It’s New Year’s Eve… 2026 tomorrow. Don’t even ask if Battleaxe is planning a late night celebration – of course she isn’t, we go to bed at 10.00. We have friends coming round at the incredibly late hour of 7pm… Blogoversary? Yes. Hastings Battleaxe is 14! Happy sunny day – I’ll say so, stunning. We just went up to the Country Park for a walk. Other things… Battleaxe has discovered AI. ‘To think, 5000 years of human progress has come to this,’ sniffed Philosopher as he looked at my efforts so far. Yes, but it is very funny to see the results, despite the reality that of course it is wrong to have two zillion servers whirring away in the Atacama Desert, squandering the earth’s resources to show me sitting on a tropical beach with a group of hunky young men… Writing – the writing part of the latest novel is finished! All edits done!
Here’s Digby, dreaming the New Year in on a sunny spot on top of our wheelie bins. Life in the vicinity of Battleaxe Towers is a bit downbeat atm – some of our neighbours are facing very sad and difficult times. I won’t go into details on here. To add insult to injury we had a water outage on Christmas Day! Only in Hastings! Philosopher and I went out for an early evening walk to admire the local Christmas lights and found a fleet of giant tankers parked just round the corner, noisily pumping water down a hole a couple of hundred metres from our house.
We spoke to a bloke and he said they were recharging the system as far as Fairlight. Said they might be there all night – and it was freezing cold. Philosopher went back home and took them out a bit of our surplus Christmas food. When we slag off Southern Water for their amazing ineptitude we forget the poor sods who have to work all hours, in massive discomfort, at the front line, to patch up the defects resulting from years of underinvestment. Sure, they’d get paid good overtime, but that wouldn’t make up for missing Christmas Day at home. The water returned late evening, but at first it was brown and then cloudy, and rumbled and clanked alarmingly because of air in the pipes. Two of our lovely neighbours drove down to the water station at Pelham Place and collected enough bottled water for all of us. Well done them.
14 years of Hastings Battleaxe! As usual, here is the link to the first ever post, from 31 December 2011, when we had just arrived in Hastings from Birmingham. I’m so glad that people still enjoy reading the posts, and it still gives me a thrill to meet someone new, who is a Battleaxe reader. For me personally, I think writing the blog has helped massively in readying myself to write novels…
Of course, Hastings Battleaxe is now also Stephanie Gaunt the writer, and so far I do not have a designated writing website, but use the Writing page of this site to talk about my work. I need to ritz that up a bit. Yes, the second one, ‘Death is a Desirable Property’ is now finished, except I need to give it one final whizz through – largely to do a dialogue check. My novels are very heavy on dialogue to move the action along, and it has to sound authentic. I do sometimes make the mistake of being a bit heavy on name tags e.g ‘You are telling me, Olga, that….’ In real life, people don’t use people’s names that often in dialogue, and it can sound stilted. But, once that check is done, I have to discipline myself not to make any more changes to the text. I made the mistake in the first novel of giving in to the urge to ‘improve’ something every time I looked at it, which is wrong, and makes the next stage, formatting and preparing for print, more difficult. I have given myself the whole month of January to finalise the cover blurb, the front and back matter for the Kindle and print versions, and get everything formatted and ready for the Amazon uploads which will happen in February. Then, on to novel number three ‘Death is a Dog’s dinner.’
Well, here are some of the AI pictures! They started because so many of my friends have children who, really quite late in life, are having children of their own, so the friends are now grandparents. My own daughter gave birth years ago – she was respectably well into her twenties – and Eve is now grown up. But at the moment I seem to be surrounded by pictures of friend’s grand-babies. Yes, you know who you all are! So, not to be left out, Battleaxe generated this:
Then we went through a range of substitutions, as requested by friends. We went through poodles, kittens and guinea pigs… and ended up with hunky young men:
Note to Google Gemini, which did these, why are all my ‘grand-children’ and all the youths, so white? Has diversity not got to you yet? Meanwhile, when I asked Philosopher how he would like to be portrayed, he was pretty scathing, but said he wanted to be God. Trouble is, he is a bit unrecognisable…
Less of that. Let’s finish with pretty pictures from a dazzlingly sunny walk inTheCountryPark.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Happy New Year to you too, Stephanie, i have very mixed feelings about AI. While I admire what it can do, I am appalled by its power to deceive us. This was fun, but the concern remains. Wishing you all the best for 2026.