France was finding a petrol station with LPG. There didn’t seem to be any until eventually, we realised that in France it’s called GPL! Duh!

Swimming

Over the years we have made a note of our favourite places to stop. A typical camping spot we prefer will have a swimming lake and a parking place for camping cars, (that’s what they call motorhomes in France) and at this time of the year they usually won’t be too busy.

The locals usually arrive around 12 noon with picnic baskets for lunch and few might have a pre lunch swim. I’ve noticed that this year the water levels in many lakes have been low due to the hot summer and in one particular lake we visited the water was only a couple of feet deep.

At another lake we watched a couple of fishermen dip their rods in the water and wait patiently for the fish to bite. We read our books, competed against each other to finish that day’s sudoku and then it’s time for a dip.

Later on we need to find somewhere to stop for the night. Usually, we will stay by the lake or if we are trying to make our way to somewhere in particular, we might get a few miles under our belt before stopping again.

The sun going down after a day by a plan d’eau

Evening

When evening comes we will have sorted out a place to stay the night. I usually get out our little gas barbecue and we will cook some sausages, burgers and maybe a steak to have with our salad. A glass of red wine is always good to wash the food down with and after clearing up I’ll go back to what I’ve written earlier and develop it a little and tidy it up.

I happened to notice something on the internet this week about Ian Fleming and the way he used to work at his holiday home in Jamaica. He was up at 7:30, had breakfast and then at 10am he began writing. He aimed for 1500 words before going for a swim at about 12:15. Later in the day at about 5pm he would write some more, put the pages in a folder and it was time for a drink. Perhaps that is what I need to do, plan my day like Ian Fleming’s day. Then again, I think I prefer things my way!

This year one of our stops was at La Meilleraie-Tillay. It’s a place we have stopped at before and one of the great things about it is that there is a toilet block with hot water. Sounds pretty normal doesn’t it but believe me, when you have not washed with hot water for a week, having a wash and shave in hot water is wonderful.

In the park next to the motorhome aire, a circus had set up, the Zanatteli circus and one night as we sat outside in the twilight we got chatting to Rico, the circus clown. He told us that he was the latest in six generations of his family that were circus people. After that first meeting Rico came to see us every night and told us stories of the circus. Despite a huge array of vehicles and equipment, there were only five people in the circus; him, his wife, his two sons and a daughter. The two sons were jugglers and acrobats. The daughter did some acrobatics too. Rico was the clown and his wife ran the box office, gave out tickets, sold refreshments in the intervals and also acted as a scene arranger. We attended their first afternoon performance before moving on to pastures new.

We usually relax in the evenings with a book but a problem this year with our leisure battery meant that our lights faded very early. If I’ve got a good internet signal I’ll transfer this week’s blog to wordpress then access it on my iPad and refine it a little more before passing it to my proofreader Liz for a final check up. Then I’ll add the graphics, pictures and videos and everything is ready for my publishing deadline of 10am on Saturday.

The next problem is what shall I write about next week?

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry collection.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

Click here to visit amazon and purchase Timeline, my new anthology.

Whatever Happened to the DVD?

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I still have a DVD collection. Not a particularly impressive one and certainly not one that would make me a fortune on Antiques Roadshow in thirty years’ time but there’s something I like about having a shelf full of films I can actually hold in my hand. These days, of course, you can watch pretty much anything without owning a physical copy. When there are so many new TV channels around and everything can either be downloaded, streamed or watched on catch-up TV, what is even the point of a DVD? They just take up room, fill up cupboards and shelves and generally get in the way.

To a certain extent I sort of agree with that, for instance, if you miss a film on the BBC, you can always go to BBC iPlayer and watch it there. On the other hand, I read somewhere on the internet that DVDs are making a comeback.

Sometimes, when there is absolutely nothing on TV worth watching, I’ll have a scan through my DVD shelf and choose something to watch. These days I get bored pretty easily, so I might watch an hour of something, go to make a cup of tea and find that something interesting has popped up — a documentary or an old TV show — and I’ll save the DVD for later (my DVD player actually remembers where you stopped the disc). Then I’ll settle down with my cuppa, watch the old TV show and finish the DVD later.

Interestingly, last night that exact situation occurred. I was watching an old favourite, the Errol Flynn version of Robin Hood, paused the disc to make a cuppa and up popped that old TV show, Man in a Suitcase. (I had set a reminder for it earlier after a quick browse through the on-screen TV guide).

Man in a Suitcase was a series made by Lew Grade’s ITC production company. It’s about a former CIA agent called McGill who was either sacked or forced to resign from the CIA and now makes his living as a private investigator in the UK. Presumably there is an episode that explains all this but I’m not sure I ever remember seeing it. Richard Bradford played McGill in a brooding, laid-back James Dean sort of style.

I had really been looking forward to watching Man in a Suitcase but after about twenty minutes — or probably less — I realised it wasn’t my cup of tea and went back to my film.

Some time ago I was looking up at my Woody Allen DVD collection of about twelve discs and thought I really needed to pick up some of his other films. Sleeper is a great comedy about Miles Monroe, played by Woody of course, a health-food store owner who gets cryogenically frozen in 1973 and wakes up two hundred years in the future. I searched eBay for a copy and found one, although the cheapest was just under £6. A number of Woody Allen DVD bundles came up for a similar price but sadly none of them had Sleeper. Anyway, for £5.20 I bought a collection of five of Woody’s films. Two I already had: the wonderful Manhattan and Bananas, although my copy of the latter was one of those free newspaper DVD versions, so it was good to get a “proper” copy with all the correct packaging. (Yes, I know, I’m a bit weird like that).

I put the first DVD in and got it set up ready to go. Then I sorted out a cup of tea with the mandatory ham sandwich and chocolate digestive and I was ready to press play. After about twenty minutes of Love and Death I was a little underwhelmed and thought, OK, I’ll save that for another day. In went Zelig, which is a sort of spoof documentary. Again, it wasn’t great but I managed to watch it right through to the end. The best thing about it was the way they made a lot of new footage actually look like real documentary film from the 1930s or 40s, whichever decade it was supposed to be set in. Great visual quality Woody, but Zelig was a little lacking in content.

Time for another cuppa and in goes Shadows and Fog. I gave that one fifteen minutes but it wasn’t doing it for me, so it was out with that one and in went Bananas. Just then though, a documentary series popped up on the Yesterday channel: Canal Boat Diaries. It’s a diary of a young man, Robbie Cummings, who journeys along the UK’s canals in his narrowboat. It’s largely self-filmed, although I suspect that at various points he is joined by another cameraman and a drone pilot, because various shots are incorporated from overhead and of him tootling off into the distance on his boat. I may be wrong and perhaps after that last shot he then had to reverse back, pick up his camera and tripod and start off again. When I used to make little YouTube films about our motorhome trips to France, I found myself doing similar things. It can be a little frustrating but sometimes you just need that shot.

Nothing much happens in Canal Boat Diaries but it’s a glimpse of a gentle, relaxing existence, chugging along at 4 mph through various towns. Robbie parks up here and there, makes dinner on his little stove and stops to stock up on supplies and to fuel up, as well as to explore. A few years ago, Liz and I looked at hiring a narrowboat for a weekend but the costs were really shocking. Perhaps we’ll have to try again later in the year when the holiday season has finished and things get (hopefully) cheaper.

Back to Bananas, which is one of my favourite Woody Allen films and it’s a long while since I’ve seen it. The film opens with the shooting of the President of San Marcos, shown as if it were a sporting event, with actual American TV sports commentator Howard Cosell presenting the action. Woody plays Fielding Mellish, who is a product tester and in one of the first sequences he is testing an office set-up with built-in exercise items. It’s actually a lot of fun but later he opens the door to a market researcher played by Louise Lasser, in real life Woody’s former wife. Woody later travels to San Marcos to impress her. Sylvester Stallone makes his film debut as a thug who Woody encounters on an underground train.

I love Bananas, especially the end where Howard Cosell commentates on Woody and Louise’s wedding night. One thing I found disappointing though, is that there are never any extras on a Woody Allen DVD. No interesting ‘making-of’ documentaries or commentary tracks by Woody, which I think are always an interesting addition to a DVD.

If I were to rewind a few years, I used to spend a lot of time in Manchester city centre, browsing music shops for CDs and DVDs. My favourite store was the huge HMV in Manchester city centre. They used to have an in-store DJ who was a really friendly girl, very approachable and very into her music. I always used to go and chat to her and she recommended all sorts of albums to me.

After looking through the CDs I’d pop up to the DVD section and spend more time there. I remember going in one day to find the in-store DJ had been replaced by a radio version: someone, presumably at head office in London, who was broadcasting music to all the HMV stores. Later, in 2013, the store closed down completely after more than twenty years on the same site. Browsing records and videos in HMV and then popping into my favourite bookshops before settling down in some back-street pub for a drink — ah, those were the days. I probably bought the larger part of my Woody Allen DVD collection there. Or was it eBay? Certainly the buying power of the internet may well have played a part in HMV’s demise.

Anyway, where will I find a copy of Sleeper? Ah well, back to eBay again.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry collection.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

Click here to visit amazon and purchase Timeline, my new anthology.

8 Questions for a Self-Published Author

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A few years ago, I published a post called 7 Questions for a Self-Published Author. This week I decided to update it and here it is, thinly disguised as 8 Questions for a Self-Published Author.

Question 1:

What made you want to write a novel?

I’ve always been a writer, even as a school kid I was writing stories and screenplays. I used to write scripts and do all the casting. Not sure whether Steve McQueen would have appreciated the roles I was planning for him though.

Later on when I was in my 20s I tried to move away from all the sci-fi and espionage stuff I was writing and write about something more personal to me, something that I had a personal connection with so I started writing about life working on the buses, which is what I was doing at the time.

I wrote about working as a bus conductor and driver and jotted down my observations about the people I met and carried on my bus. Then there were other stories about my personal life, drinking in pubs, chatting up girls in nightclubs, listening to music and so on. Later I realised I could link all this stuff together even though it was just a series of essays and make it into a short novel which is what I did. The process involved rewriting my essays to fit in with the story but that was fairly easy as the story was actually a fictionalised version of my own younger life.

Question 2

How did you go about publishing the finished book?

Floating in Space was turned down by three publishers. That was of course disappointing but rejections are par for the course for any writer. Some time ago I wrote a blog post about books rejected by publishers and I found out that The Day of the Jackal was rejected 4 times, Gone with the Wind 38 times and The Time Traveller’s Wife 25 times. Publishers are only human of course but these days writers don’t need them, we can just publish online, just like I did using Amazon.

The most famous book to come from online publishing is probably 50 Shades of Grey which was first  posted online as a story called Master of the Universe, on a fan-fiction website and later on the author’s own website.

Question 3

Tell me about the problems of marketing and getting your book noticed by the public.

Well, that is the hard part, writing a book was easy in comparison!

Building up a presence on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube was a gradual process and the same is also true for my blog on WordPress which I started really just to promote the book. I started off with essays about how I wrote the book and videos of me talking about the book and so on.

I read somewhere that over 5000 books are published every day on Amazon, an incredible figure, so how can anyone compete with that? Well, just by getting out onto social media and plugging away with tweets, new blog posts, videos and so on.

Question 4

Tell me about your website and your blog.

Well, my website was originally created just to promote my book and get my message out there to potential readers but it’s also a challenge, a writing challenge. My big problem is that I’m lazy and I need a big push to get me writing so having a deadline, 10:00am on a Saturday morning, is something that gets me motivated as a writer. I know that I have to write something by then.

That deadline actually makes me feel like a sort of writing professional as I’m always working towards it, trying to get something ready to post for my readers. I do feel really pleased when I have no idea what to write about but suddenly on a Friday afternoon I’ll settle down with my laptop and write a really good post.

The crazy thing is that the same problems that apply to my books also apply to my blog. Who has heard about the blog? Who will read the posts? I have to promote my blog as much as I promote my books and even when my posts get attention, does that convert to book sales? Not necessarily! I use social media a lot but I’m not sure I even understand it. Over on X (formerly Twitter) I have over 6000 followers and if all those followers bought copies of my books I’d be very happy, but do they? No. Why not? Well a large majority of those followers are writers and authors themselves who like to connect with other writers and authors. Ok that’s good but what I need are more readers than writers.

Question 5

What sort of posts will we find on your blog?

Generally, I try to write stuff that is similar to my book and short stories, little bits of fluff, anecdotes with a funny twist, things like that. The idea is that if people like the blogs they should like my book, Floating in Space, which is written in a similar style. A typical blog post and one of my favourites, is the one about hoodies (Hoodies and a Shaggy Dog Story) and an incident where an old lady’s handbag was snatched. Another favourite was called the Cat Wars and was about a crazy situation that built up when I was looking after my neighbour’s cat.

The only problem now is that I’m running out of anecdotes but I still manage to write about two other favourite themes, second-hand books and classic films.

Question 6

What about video, do you use video in your blogs and marketing?

Any internet post on social media performs better with images, a 37% percent increase in engagement and even more so with video.

Here are a few stats:

100 million hours of video are watched each day on Facebook.

500 million people watch Facebook videos every day.

Facebook videos receive 135% more organic reach on average than a photo.

Two thirds of content on Instagram is now video as opposed to pictures but video has to be snappy. If viewers are not hooked in the first few seconds, they just click away from your video to something more interesting.

I use video on my website to try and engage readers and all my adverts, because I do use advertising every now and then, are all video based.

A lot of years ago, in the 1990’s I really wanted to get into TV and video and I went on a video production course at the WFA media centre in Manchester. Subsequently, I made a few attempts to make some things for TV, all of which ended in failure but as a result I do have a bit of technical knowledge with video editing and production which has helped me a lot.

Luckily, technology today makes it pretty easy to create simple videos and I use them a lot in my blog posts.

Question 7

What are your plans for the future regarding writing and blogging?

Well, more of the same really. I’ve begun to work on a follow up novel to Floating in Space but a novel is hard work and I sometimes wonder if I’m up to the task. Even my latest book, Timeline, which is just a collection of stories and blog posts was pretty hard work. The big problem is just me, being motivated and just getting myself geared up to work and write. Writing short stories is much more enjoyable and I’m really pleased at how my stories have turned out. A few are available for readers to download and enjoy, just click on the download link above.

Question 8

Tell me about your other books

I mentioned above about my short stories and I put together a collection of those in my book Timeline. The title story is set in the present day but in a Germany which was victorious in World War II and there are another 10 stories in the book. Also included are some of my favourite blog posts and a little of my poetry. Talking of poetry, I have also published a collection of poems titled A Warrior of Words. Over on my YouTube page there are a mix of various video types and some time ago I decided to put all my poetry readings onto a separate channel. Click here to watch my poetry videos.

Click the links at the top of the page to read about Floating in Space, A Warrior of Words and Timeline. All are available from Amazon.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

Click here to visit amazon and purchase Timeline, my new anthology.

The Police

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve given myself a theme this week, that of writing about the Police. Being British I’m going to try and focus on the British Police but I’ve added a few paragraphs about the US Police too.

The Police in TV and Film

I have to say that I’ve struggled to think of films about the UK Police without resorting to Google although there are quite a few TV shows I could mention. The obvious one that comes to mind is Dixon of Dock Green.

Dixon of Dock Green ran from 1955 to 1976 starring Jack Warner as Police Constable George Dixon. Dixon was the traditional ‘Bobby’ who patrolled a regular beat in London, working out of the Dock Green Police Station in London’s East End. The show was inspired by the film The Blue Lamp in which Jack Warner originally played the character of George Dixon.

In the TV show Warner famously introduced each episode by saluting and saying ‘evenin’ all’ to the camera. He also ended each episode by saying a few philosophical words about that night’s episode before wishing his audience a ‘good night’.

The Bill

A much more recent show was The Bill which started out as a one off ITV drama in 1984 which so impressed ITV executives that they commissioned a series. The idea was to look at a day in the life of a police station and show the sort of situations encountered by officers on the beat. I first remember the show as being on a few times a week in a 30 minute format which was later extended to an hour. The 30 minute shows were self-contained episodes but when it was updated to an hour it became a serial show with each episode following on from the last. The show was cancelled in 2010 after 26 years.

Hill Street Blues

Moving away from UK TV to the USA, one of my favourite TV Police shows was the Hill Street Blues. It was similar to The Bill but set in a fictional US Police Station. Each episode began with a briefing and roll call to start the day’s shift although in later episodes this was replaced with one of those ‘previously. . .’ sequences.

The show won a total of 26 Emmy awards during its run of 146 episodes between 1981 and 1987.

The theme tune was written by Mike Post and became a major chart hit reaching 25 in the UK charts and no 10 in the USA.

As I said earlier, I can’t think of any films featuring UK policemen, certainly not uniformed ‘Bobbies’. Even American films tend to focus on plain clothed detectives but here are two particular favourites, both from the 1970s.

Serpico

Al Pacino stars in the true story of Serpico, a New York City cop who tried to fight the culture of bribery and corruption in the NYPD in the 60’s and early 70’s. This 1973 film is directed by Sidney Lumet and is shot in a gritty natural style. It starts with Serpico being shot in the face and then on his way to hospital it flashes back to tell the story of rookie cop Frank Serpico and his graduation to detective and his refusal to take bribes. It is shot and acted in a very natural documentary style and the film portrays Serpico’s ongoing disappointment with his superiors and those he trusts to look into the situation very well indeed. A brilliant example of 70’s moviemaking at its best.

I have Serpico on DVD and one thing I love about DVDs are those special versions with extended features, documentaries and so on. On the DVD of Serpico there is an interview with the producer Dino De Laurentiis where he tries to explain the character of Serpico this way; he and Serpico go to a screening of a film in New York. They are checking out possible directors or something, anyway, the theatre is empty and ignoring the no smoking sign, De Laurentiis decides to light up. ‘Wait a minute’ says Serpico, ‘you can’t smoke in here.’ De Laurentiis replies ‘what does it matter? There is no one here but us.’

Serpico points to the no smoking sign and replies ‘Look, you just can’t smoke here’ and makes the producer put out his cigarette. That, says Dino on the DVD, was when he began to understand what Serpico was about. There were no grey areas with him, everything was black and white.

The French Connection

The French Connection still feels electric even decades later. The movie throws you right into the gritty streets of 1970s New York, following tough, reckless detective Popeye Doyle, played brilliantly by Gene Hackman. What makes it so gripping is how raw and real everything feels; the shaky handheld camera work, the chaotic energy and of course that legendary car chase scene that practically rewrote the rules for action movies. It’s not a polished Hollywood crime story where the hero is clean-cut and noble; Doyle is obsessive, messy and sometimes hard to like, which somehow makes the whole thing feel more authentic. Directed by William Friedkin, the film has this tense, documentary-style vibe that keeps you on edge the entire time and you can really see how much influence it had on modern crime thrillers.

The Police (the Pop Band)

The Police were one of those bands that somehow managed to sound completely different from everyone else at the time. They showed up in the late 1970s when punk rock was taking off, but instead of sticking to straight punk, they mixed in reggae rhythms, catchy pop hooks and really polished musicianship. The band was made up of Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland and together they created huge hits like Roxanne, Message in a Bottle and Every Breath You Take. Even now, those songs are instantly recognizable, certainly for me anyway, the second they come on.

What made the band especially interesting was how talented each member was individually. Sting brought the distinctive vocals and songwriting, Andy Summers added those atmospheric guitar sounds and Stewart Copeland’s drumming gave the music a ton of energy and personality. Their music turned them into global superstars, though behind the scenes the band members famously clashed with each other. They eventually split up in the mid-1980s and Sting moved onto to a successful solo career. They reunited for a tour in 2007 reminding everyone just how influential and timeless their songs really are.

The UK Traffic Police

I thought I’d finish with a few words about my own experience of working with the Police. I started work for the Highways Agency in 2006 as an operator and later deputy manager in the North West RCC (Regional Control Centre) and I worked closely with the Police. Here’s the thing that struck me almost straight away, I always thought the Police were just the Police. Well, how wrong was I because the Police are actually a number of separate forces. In fact, there are 45 regional police forces in the UK and 3 special forces. The 3 are the British Transport Police, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary and the Ministry of Defence Police. The forces that I used to work with in the north west of England were Lancashire Police, Cumbria Police, Merseyside Police, Cheshire Police and Greater Manchester Police. All of them had different ways of working and even different computer systems. We at Highways used a system called Command and Control, similar to that used by Cheshire Police. Cheshire Police headed the NWMPG (North West Motorway Patrol Group) and as their system was similar to ours, they could send incidents to us electronically.

GMP had an entirely different system so they could not send a job to us except by actually picking up the phone and telling us about the incident. What they tended to do was send the job to Cheshire Police who would manually input the job on their system and then send it to us at Highways. Kind of long winded but it worked as long as the Cheshire operators checked their GMP screens to update us, which when they were busy, didn’t always happen.

When I was in training I spent a day at both the Cheshire and GMP control rooms. Cheshire were very friendly and helpful but it wasn’t the case over at GMP. They had a bunch of mature ladies who manned the ERTs (Emergency Roadside Telephones) which were due to be taken over by Highways so that those ladies refused to speak to us as to their minds we were stealing their jobs. Instead, I spent an afternoon sitting with the officers manning the ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) cameras which were being used at Manchester Airport, catching drivers with no MOTs or insurance and even stolen vehicles.

Some days afterwards I went out with Cheshire motorway police. Their officers were rude and bad mannered and no help at all but the next day I went on the road with a GMP officer. He was a very friendly guy. I met him at his outstation in Salford and after a brew and a chat we went off to patrol the M60, M62 and M602. Interestingly, despite the officer being friendly over a cup of tea, when he went on duty he went straight into professional mode and focussed fully on his job. No chit chat, no jokes. He spotted at least three people not wearing seat belts and pulled them over. Why would you not wear a seat belt, especially on the motorway?

At one point we had a call to put on a rolling road block for another officer on the M602 who was trying to retrieve some debris in the carriageway; cycles that had fallen off the back of a car and were causing problems stuck in lane 2. We headed to the scene, spotted the other officer on the opposite side and turned round at the next junction. As we headed to the exit ramp I looked over at his speedometer and saw we were doing 120 mph. Vehicles on the roundabout moved quickly out of our way and we turned, pulled onto the other side of the road, stopped the traffic and the debris was removed.

That was a heck of an interesting day and a real eye opener for me.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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Film Connections #8

Posted on by Steve Higgins

As regular readers will know, I am a great fan of classic cinema and I do love making these posts in which I try to tell a story by linking together various films, actors and directors. My last connections post ran a lateral course linking the film Pygmalion to Star Trek; The Motion Picture. This week I’ve worked out a very roundabout connection from Greta Garbo via Frederick March, James Mason, Alfred Hitchcock and Ingrid Bergman, right back to Garbo again.

At first glance, Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman seem to belong to different emotional climates; Garbo, distant and enigmatic, Bergman, luminous and searching, her humanity worn closer to the surface. The threads run from the migration of talent across studios and continents and in the way both women, in very different ways, redefined what it meant to be a star of the cinema.

Greta Garbo was one of the first stars of the silver screen. She was born in Stockholm, Sweden on the 18th September 1905. She is best known for her beautiful but melancholy screen persona. In 1924 she was spotted in a Swedish film by Louis B Mayer the head of MGM and the following year he brought her over to Hollywood.

Greta Garbo

In 1930 she made the successful transition from silent pictures to the ‘talkies’ with her first sound picture Anna Christie which was promoted with the phrase ‘Garbo Talks!” The film was a great success and her career in the cinema continued until her last film in 1941, Two Faced Woman. She signed for various pictures afterwards but all the projects either never came to fruition or she dropped out for one reason or another. Billy Wilder asked her to star in Sunset Boulevard in 1949 but she declined.

In one of David Niven’s books, Bring on the Empty Horses, the author relates how he asked Garbo why she stopped making films and she thought for a moment and then replied “I had made enough faces”.

In 1935 Garbo starred in the screen version of Anna Karenina directed by Clarence Brown. Among her co-stars was Fredric March.

March began his career as an extra in silent movies. He made his stage debut in 1929 and not long afterwards signed a contract with Paramount Pictures. He made numerous films but in 1937 he played the part of drunken movie star Norman Maine in the film A Star is Born. Maine helps aspiring star Esther Blodgett, played by Janet Gaynor up the ladder to movie stardom. The film was shot in Technicolor and became one of the first colour films to be nominated for an Academy Award.

A Star is Born is a film that has been remade a number of times and all the remakes have been musicals, including the most recent one produced in 2018 which starred Lady Gaga. My favourite though was the 1954 version with James Mason and Judy Garland. Judy Garland plays the part of Esther Blodgett who is heard singing by the boozy Norman Maine, this time played by Mason. He takes her along to the studios and after introducing her singing voice to the studio boss, gets her a breakthrough role in a new film.

Esther, now known as Vicki Lester, becomes a big star and of course falls for Norman Maine. The two marry but will their marriage survive Maine’s alcoholism and failing career?

James Mason was born in Huddersfield in 1909. He became a stage actor and was later hugely successful in British films. In 1949 he moved to Hollywood and after the success of his starring role in the film The Desert Fox about German General Rommell, he was given a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox.

It was in 1954 that Mason was asked to be Judy Garland’s leading man in A Star is Born. Cary Grant had been offered the part but turned it down.

Both Cary Grant and James Mason starred in the 1959 picture North by Northwest directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Mason stars as a suave but ruthless secret agent who mistakes Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) for a man known as George Kaplan who Mason suspects is a government agent tailing him across the USA. As the film unfolds, we see that George Kaplan is actually a fake identity created as a decoy.

After a murder in which Thornhill is wrongly supposed to be the murderer, he escapes on board a train to Chicago where he meets Eve Kendall played by Eva Marie Saint who helps him get away.

North by Northwest is one of my personal favourite films. Apparently, Hitchcock had engaged screenwriter Ernest Lehman to work on a story adaption but he couldn’t work out what to do and offered to quit. Hitchcock replied that he enjoyed working with Lehman and that the two should just work out an entirely new story. North by Northwest was the result.

Cary Grant appeared in four of Hitchcock’s films. Suspicion (1941), To Catch a Thief (1955), North by Northwest (1959) and most importantly for this post, Notorious (1946).

I’m sure I’ve seen Notorious but it’s not a film I can really remember even though when I looked it up many people say it’s one of Hitchcock’s best ever films. Cary Grant plays a government agent who is on the trail of Nazi Claude Rains. Grant enlists the help of Ingrid Bergman who plays the daughter of a war criminal. Grant and Bergman fall for each other but Ingrid Bergman’s character has to seduce Nazi Alexander Sebastian played by Rains.

Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca

Ingrid Bergman came to Hollywood in 1939. She was invited by Hollywood producer David O Selznick to star in an English language remake of one of her earlier Swedish films Intermezzo. Bergman expected to be in Hollywood for this one film and then return to Sweden but the huge success of Intermezzo made her a star and more Hollywood films followed. Her husband and daughter came to Hollywood to join her and later they both applied for American citizenship.

Ingrid made a number of classic films in Hollywood including Casablanca, Spellbound and Notorious.

In 1949 she wrote to the Italian director Roberto Rossellini telling him how much she admired his films and expressing her wish to work with him. Rossellini cast her in Stromboli and she flew to Italy to begin work. While she was there, she fell for Rossellini and began an affair with him, becoming pregnant with his child.

This caused a huge scandal back in the USA. Bergman herself thought that because she had played a nun in The Bells of St Mary and a saint in Joan of Arc these roles seemed to make what she had done appear much worse. Ingrid went through a much publicised divorce and custody battle before marrying Rossellini in 1950.

Ingrid was born in August 1915 in Stockholm which brings us back full circle to Greta Garbo who was born ten years earlier also in Stockholm. Two wonderful actresses separated by only a decade.

(All pictures reproduced via creative commons.)

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About Blogging

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s always nice to see my regular post published on a Saturday at 10am but almost as soon as it goes out into the world of the internet the first thing I think about is what shall I do next?

Well, the next step is to try and plug the post everywhere I can think of so this post goes out on Facebook, on X, on Instagram, on Threads and on Tumblr. I also add it on any relevant Facebook pages so for instance if it’s a sci-fi post I might link it to a sci-fi Facebook page or a sci-fi page on Reddit or any other relevant page. I also publish some of my posts over on Medium and again, link them back here to WordPress. Sometimes I even make a video version and share it over on my YouTube page.

Very few of these posts will work as a video but a couple that come to mind were a post about a letter to my younger self which translated well to a video except that the narration wasn’t really much good. (Must make a note; try remaking the video with a better narration). Another was a post about how to write poetry. The video version involved me just talking to the camera about the ways I write poetry.  To be honest I think the video version was better although looking at it again recently I do seem to rabbit on a bit.

On social media I’m always trying to bring in more readers to my blog page and so I try to add something other than just a link to my latest post. Lately I’ve been making these short 5 second videos that can be made pretty easily on Grok or most other AI image making sites. I usually use these on X or on Instagram but recently I thought I’d upload a few to YouTube. YouTube seem to be trying to get on the bandwagon created by Instagram and TikTok of very short videos that viewers can just scroll quickly through. On YouTube they are called ‘shorts’ and I’ve found that my shorts have actually been really successful, bringing in lots of viewers who will hopefully watch these quick videos and then click on my website to actually settle down and read more.

One of my shorts, a very short AI generated video shows a young woman roaring off on a motorbike with the words ‘NEW BLOG POST OUT NOW’ inscribed on the back of her leather jacket. Currently that video has 4.7 thousand viewers and my YouTube followers have begun to increase. I still need another 60 followers in order to actually make revenue from my videos but happily things seem to be moving in the right direction. A small group of my main videos have great viewing figures but until I hit the magic number of 500 followers, I make no money at all from YouTube.

It’s only fair to say that after publishing that last video on YouTube a little box appeared which said promote this video for only £10!  Ten pounds I thought? What’s ten pounds today? Two or three pints of lager in Wetherspoons? A CD album? Okay I thought, ten pounds, even a tightwad like me can live with that. Of course, that’s where the 4.7 thousand viewers came from, an advertisement. Even so, many of those watchers must have clicked onto my landing page and maybe even read a few posts. Did they go one step further and buy a copy of Timeline or Floating in Space? Well, maybe they did and maybe they didn’t. I’ll find out when a few royalties hit my bank account but until then I won’t be holding my breath. Nice to see that recently though my readership has been steadily expanding.

What I find really interesting is when a post from years ago suddenly gets a little attention. Why did that reader go for that particular post? Did he or she stumble upon it? Were they using a search engine and what were they searching for? Happily Google or Yahoo has directed them my way which is always nice to see.

The other day I was watching one of my favourite films Julie and Julia. It’s a film by Nora Ephron which is about a blogger called Julie Powell who decides she will make all 524 recipes from Julia Child’s cook book in 365 days. Julia was an American woman who learns cordon bleu cookery in France and writes a popular cookbook for American housewives. Obviously, things don’t all go smoothly for Julie the cook and blogger but she manages to get through a different recipe every day and in doing so gets some attention from the local press which boosts her blog even more and eventually enables her to become a published author.

It’s a great story in its own right but also for bloggers everywhere. Of course, they’d have a job making this website into a film unless they wanted endless shots of me, or someone playing the part of me, tapping away on my laptop writing blogs and short stories. Of course they could dramatize some of my stories. The Hollywood Meeting for instance in which a young writer goes to Hollywood to pitch one of his scripts to a producer might make a good film.

This is the point where I try to link a relevant feature film. Films about authors. That’s a tough one. There was Misery, a film based on a Stephen King book where an author is kidnapped and tortured but I don’t think I’m going to go there. Another film I remember seeing some years ago was called How to Murder Your Wife with Jack Lemmon. Jack plays Stanley Ford who authors a comic strip in a newspaper and acts out various situations which are then photographed. Jack’s character uses the photos to inspire his comic strip drawings. Look out for it if you see it on your TV schedules although it’s one of those films I haven’t seen for a long while on TV. When Stanley gets married, he takes many of his real life situations with his wife played by Virni Lisi and uses them in the comic strip. His comic strip character then decides to murder his wife but the wife, on seeing the strip, decides to walk out and people think Stanley has actually murdered her.

The comic strip art used in the film was by an artist called Mel Keefer who penned various comic strips in US newspapers and comics. That reminds me of another social media post I sometimes use below.

So in a world of short sharp TikTok and Instagram videos, can a blog post still work? Are there still people out there who want to read, who want to invest more than ten seconds on a post, who actually have an attention span, who can spend five to ten minutes reading something like this very post?

The answer is hopefully yes. There are even still people who want to buy and read books, after all, I certainly do.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

Click here to visit amazon and purchase Timeline, my new anthology.

The World of AI Video

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I did a post some time ago called Manipulating the Image. It was all about photo manipulation and how they used to do it in the old days when cameras used film and not a memory card and how they do it today using artificial intelligence. Things have quickly moved on and now it is just as easy to make a short video with AI as it is to make an image.

My go to AI imaging site has until recently been nightcafe.com. Users can easily make images there as well as short video clips and you can even use an image as a starting point. Nightcafe requires a subscription for a small sum but also, if you use the site regularly, you can build up a raft of free credits with which to make even more images. I soon found that my image credits were soaring so as a fully paid-up member of Tightwads Anonymous I thought wait a minute, I might as well cancel my subscription as I don’t need it anymore as I have a shed load of free credits.

So, I cancelled my subscription and soon realised that I was now no longer a ‘pro’ user and as such no longer entitled to use the top AI models. I still had lots of credits but I could only use them on the less powerful models. Not only that, I could no longer make my images into videos.

You might be thinking that perhaps that wasn’t such a big deal for a writer. After all, a writer deals with words not pictures. Yes, that’s true but in the 21st century world of the internet, it’s images that bring people into your orbit. A Twitter or Facebook post with a picture or video will apparently get 120% more engagement than a plain old text post, so in order to bring people into the clutches of stevehigginslive.com, I need pictures or videos.

A lot of my posts over on Twitter are basically promotions for the blogs on this website. I try to produce an interesting image to pull in my readers and then add a message; things like Read A New Blog Post or something similar. Here is one of my first video clips made using AI.

I’ve always rather liked this image below, an inviting pub with the name on a sign: The Blog Post Inn.

Here’s the same image made into a video over on meta.ai.

Many years ago as a schoolboy, one of my favourite doodles was to draw a frogman swimming underwater with a big flow of bubbles rising up to the surface. I was probably inspired by the TV in the 1960s, things like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in which Admiral Nelson and Captain Crane took us on all sorts of underwater adventures in their submarine, Seaview. Anyway, that was probably the source of some more videos involving a scuba diver finding an underwater carving which says -wait for it- Read a New Blog Post!

I always enjoyed both Voyage and another undersea TV show Stingray. Stingray was one of Gerry Anderson’s puppet shows. It was about the WASPs; the World Aquanaut Security Patrol and their amazing submarine Stingray commanded by Captain Troy Tempest. No doubt inspired by the scenes of Stingray and Seaview I decided, and this brings us back to AI, to make some submarine images. Here are a few below.

The really annoying thing about making AI images and videos is that they rarely come out how you want them. If they do, then they always seem to go wildly wrong when I try to tweak them. How do you make an AI image in the first place you might be asking. Well, simply from a text instruction, for instance:

A wide-angle view from low down; a moon rocket launches from Cape Kennedy. As the rocket blasts off in a cloud of smoke and steam, we see the words stamped vertically on the rocket: “NEW BLOG POST ” .

It’s always good to add in a few descriptive terms like hyper realistic as well as some camera terms like wide angle lens and so on.

In my video editor I’ve quite a few saved templates so it was easy to slot in the rocket video, add some sound effects from my trusty sound effects CD and here’s the finished video.

There are some pretty good AI generators out there that are completely free. Meta is the company that owns Facebook and you can use their app meta.ai to make free images and videos. I tend to start with an image from elsewhere, perhaps create something on Nightcafe and then upload it to meta and ask it to animate the image. I’ve had some good results and also some frustrating ones. I made an image of a woman wearing sunglasses with a neon sign saying ‘read a new blog post’ reflected in her specs. I asked meta to create a video from the image in which the girl ‘lifts up the specs, winks at the camera and replaces the specs’. Simple? No not really. In one version the woman took the specs off but then they disappeared. In another, they took themselves off and in a third they went up and down by themselves. Would she drop the specs slightly, wink and then put them back on? No. In the best result, the girl takes off the specs but seems to wink both eyes!  Not exactly what I wanted.

Another site, perhaps more well known is Grok which you can find on the former Twitter site, X.

Another new dimension to AI is audio and on some AI sites you can get an audio model to read a short script. I tend to put various elements together, pictures, video and audio, edit them in the traditional way and add either sound effects or music. I particularly like an audio model I found of an American man with a deep baritone voice which I use on a lot of my promo videos or sometimes an American lady. On Grok, you can actually produce a video in which your video subjects can speak but they tend to rattle off the dialogue so quickly it isn’t natural, although after some experimentation you can add pauses in places but even so, it comes over as a little odd.

Here’s one in which I asked the AI model to say ‘wow’ and then matched up some audio of my American AI voice saying that same word.

Going back to that earlier idea of the girl with the glasses, I thought I’d try again without the wink. The girl was supposed to look over her specs, smile and put them back. In the resulting clip the girl did all that but seemed to be mouthing ‘Hi’. I went off to my audio program on Freepik and produced some new audio, fitted them together and this was the result.

Whether these little clips bring in any new readers I’m not sure. In fact, now I think about it, it might put readers off if they assume the entire site is AI produced, including the writing! Of course, that would save me toiling away over a hot laptap trying to think up new ideas for blog posts.

Even so, I have a lot of fun messing about with AI images and audio. I wonder if perhaps one day I could even make an entire film using AI generated visuals and audio. Things are happening so quickly in the world of AI I can image that happening in the very near future.

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A Trip Down Memory Lane

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I really do love it here in Lanzarote. Warm but not too hot. OK there’s a little rain but it only lasts for 5 or so minutes and then the sun is out, drying everything up. If I had the money I would be buying a place here and settling down to a life of sunbathing, swimming and dining out. I could invite all my friends over, for limited times of course. Then again, perhaps I wouldn’t. Either way, I think I’d be very happy.

Sometimes when I’ve had a swim and I’m lying on my lounger just drying off in the sun, I often think about my dad who died back in 2000. Not long ago I came across one of my brother’s photos. It was my dad in the back garden of our old house and he was dressed in a vest and shorts, reading the paper with his dog, a pedigree dachshund on his knee. He was not in a chair or a sun lounger but relaxing in a wheelbarrow, just how he did when he was at work and had finished his job.

Dad worked for Manchester Highways and his job title was, if I remember correctly, a flagger’s mate. His job was to lay pavement flags throughout Wythenshawe in south Manchester as well as to work tarmacking roads and repairing potholes. He rode to work on his bicycle every day of his working life armed only with his backpack containing his lunch; his sandwiches made by my mother and his brew can. He used to use that brewcan even when he retired. Where he got the hot water from when working on the roads I don’t know unless he either went back to the highways office or perhaps asked people where he was working to top up his brew can.

I reckon he would have loved it here in Lanzarote. Back in Manchester the Highways depot where he worked closed down years ago and now a small private housing estate occupies the spot where he used to work. Funnily enough, just next door on Fenside Road was my old school, Sharston High School. It was demolished years ago and on the spot there is now another private housing estate which is surrounded by the old iron fence that encircled our school many years ago.

Dad

My Dad, working on the road, directing traffic.

Our school gym still stands on Fenside road. It is now some sort of fitness or sports centre. Apart from those railings I mentioned it is the only surviving reminder of our old school.

The school was large and was built in a sort of ‘C’ shape. There was a north and a south side and inside the ‘C’ were the school playing fields; cricket and football for the boys and rounders for the girls.

On the north side -to be honest I’ve always got the north and south sides mixed up, but the top of the ‘C’ anyway- there now stands a nursing home and it was here that my mother spent the last years of her life suffering with dementia.

I took semi retirement from work to help look after her and my brother and I shared caring duties. We had carers coming in four times a day. Morning to help get her up and have breakfast. Another at lunchtime, one at teatime and a final visitor at night to help get mum ready for bed. The final carer was due at about nine but they started to get earlier and earlier. Once we had someone round at about 5:30 to help mum with tea and then instead of 9 the final carer turned up at about 6:30. I remonstrated with them and said no, you need to come back at 9. I guess it was the last visit and they were eager to get off early.

Believe me, it was very difficult dealing with mum back then. She would forget she had eaten and would demand more food after being fed. Getting her clothes off her to put into the washer was a nightmare and when they had been washed, she complained that the clothes were not her clothes after all but someone else’s.

Once it worked out in my brother’s favour. I used to work shifts and would arrive home about 10:30 and take over from my brother. That night he wanted to leave early at about 8pm. Could I get time off to get to mum’s earlier? As it happened I couldn’t but he and the carers put mum to bed early and when the carer had left, my brother let mum nod off and then he left too.

Some months earlier we had brought a small bed downstairs into the lounge for mum. When I got in at my usual time, mum had woken up and, thinking it was early morning, was trying to get up.

I tended to have a small supper when I got in from work so I calmed mum down, explained that it was late at night and together we had a small supper of sausage sandwiches and we watched some television. I’d recorded a documentary about the comedian Bob Monkhouse and when it finished, we chatted for a while about Bob and his rather difficult life, then we both went to bed.

The next morning when the carers arrived, she had reverted to her slightly mad self, complaining once again that her clothes weren’t her clothes and that this wasn’t her house but some other strange house and that she didn’t live here.

The conversation about Bob Monkhouse the previous night had been one of our last sensible conversations ever.

I think it was 2021 when she moved into the nursing home. She had been very poorly with a cold that had gotten worse and worse. I personally thought it was one of the first Covid cases. She went to hospital and began to recover. We went to see her on Christmas day. We brought her a Christmas present, I can’t even remember what it was but I was surprised to find the nurses in her ward had brought presents for all the patients, hers was a pair of woolly gloves. Sadly she never got to wear them.

When she began to recover her social worker moved her to a nursing home saying she only had 6 months to live although she went on to live another two and a half years. At the nursing home she recovered rapidly and even attained something almost like her normal self. When Covid and the lockdown struck we were unable to visit her. When things eased we could visit but only outside of the windows. What was mad was that Mum was profoundly deaf and without her hearing aids couldn’t communicate. I don’t know why but I just couldn’t seem to get it across to the staff how important her hearing aids were and there we were, separated by a window, mouthing and gesticulating but poor mum, without her hearing aids could only wave.

When the lockdowns ended we could finally visit mum again but sometimes her hearing aids would be lost or without batteries. I decided to take one of her aids home and just fit it when I visited so we could have something like a normal conversation.

My mother in her last years

When I visited mum I used to ask her to recite some multiplication tables in the hope it would get her to use her memory and exercise her brain waves. One day we did a simple one, the three times table. One three is three, two threes are six and so on. Round about nine she began to falter and looked suddenly distressed. ‘I can’t remember anymore’ she said sadly.

We talked about other things and then I told her it was time to leave. The disappointment of not being able to remember her times table was still evident in her face. We said our goodbyes and I went towards the door. As I turned back for a final wave goodbye, she said something and I stopped to listen.

‘Ten threes are thirty’ she said. ‘Eleven threes are thirty-three, twelve threes are thirty-six’. She looked back and smiled. She was a very determined lady.

After she died I put a picture of her on the Facebook Wythenshawe page, announcing her passing. Various people commented but one lady in particular said that she used to work at mum’s nursing home and that she counted it a pleasure and a privilege to have looked after this lovely lady.

As you can perhaps imagine, I was moved to tears.

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