Toronto Pride, and Yeah, The Boys!

Dear Reader,

I've been back home in Sydney for about a month now, catching up with friends, writing, and reading. But one of the highlights of our trip was being in Toronto for the Toronto Pride Weekend.

We were already at Woody's Bar late Friday afternoon when the hordes invaded Church Street as night fell. Over the weekend we enjoyed the markets, the main Drag stage, and several bars along the strip. Oh, and of course, the parade!

You can catch my video of us on Friday night wandering through the crowd, and the parade on my YouTube Holiday Snippets page.

While I'm on the subject of video, I've launched a new series titled The Story Behind the Story, where each week a short Vlog about the inspiration and the development of one of my books is shared. These are posted weekly on YouTube and Instagram.

The first which discusses Drama Queens with Love Scenes can be found at my YouTube VLOG PAGE along with the second about Drama Queens and Adult Themes. Make sure you Subscribe to see the others when they go live.

As highlighted in the Subject Line, there is a review of Holden Sheppard's follow up to Invisible Boys. The link is down this page under the banner, Recent Blogs.

And now, before you browse the rest of this newsletter, I have a story. Every day authors are sent fake AI generated emails singing the praises of one of their books. The purpose is to extort money for a non-existent advertising campaign or an introduction to a non-existent book club.

The email shown above invited me to be an online guest at The European Book Club. I had to rush out out of the house so I quickly googled them, found they had a website with an email address, and sent them a message asking if they'd heard of the woman who contacted me. I expected they'd reply she didn't exist.

Instead, their reply the next day assured me it was a legitimate invitation, so I looked at their site more closely. The books listed on their homepage are all best sellers, and somehow the book club read them all last year. No mention of any read this year.

And on their Discussions page, the buttons along the top don't click to anything, while the View Discussion links go to '404 Page not found'.

You can see that the titles listed above aren't the type you'd discuss at a book club. On another page they claim they've interviewed a woman about her book on Animal Chakra Healing, and another with a man who wrote about recession-proofing your business. We all know these aren't titles book clubs read.

This was the first time an entire AI generated website was created to justify a fake author invitation. What bothers me is how fast AI is learning, so this type of scam may be more refined in the future.

I also reached out to an author they claimed they interviewed. It turns out they did. She told me it took seventy-five emails to set up her appearance, and a payment of $US100 even though the scammers wanted more. The interviewer could hardly speak English, and the connection was so dodgy, they had to bail out of the conversation early.

That's it from me for August. Take time to browse the links below as I look forward to catching up next month.

Cheers,

Kevin xxx

My Books

Recent Blog

It’s risky writing a sequel to a popular novel. It could feel rushed. It may not reflect the same spirit. It may run out of fresh ideas. This sequel to Invisible Boys has none of these issues.

To continue reading CLICK HERE​

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