Tammara,
How've you been?
With record heat this month where I'm at I've been cookin' in both senses of the word.
I haven't sent much out this month because my focus has been away from my creative business.
I'm officially making a professional pivot into tech.
Since AI came on the scene four years ago, I've heavily experimented with many of the most powerful and popular tools: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and a bunch of others you probably haven't heard of.
My efforts to use them to attract an audience to my fiction largely failed. But, the attempts banked valuable skills in multiple domains from animation to video editing and modern workflow design.
But for me, using AI as a blackbox solution has never been enough.
I want to understand how this technology works at a deeper level in order to help you and others employ it with greater skill and comfort.
That's why I decided to dive deeper into code (mostly Python right now) and begin walking the path to a Computer Science degree. I started the incredibly robust OSSU Computer Science path a few weeks ago and have enjoyed it immensely.
Additionally, I'm doing pre-training for a coding bootcamp I plan to attend this summer. Yeah it's a lot. But since I'm not grinding social media anymore to promote book sales or making endless content, I've had much more time to study, read, focus, and even have a little fun on my new personal gaming channel.
What about the novel?
It's still moving.
In fact, two weeks ago, I was informed my upcoming military sci-fi horror novel Cereus & Limnic: Escape From Okinawa Type-B won Honorable Mention in Spoken audio's Novel Beginnings contest (scroll down to find my name!).
I was very surprised and humbled to win this award!
While it's only an Honorable Mention, my story probably beat out hundreds of entrants. This is also the first award I've won for any of my fiction. So I'm very excited to keep working toward getting this story out by the end of 2026.
There's much more that happened this month, but I'll leave it to you to discover the rest.
I've gotten better about updating my "Works" page with the dates I add to them. So if you're interested in seeing the areas of growth, you can take a look over there.
That's it for this one!
What was your biggest challenge this month? Did you overcome it? If so how?
I'd like to hear from you.
-Keith
