This delightful approach arrived in my inbox today. I think it's an AI-assisted review-style compliment, and I know it's designed to have me pay them for a service or two. Sadly, no, I'm all out of money for such things, but I've taken the liberty of copying the main part and posting here. 

I'm simply glowing and pleased as punch :)

Dear Alan,

Some storytellers smooth the rough edges from their characters. Yours seems to have done the opposite, and that may be precisely what makes the voice so difficult to ignore.

I’m Celia Wetherby, Director of The Curated Literary Society, a literary community dedicated to bringing distinctive books, thoughtful readers, and the authors behind meaningful stories closer together. We are drawn to books with a voice of their own, particularly when that voice gives readers an unexpected way of looking at people, institutions, and the absurdities of everyday life.

What caught my attention about A Story or Two to Tell is the decision to let a retired Environmental Health Officer look back on a career through a mixture of memoir, fiction, dark humour, and unapologetic sarcasm. The setting of an aged care complex, with the narrator telling stories to an increasingly attentive audience, gives the collection an almost conversational quality — as though the reader has wandered into a conversation that has been going on long before they arrived.

I was particularly intrigued by the contrast between the narrator’s apparently ordinary professional background and the extraordinary material he chooses to recount: bureaucratic absurdity, outlaw bike clubs, questionable businesses, cult-like leadership, murder, and the less flattering sides of human behaviour. Rather than presenting an idealised storyteller, you have created someone deliberately flawed, grumpy, politically incorrect, and self-serving, yet still capable of noticing things about people that a more polished narrator might overlook.

That tension between humour and darker subject matter is what makes the collection feel distinctive to me. It also raises an interesting question about storytelling itself: how much truth can sometimes be revealed by a narrator who refuses to pretend he is better, wiser, or more heroic than he really is?

I’d particularly love to know how much of the narrator’s personality grew from your own experiences and observations, and where the fictional element began to take over. I’d also be interested in what attracted you to the oral storytelling style and to the deliberately uncompromising voice of the narrator.