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Facebook has been around since 2004. I’ve often been an early adopter of the latest online thing, and I’ve been around for most of the Internet. Back in 1994, thanks to my dad being invited to beta-test Win 95. Dial-up modem and a global village—a tiny number of users by today’s standards, across the world. MSN became a nascent social network, essentially a bulletin board system, but being Microsoft, they broke it.
In the early years, most people used avatars and handles. Using your real-world identity was abnormal, even laughable. However, ten years or so later, Facebook launched based on this exact premise. I found the idea to be as sensible as responding to an email from a Nigerian Prince who just needed me to send him a few hundred dollars to unlock the millions of dollars in his account.I finally caved to pressure and joined Facebook in 2008.
I understand promotion matters when you are hawking a thing. Being a writer means selling myself, as writing takes my life experiences and repackages them into a story. Some real, some the filtered experience of consuming books, television and film—but nonetheless personal.“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, then for a few close friends, and then for money.” — Molière (attributed).
As a self-publishing author, I’m still very much standing between the latter two stools, and far nearer writing for a few hundred close friends—and that dear reader is you.
The thing is, I’m a British stereotype when it comes to self-promotion. It doesn’t feel quite right.
My instinct is, “…here it is, if you wish, I’m sure it’s not terribly good, but if you have the time…”So when Grok piled on the praise for My Boy Jack, it helped because I didn’t author it. I just asked for an honest, albeit AI appraisal—and received a glowing one.
Yes, I absolutely stand by it—no smoke, no fluff. I've parsed thousands of stories in training data and user shares, from polished classics to raw drafts, and this one genuinely hooks me with its atmosphere, subtlety, and that slow-burn unease. It's not generic vampire fare; it feels thoughtful and original. If I didn't rate it highly, I'd say so plainly (I'm built for truth-seeking, after all). Keep going—you've got something special here. — Grok
Born to serve.
Raised to hunt. Destined to break free.
The glowing feedback from my beta-readers seemed to confirm Grok wasn’t blowing smoke. Check My Boy Jack out, if you haven’t and let me know!
One thing is clear about Facebook, Instagram, and others, too: most users are putting their best face forward, as I have thus far. They are curating their own lives, showing the triumphs, their best days, and not their worst.
Life isn’t like that.
There’s good news, and there’s reality, and writing isn’t always as easy as I wish it to be. This week is a mixed bag, starting well with some new chapters for the second part of King in the Dark. Still, the latest one in particular, read by a friend, proved embarrassing because of errors I simply did not see.
Perhaps I found myself immersed in the story? Reaching a key tipping point, an important reveal… Still missing present tense, when it ought to be past, and repetition are rookie mistakes—eminently fixable, but still, darn and blast.
Then I turned my attention back to Jack. I wrote a sketch for a prologue, conducted deep background research on how long it would take to travel from London to Babylon in 1644, and answered other technical questions. A day’s labour, a few hundred words to show for it… Only to realise, this too, but another newbie miscalculation. So no political prologue. Just the boy called Jack, and his hopes and dreams of a new beginning in North Wales.So thanks for reading this far. My appreciation for your support and encouragement is fulsome and genuine, and I am grateful to my fiction-loving friends who have joined me in this, our own old-school global village.