Source: Image by @katharsisdrill
Mort, the Shit Manager is a spin-off fictional series of short stories based loosely on the thoughts of David Mortenson, the tyrannical Kwiksave store manager who features in my auto-biographical series 'The Horrors of Kwiksave'.
Writer's block happens to us all, and for me, it happens most frequently when I attempt fiction. It’s unlikely that anyone has noticed, but I have two parts of one episode of ‘Mort the Shit Manager’ floating around HIVE now.
One of them is unlikely to ever be finished, as I deem it too outlandish, and the other I am struggling with in terms of quality. If it doesn’t start me chuckling after reading it, then I’m sure nobody else will be guffawing.
In a nutshell, it’s the creation of something, and if that something is not good enough for my own standards, then it gets shelved, permanently, until my brain comes up with something else, preferably that I haven’t used before.
Mort the Shit Manager: Gladys Shufflebottom (Part One) was published in October 2025, and for the life of me, I can’t dredge up anything good enough for part 2.
...'Ask AI to combine Gladys, Rover and Tripe & Gizzard flavour dog food and we get this, bloody awesome.., well maybe not in that sense'''.
I have asked AI for ideas, not to write it for me, but it gives me cheesy ideas which I mostly don’t want to use.
I feel there is a lot of legs left in this ‘brand’, as that is what it technically is but I did it all wrong from the beginning, going in and out of Mort’s life from when he was a Stock Lad in 1974 to his eventual promotion to Store Manager in 1979 after the demise of Reginald Bulge.
The domain registration for my website was due to expire a few days ago, and against my better judgment, I extended it for another year. Nobody looks there, and I refuse to pay stupid money for SEO promotions, so it will sit there as a testament to part of my Urban Exploration adventures.
I added some sections for ‘The Horrors of Kwiksave’ and ‘Mort the Shit Manager’ in a few hours of optimism, but I know the website is doomed to be barely seen by anybody.
On the same day, I figured ‘how can I convert the image of Mort drawn by @katharsisdrill to a realistic one’?
Signing up for a free month of ‘proper’ AI, I started asking it to have a go and create a series of images from the hand-drawn one, and it shocked me with what I got back.
...'after several iterations, the drawing came to life and now we have the real 'Mort', who incidentally does not look like the real person, which is just as well'...
Years ago, I longed for an artist to make my stories come alive. I always felt guilty about using someone else’s photographs, even if they were cited and stopped on a particular thread of ‘Brent’ when someone mentioned it on a post of mine.
If this person ever saw the image portraying themselves as a brainless Stock Lad with an unhealthy obsession with dandruff, they may be less than happy.
With HIVE being so insular, it’s highly unlikely, but now that I have my own personal artist called ‘AI’, it’s no longer a problem.
...'AI has a bad habit of making people too good looking. The real 'Sharon' was NOT quite this good looking and the tooth is not quite accurate, but she's close enough. I had to fuck around with her uniform more, to get it even slightly close to an authentic look'...
Sharon, the bad-toothed supervisor, can come alive, as can Reginald Bulge and Edith Smokebottom-Ward, who only smokes 165 Woodbines a day.
...'the new Reginald Bulge could be a little too close to the original image, he's not the finished product just yet'...
Using the latter as an example, I told AI to take the authentic photograph of ‘Job Centre’, use the logo livery, apply it to the Job Centre Office, add a modified version of Edith with a huge ashtray, and piles of Woodbine cigarette boxes.
The Woodbine box was a single upright package, then it rotated them all and created something photo-realistic. I was super-enthusiastic a week ago, when all this happened, but the elation has now somewhat vanished.
Meanwhile, I have added a few images to some of the existing early ‘Mort the Shit Manager’ posts, which will likely never be looked at as they are now well past their sell-by date.
Which leads me to my original problem: writer's block… here goes…
Rap, rap, rap…
Mort jumped at the unexpected interruption.
…how dare someone knock on his office door in such a fashion, interrupting his mid-afternoon nap…
“It’s that old woman with the dog food again”, said Sharon with a smirk only she could muster knowing Mort would immediately be raising his hackles while simultaneously on his guard.
Images generated by AI.
My Urban Exploration Tales can be found directly on the internet via my Website 'Tales of the Urban Explorer'.
If you found this article so invigorating that you are now a positively googly-eyed, drooling lunatic with dripping saliva or even if you liked it just a bit, then please upvote, comment, rehive, engage me or all of these things.
