How To Paint Book, Banana Surprise Glazing, Love And Fragility Complete

Spent most of yesterday working on my 'How to Paint' book, which is already my biggest book in word-count and it doesn't feel so much as half written. There are many issues, chiefly the overall structure and adding more personality and verve over the dry technical points. It is ultimately a technical manual, but needs more than this, it needs to inspire more than inform. I realised, when writing, that this era of free and instant access to technically correct information makes personality and opinion much more important than mere fact. Perhaps this is why opinion is valued; it's the humanity among the dry data. The phenomenon of Populism is the worship of opinion over academic fact; perhaps this is why.

My painting has technically improved a lot this year, partly due to the analysis in this book. My own book has helped codify elements which were before esoteric.

Most of the today was too slow and too tired. I awoke after a long sleep of many dreams. It took hours to feel awake, and at 16:50, I still feel half dazed. Despite this I pushed on with painting and have glazed 'Beware Of The Banana Surprise', and then a glazing of the new ear and neckline of the male figure in 'Love And Fragility In The Age Of Perfection'. The neck and ear were, before this, poor in tone and finish but now almost stand out as the best part of the painting. If there is an error to correct the key steps are wait for everything to dry, then glaze with opaque underpainting colours, then re-glaze. This worked on The Starcrossed Escape too.

Art Writing, Painting Delivery

Spent most of yesterday writing and working on the unusually troublesome structure of my book on oil painting. I've sold quite a few books this month and year in print and audio. My book sales, and music plays and sales, have been steadily growing and this trend is continuing.

Today, Good Vibrations in the library, and a trip to the Oil Art Advisory to deliver four large paintings: 'Triumph Of The Mechanauts', 'Tiger Moving Nowhere At All', 'Imagining Happiness', 'Abandoning Someone Who Was A Friend To Me When I Had None'. They loved them all and have decided to immediately hang them. I've never felt so supported and enthused. I'm painting large again this year, primarily due to the influence of Zoe and Max, and will continue with greater ambition. I know that this year and next are years of power and growth.

Onwards we forge.

Writing Oil Painting From Beginning To Master And Beyond

Decided and managed to paint an underpainting yesterday, the speed and joy of working on a small painting. The idea, The Loneliness Of The Sun, was from a few years ago. Perhaps I should have painted today, I have 'The Blood Of Winter' and the 'H Beam Piper' paintings to glaze, but I didn't remotely feel like it.

Instead, I read more of Max Doerner's book and started the big job of reordering and writing my own book on oil painting, provisionally entitled Oil Painting From Beginning To Master And Beyond. Already at 45,000 words, although this draft is very haphazard. The 2025 draft covered everything in a tree-like structure, but I want to rewrite and re-organise it all. I must make it more personal and more entertaining, warmer, but still contain as much as I can about the crafts and skills I've learned.

War And Nuclear Love Work

Final day of sheet music for War And Nuclear Love. At times I think that nobody will ever play any of this, and that my days, week, years of working on this tedious and difficult sheet music is pointless - but this is not certainly true; there are two main reasons. First, that nobody else bothers, and second, that data integrity has been shown to be an important driver of success and civilisation. I file and record my work in great details because such work is part of the purpose of life itself. Either way, if I'm ever to play these live I really find this useful, so a couple of days work to transcribe an album isn't so bad. I managed to transcribe the complex guitar parts in 'After The Battle' today, and the music for 'Post-Apocalyptic Playground'.

By 3pm the draft scores were complete, but I had lots more art to create, at least for the booklet and iTunes booklet, so I really needed to make a few more full CD booklet pages, and a CD surface while I'm at it, although there are no plans for a CD at the moment.

One other job today was launch the Goodreads Giveaway for The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death. This week-long promotion give away a free copy of the Kindle book, with kind requests for a review from the winners of this lottery.

Burning Circus Audiobook Complete

Completed The Burning Circus audiobook today. Unsure what to do next. I've been sketching works for the long paused album on war, which seems chillingly appropriate.

Blake and Burning Circus Audiobooks

Two days of work on the Songs of Innocence And of Experience, and The Burning Circus audiobooks. Slight work yesterday, designing the cover art, and preparing the track names, filenames. With over 40 tracks per book, the task of typing these filenames 4 times (in different places) is quite time consuming.

Today, recorded all of the Blake poems, and processed these too, so the book is now complete. I'll work on The Burning Circus tomorrow. I've also decided to pay for a Goodreads giveaway for The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death, a first stab at some promotion for this book, which I still love and rate, yet remains largely unknown to the world.

I'll hold off submission and publication of the audiobooks for a few weeks. I'm unsure if this makes any difference, but with Steam for example, releasing lots of new things at once floods potential customers, when one new release every month tends to have more effect. This will conclude my audiobook work for now. My next writing task will be finishing (well, writing...) my book on oil painting mastery.

My teeth and mouth still ache mildly and constantly, as has been the case since December. This, and the lack of an NHS dentist, constitute the primary bane of my life at the moment.

How To Audiobook Complete

Completed the audiobook for How To Organise Your Computer Files in record time. The text boxes and footnotes presented a problem for audio, so I changed the timbre of the voice for those, making it somewhat dry and dusty like the voice of HAL in the '2001: A Space Odyssey' film. For footnotes, I added a bell sound at the appropriate time, and read the notes at the chapter end, as in the book.

I had to change the cover, as the lower part needs to be blank for overlays.

The book is less than 4 years old, but some parts are already ripe for a new edition. Back then, few USB drives could outperform a hard drive's writing speed, but now this is common. Perhaps the parts on optical media was anachronistic even in 2022, but the comments are still valid; they are, in the long term, probably more archival than solid state drives. I'll wait a week or two before doing more on this. It would be better to release these audiobooks at intervals instead of all in one lump. Much of the material will be valid and useful no matter what the year.

The fast work on this has given me confidence that I can work at a similar rate for the Blake poems, so I've decided to record The Burning Circus too, notably leaving only Deep Dark Light unread. The strange specialist books, like the Nantwich Museum Poems (which isn't my work anyway, and was only made as a limited edition accompaniment to my exhibition), the Salome book, the Marius Fate book, and the Taskforce manual aren't high priorities to revisit.

Deep Dark Light would be quite a lot of work, it has a lot of poems, and the long story of almost novella length, and it's yet to sell a copy, so for the moment I'll hold off on that, even though I think it's a good work of literature.

How To Audiobook

I've decided to charge into more audiobooks and sheet music transcription, spending the next two weeks to see how much I can manage of those four projects, the work of which is an ultimate goal anyway. Today, a first day of work on the How To Organise Your Computer Files audiobook. It presents a few challenges, as the book has a few text boxes, so I've developed a sound effect to indicate when the spoken text is read from a text box. Some of the text itself necessarily changes a little so that folder trees, for example, are described.

First job was creating those sound effects, then adapting the cover:

About 50% of the text is now read in its first draft, far faster than the much larger TMBWOD. My target is to finish it all by the end of Tuesday, anything less would be a bonus. Onwards we charge.

TMBWOD Complete, Prometheus v3.84

Completed the final small edits and proofing to The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death today, then submitted for approval.

Then updated Prometheus a notch. One tiny improvement was the track lights. Until now the top (green) light is lit when all tracks are active (as most songs will be when on the final render) and dark green when some are not, but for audiobooks, I tend to only want one o two active, just those for the current chapter, so it's useful to be sure that no others are; so a new black icon is now there when all tracks are off.

My 'Hello Earth' painting has taken off on BlueSky, a similar level to the Philosopher painting. Strange how this happens, but it is a welcome and pleasant feeling of appreciation. It's confirmed that the 12 paintings with Galleria Balmain will remain there exclusively until September or so.

I could start on new creative material, or work on more audiobooks or sheet music transcription. Next possible books, How To Organise Your Computer Files or William Blake one. Next possible albums to transcribe, Burn Of God or Remembrance Service. It's an ultimate aim to do all of that, but I'm feeling I'm not creating enough. I need to make new art.

TMBWOD Audio Production

A full day working on the production for The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death audiobook. This is the fun part, made so much easier by Prometheus! After maximising the basic recordings I apply basic dynamics, then load those waves into Prometheus to apply effects, always a high pass filter (plan voice recordings are always too bass heavy), a noise gate, and a tiny bit of reverb.

After that, special effects for the work in hand. I've applied a tinny voice filter to Arturo, the funny robot man, a reedy voice to the gramophone, a telephone effect for God, and a thinner voice for Adam, the mechanical child. For the main computer of the trans-dimensional gateway, I used the very retro sounding AnalogX speech synthesizer. I experimented with the DEC Talk synthesizer (as used by Stephen Hawking!) but that sounded too realistic!

One tricky voice was for 2me, the emotional spirit entity. I read it plain but thought that a female squeaky voice might work. Turning up the pitch sounded good enough, but not intelligible enough, so I decided to tag on a sine wave which tracked the amplitude. This seemed to work well, fitting the description of a 'smooth glass' voice.

The main song was included, and I made a small edit of music, a few notes, for the introduction.

Then it was a matter of rendering out the final files and making tiny volume adjustments so make all waves between -20 and -21dB.

All is set for proofing now. I may re-record parts if I'm particularly unhappy with elements, though this would be troublesome at the moment. The entire book is a little over 5 hours.

TMBWOD Audiobook First Draft, Complete Game Bundle

Completed the basic recording of The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death audiobook today, and started the process for the balancing and volume levels. The first chapter is, unusually, a song, so I had to sing this today too. More than a song, it's one of the most difficult songs to sing I've ever written! It ranges from G2 to A4 and changes key too, all in 8 short lines.

If I had the opportunity I would perhaps make a few changes to the text, a few. The punctuation needs some changes, as I tended to read this differently to how it was written. I spotted one or two actual mistakes, small words here and there, and there were a few moments of 'I could do better' - but on the whole I still like the book a lot. I'm still proud of it, still think it's one of the best things I've done as an artist, and it's still tragic that the world of literature is oblivious to it. Some parts, like the telephone, bed-side LED clock, and computer references place it firmly in the late 20th or early 21st century, so it's not timeless, but much of it is.

I'm in a flux of emotions. The year I wrote it, 2012, was something of an annus mirabilis for me; that book, The Love Symphony, the Richard Dadd painting and cabinet, and many great artworks as I charged from one thing to another. Can I do the same? I must try twice as hard to better myself.

The year feels special, like a year of change, and I want to push to do better things, the best things, to try to improve and learn, to strive.

Another job done today is the release of a 'complete set' bundle of my games on Steam. There are one or two games not deemed worthy of the $100 release fee; Bool, Firefly, Breakout Velocity, Outliner. There are always more I could add. I could make a better, bigger Yinyang, and could improve most of these games. Almost all of them were made in 2002, another annus mirabilis, in which I founded Bytten, Cornutopia Games, and IndieSFX; the foundations of my first period of growth.

I'll spend tomorrow working on the technical audio for TMBWOD. There are opportunities for special audio effects, but it's a big book, a huge job, perhaps not worth it. The readings did make me feel like an actor, I enjoyed some of the character voices, and inwardly laughed at others; but all are good experience. All showcase myself as an author as well as performer.

If I did more of these I would choose my next most popular books; How To Organise Your Computer Files, and the William Blake poems, which I get nothing for (despite my illustrations, Amazon consider it public domain). There are probably countless version of Blake's poems in audio form, probably read by great actors, but it would again be a showcase of my skills, and something of a legacy if I am lucky.

The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death Audiobook

Two more days of audiobook recording for The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death. I've already read as much as all of The Intangible Man book yet am only about 60% of the way through. Many chapters are 40 to 50 minutes.

My mood is stoic. Life is about the survival of the fittest. The fittest are whom? The most resilient. Fitness is not about strength or power or surging forth but informational resilience to harsh conditions.

TMBWOD Audiobook, Proto-Viral Philosopher

So many options for things I may do, and anything is really possible. Creating new things feels different than working on old things, but then working on old things often means creating new things for them! The small video talking about The Myth Of Sisyphus is fine, and perhaps it's a good idea to make a promotional video of sorts for each album, and each book, and each painting, and each game; but again, there is the question of workload vs. value. Everything is ultimately valuable, and anything justifiable if rationalised.

I've sold a couple of audiobooks, after recording two in January, and, as with having sheet music for all of my albums, having audio versions of all of my books seems like a good idea, so today I've charged into recording an audiobook for The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death. Recorded 3 of the 14 chapters today, though the first chapter is (I'm sure you know) a short song, so there are really 13 chapters.

I've been postings paintings and links to existing works almost daily on social media this year and my Philosopher painting has had an explosion in views overnight and on BlueSky today, a first such result for me which, on its own has been an inspiration and source of some happiness.

Deborah's holiday and the Olympics have both been a distraction in the past week, contributing to a lack of focus. Hopefully this focus on TMBWOD (and perhaps even afterwards, another book, perhaps Deep Dark Light, perhaps another) will acts as a stabilising force.

Final Gilding, Short Story Edits, Paper Compression

Half of the day spent preparing for artwork for the Oil Art Advisory. Inspected the reliquary and decided to glid a tiny patch which had a fragment where the gold didn't stick. This happens quite a lot, and can be attractive, but here it stood out too much, so I began by gilding that tiny patch.

You might see it as the flaky part in the lower right corner of the door's edge. Then, wrote an owner's manual for the cabinet, and assembled tools for possibly fitting mirror plates to the Monstrance of Life.

Then added all of the artwork text to the appropriate folders, for each artwork. I sometimes need to write information about artworks, descriptions etc. and until now have written these each time. Now I'll file these with the artworks for future re-use. I've also put this on the appropriate web pages. I used to describe a lot there, but gradually let the images speak for themselves for fear of spoiling the mood or surprise. I'm now reversing that. In an era of ubiquitous images, it's good to have more information about each artwork.

After that, refined my short story for the Cheshire Prize for Literature, and developed a new dynamic compressor. My changes to the Stone Compressor did not work, and I happened to think of another, so experimented with it and now this 'Paper Compression' is better than any I've made so far despite being simpler.

The only culture I'm engaging with is 'The Twilight Zone' from 1959, 'The Wheel Tappers and Shunters Social Club' from 1975, Kafka's Diaries from 1911, and Tom Karen's autobiography from across the 20th century.

Story, Stone Compression Experiments

I've written first draft of my story, which is untitled as yet. Just under 1500 words, as required. More to do on it.

Then I charged into experiments with my dynamic compressor, Stone Compression. I use the one in Sony SoundForge often, so that is my target for emulation of operation, but it can produce odd results at times. Here is my test wave. I'm to compress at 3:1 at -6db, the grey line in the trace. You will see that above that line the wave 'shrinks' by a factor of 3, which is correct.

I set my compressor attack to 50ms, decay to 150ms:

Here is attack 50ms, decay 1000ms:

So far so good, it looks like the tail is decaying by 1 second. In the Sony compressor however, attack and decay, even wild values have a far more muted effect. It produced great results with many settings, but almost all of the attack/decay settings produce very similar results. Here is attack 2ms, decay 2ms:

Here is attack 50ms, decay 1000ms - the same settings as my second trace above, though it looks very different. How similar to the dramatically different 2ms/2ms version it seems. Basically, it's only affecting the values over -6dB, which is perhaps correct for a compressor, but in doing so it's making the results boringly similar even with wildly different settings. I'll keep my wild version for flexibility, and to be different. This, incidentally is used in SFXEngine, so perhaps I'll upgrade that too, but I'm unsure at the moment, as this change is radical to the way it currently works.

Gilding The Reliquary Edges

Started the day trying to write, well partly succeeding, a story for the Cheshire Prize. I'm out of practice.

The gold and oil arrived before lunch, so I decided to gild after. I ordered 250ml of oil. I have in the past ordered more, 500ml or even a litre, but it's one of those products which thickens or sets in the bottle, and the old tin was poorly packaged and a nightmare to pour from. I only used 50ml or so before the rest spoiled, so I elected for a smaller batch. I made a plastic funnel from lighting gel, and poured into 4x30ml solvent-tight amber bottles from Baldwins. This should keep the precious stuff in good order. The rest I left in the tin and sealed it, plus much clingfilm.

Then, gilding, which was also nightmarish when I first tried it many years ago. For my first ever attempt, in 2008 or so, I applied the oil too thickly and didn't wait for it to grow tacky. I applied the gold, which broke and let through some oil. This stained the surface and make my fingers sticky, making everything worse. The oil never set, making all of the gold break, ruining it with yellowy oil, and creating a disaster.

For my second attempt, and the first reliquary, I decided to use epoxy resin as my size, knowing that this sets chemically not by exposure to air. In many ways this was much more successful, though of course, epoxy can yellow, so shouldn't be permitted on the top of the gold. I used a casting resin designed to be more stable. Applying it thinly was very difficult, and of course it grew thicker by the minute, even though it was 12-hour resin. Being a resin glue it had the power to stick everything, such as the work to the floor permanently.

Other problems include the opposite to the first attempt, waiting so long that the oil dried and the gold would not stick. So, I learned that there is an element of exact timing involved. Another problem was the gold itself. The loose leaf took huge skill to handle and manipulate. I was determined to learn, and made my own little bed, and obtained the correct gilder's knife and soft brush for lifting the gold (a gilder's tip). I managed it in the end, but once I had I started to use transfer leaf, which is a joy to use by comparison. One downside to transfer is that it can't as easily cope with lumpy textures and pits, which loose gold be be prodded into. Apart from this, transfer is always better.

I've also tried using PVA, which can be simply called water-based oil size. This works, but isn't brilliant because it dries so quickly. For this, one must apply a little glue, then gold, then glue etc.

So now, I use oil size. The first trick is to make sure the surface is non-absorbent, or else the oil will sink in, so I may apply a sealer first (like acrylic medium or paint). I mix a little oil paint with the size, to more easily see where the transparent oil is applied, and to aid drying, then paint it on the area to gild. I paint it very thinly, as thinly as possible, almost scrubbed in. In no time, a 15 mins, it will be sticky, like the tack on Sellotape, then it's ready to apply gold.

I cut the gold with a rotary blade of the sort used for fabric. This is easier than using a gilder's knife. For transfer leaf, it's a simply matter of picking up the leaves on their backing and applying. For real gold, tools are needed to pick it up. I seem to have better luck with metal tools than the gilder's tip, on which the hairs need some slight grease, traditionally rubbed on from one's forearm. Once set down, real leaf is tamped with something like cotton wool, but the wool strands can glue onto tiny holes where the glue remains and white hairs start to appear, so this is a pain compared to the joy of transfer leaf.

Today I used transfer leaf (23.5kt) and Handover 3-Hour Size, which seems very good. Prior to this I used Robersons Fast Size, and also LeFranc; all equally good.

Now, another lesson (or trick) is to leave it all, complete with flappy bits of gold on the top. Everything should be left for a day or two to fully dry and only then can the bits of gold be brushed off, and perhaps little holes (these are inevitable, and sometimes even part of the aesthetic, allowing organic fragments of undercolour to show through) gilded yet more.

Painting, Story, and Album Thoughts, and Kafka's Diaries

Today I packed the paintings for tomorrow's visit. How I wish I could paint more. There are several reasons why I paint less now. First, I lack space, the space for completed works, as well as the incentive to paint. I'd love a regular place to exhibit, though I've never had one. To date I've painted for competitions or open exhibitions (near or far), or, after a spell of work, developed my own idea for an exhibition and staged one in a venue of my own hiring.

Covid acted as something of a stop to this, which brings me to the second reason, of diversion into other arts. I've made more music since 2020 than in perhaps the 20 years prior, so music served as my artistic obsession, stolen from painting. Artists must follow their whims, and perhaps mine will shift back to painting (or elsewhere, my artistic drive is as strong as ever). Though, the key lack of physical space is still an important factor. When I started painting I'd happily paint large works but I have no space for that now, too many paintings are in storage, and this limits the sort of painting I feel like doing. Now, I feel like I should and could paint more, again, better than ever, so it's important that I find a way.

Enough deep thought for now.

I spent 45 minutes listening to an excellent Radio 4 programme about liberty, and John Stuart Mill's essay on the subject, and later and equally good programme about chocolate. I eat chocolate every day; a drink of cocoa every morning, and a couple of chunks at least later. It appears that chocolate has no direct health benefits, such as a medicine might convey benefits, but benefits in food are relative. Chocolate may be more beneficial than another food we might eat instead. To some extent all foods are harmful, food wears our bodies down, so the health benefits of food should only be considered in relative terms.

In the afternoon, I went out with Deb, to at least take some fresh air. I bought a book, Kafka's Diaries. I'm reminded that now, after my recent audiobook reading that I'm evolving towards the literary. Last night I wrote out the plans for a new story about an AI chat-bot, but the plot is large and complex, as good as a Film Noir, yet too large for a 1,500 word story. I may be able to do something with it, but I have only 14 days to complete my Cheshire Literature Prize entry, so it may be more efficient to develop a new idea.

I also have sketches for a new album, with two tracks; the Radioactive theme to start, and 'Written on Rice' to end, but with no other tracks. The sketched story outline reminds me of the importance of structure, and I must endeavour to plan the album structurally, primarily. Above all, I must not rest. There is much to do, and I must strive to do it all, and well.

The Intangible Man Audiobook Version 2

Completed and submitted the second version of The Intangible Man Audiobook today. My new process is much simpler, editing the plain waves in 24-bit, then applying dynamics, then feeding everything into Prometheus for filtering, any special effects like reverb, boosting the volume to ideal levels, then limiting.

I'm already tired of this and ache to move on, though I have five other books I could read! I wish I had the drive to promote anything I do. I have a huge and unstoppable drive to create, to move on, to charge into the new, yet I have no drive to promote the old, to tell the world, or share anything. Quite the opposite, my instincts are to shrink from the very prospect of sharing anything. Years of this has also led to a complete lack of knowledge of how to promote anything.

Still, I use all of my brain, so that which doesn't promote is being used elsewhere. One thing I do and can do is enter competitions, and last night I had the genesis of an idea for a short story for the Cheshire Prize for Literature. I worked on The Intangible Man partly for this exact reason. The old book may well have done (though it does feel neater and better to re-read it with more skill and control) but if I'm to write something new, I need to enter that literary world. I have only two weeks to write it and enter.

I will start tomorrow, but I must also pack some of my best artworks for a trip to Knutsford, and the anxious delight of a visit to a gallery. In other happy news, I've finally been refunded by wonderful Amazon for the expensive but useless 4G phone I ordered in November. This was so out of date it had no hope of working (could not connect to data, would not update, could not use VoLTE). The 3rd Party Seller did nothing, not even a message; it was Amazon's appeals process which led to the resolution. My mother is also awaiting a refund from the same seller for the same model of phone.

Onwards we charge with new-found glee.

The Intangible Man Audiobook Second Edition, Substack Ends

A full day working on a second version of the audiobook for The Intangible Man and Other Strange Tales. Seven stories were read in draft yesterday, and the remaining today. This is a lot of tedious work, most of it the editing process. The next big step is processing the audio, limiting and volume checking, and adding any audio effects. I expect this will take another day, perhaps longer.

In other news, my Substack 'appeal' has been rejected, which is something of a blow. It was a huge amount of work to join Substack, to transfer this 20-year old blog to that more up-to-date platform. I'm still in the dark as to what the problem was. I didn't tend to email out posts. Perhaps the platform wanted me to do this more often, and so gain more readership - or, perhaps the opposite, that Substack objected to me using my external mailing list. Or it could be another reason. To say that I feel unsupported by a platform, which currently holds over 3000 posts of my life's work, is an understatement.

Perhaps I should be fortunate that this suspension occurred only a few days after a backup from that site. I can't now create a backup, and I don't appear to have any control over the site at all.

Well, onwards I march alone. My heavy boulder calls. Time to push it a little more, around this stony corner, down a new little pathway.

21st Century Surrealism Audiobook Complete

Two days of solid work on the 21st Century Surrealism audiobook. After each chapter recording, each need editing and checking. Then, boosting the volume, adjusting the dynamics, clipping, and conversion into the final format. This was completed today, and the 3-hour book submitted for publication within the next week or two.

I immediately began work on a second edition of The Intangible Man. Using Prometheus for the filtering, limiting, and other audio effects, is a much better (non linear) way to edit than using SoundForge, and I feel I can read better too. If I can complete this, and The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death this month then it would be a good month, I think. Perhaps, one day, I could work on The Burning Circus, or Deep Dark Light, or the computer book, or even the Blake poems.

Still, even after one book I feel the call to create something new. I can't dwell for too long on this current, tedious task.

Here's the audiobook cover: