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I’d like to thank the person in India who earned me $0.02 by reading 17 Kindle pages of Hemo Sapiens: Awakening. Reading on Kindle Unlimited is free—time aside. Read the whole book, and I’ve earned $0.50. In time, we’ll be as rich as astronauts.
Mates, the proofing process was Hell. I even count the number of times I reviewed my book, Hemo Sapiens: Awakening. Then I sent it out to a couple of Beta readers, one of whom went over and above and did some proofreading, which I appreciated. I made some amends, and I ordered a proof.
The proof arrived relatively quickly—even without expedited shipping, which would have been more than twice the price of the book.
I”ve probably not mentioned some, but I had the opportunity to fix each of these mistakes, so I’ll bookmark this page and my next book will be that much easier to publish.
There’s a park outside London where the trees keep secrets and the air hums with untold stories. Nigel, a chap with calloused hands and a life measured in paycheques, stumbles upon a moment that’ll unravel him. A purse, unguarded on a bench, whispers temptation. He’s no thief, just a man cornered by circumstance.
The park, draped in the solemnity of dusk, watches as Nigel succumbs. He lifts the cash, a weight heavier than coins, and returns the purse to its owner, an elderly lady scattering crumbs for birds, her gaze lost in yesterdays.
It begins as a murmur on the wind. “I know what you’ve done,” whispers a disembodied voice. Nigel whirls around, searches the empty park in vain. He shakes off the words as a trick of his fraying mind.
But the voice persists, insidious as poison, relentless as the tide. Nigel wanders the park’s paths, and the leaves hiss with recrimination while shadows seem to lean in, heavy with judgment.
Reality blurs, the line between guilt and madness thinning. Nigel confides in a mate over a pint, his voice taut with fear and disbelief. “I’m hearing things in the park, a voice saying ‘I seen what you done.’ But I can’t find where it comes from.” His words trip over themselves.
The whispers follow Nigel everywhere, rustles of feathers echoing each accusation. His desperation cresting, Nigel finally flees the park. But even as he runs, the voice pursues, wings beating in the darkness over his head.
In his panicked flight, Nigel fails to see the lorry barreling down the street. It connects with a sickening crunch, leaving his broken body splayed on the pavement.
“I know what you’ve done,” it declares, Nigel’s crime given feathered form. A final cosmic jest, as this guardian of the park delivers justice for his misdeed.
Quoth the parrot, “Nevermore.”
Sometimes you just get in the mood to write a short piece of nonsense. In this case, I liked the theme of a paranoid person haunted by a talking parrot. From there, I wanted to capture elements of Edgar Allen Poe’s Telltale heart and (obviously) The Raven with a bit of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
As usual, creating cover art is an adventure. I asked Dall-E to render an image of the elderly woman on a park bench with a wooded background and a parrot perched in a tree behind.
It decided on this. It was hilarious to me, so I kept it. NB: I did not ask for it to be rendered on a faux book cover. smh
A challenge with beginning a story in media res and then writing a prequel, is that one is able to kick the creative can down the kerb and cross the bridge when you come to it. I’ve painted myself into a few corners, but exowombs, or artificial wombs, are one of them.
Being speculative fiction, I have some leeway, but I need to make some plausible connexions. Exowombs have existed for a few years now, but they are for premature infants and animals, so my literary licence needs to stretch that. To be honest, when I was contemplating things at a fifty-thousand-foot level, I was going from test tube to petri dish to incubator, but I overlooked the gestation bit. Oopsie. My bad.
This is not a work of hard science fiction, so I can take liberties there as well. I just hadn’t researched the current state of science until now. I’ve got a plot device in place, and it seems I’ve got some ideas for early concept and cover art that I can share here.
I rendered these with Dall-E 3. By default, it chose a green hue. I modified it to blue, and I wanted to see how it looked in violet to match their irises—this being an artistic rather than scientific choice. Bubbles in cylinders suspended with wires and tubes.
Rendering these early can also help me to write descriptive prose with visual references. Dall-E seems to have a thing for spheroids, so I asked it for cylinders instead. I do like this one.
My first correction got me to here. I like the metaphor of the egg membrane encasing the foetus in the tube.
Next, I wanted to envisage multiple cylinders with perspective, so I got these two.
The problem I have is that it seems to be too large of a scale, but it’s still cool. We seem to have lost the egg-shaped membrane by now.
Before settling on violet, I wanted to see what six across looked like. Dall-E’s maths skills are pretty dodgy, so this is what six looks like to it. You’ll notice that the violet render at the top does contain six.
I don’t have much to say beyond sharing these images. I don’t want to give too much away, but I am excited to be writing Chapter 5 where these are relevant to the narrative in play.
What do you think of the images? Let me know in the comments.
I’ve just received my first Beta feedback from Hemo Sapiens: Awakening. I’ve hired three readers and engaged two, so I’ve got more to go.
As I wrote recently, I’ve been using AI to review my work, and I’ve been waiting for flesh and blood humans to give me their opinions.
My Beta reader is Enrico B from South Africa. My next reader is from the UK. I found them both on Fiverr.com, a site I’ve successfully used for music collaboration in the past. Although your results may vary, it’s a generally inexpensive way to get quality results. I hired Doni from Indonesia to design my title and subtitle.
Judge the quality for yourself. I happen to like it. I was going to commission the rest of the book cover, but I opted to do that myself.
Enrico provided me with a summary report as well as an annotated markup of my manuscript. Beta reading is not developmental editing or copyediting, so I wasn’t expecting line edits, but he did provide commentary on most chapters. In my case, his focus was on pacing and adding narration to fast-paced dialogue exchanges. In most cases, he advised my to slow my roll, but I’ll wait to see what the next reader writes. My style is rather curt and quick, and perhaps Enrico wants to savour a bit more. I feel that his advice is constructive. I just don’t know how much I’ll implement—probably at least a little.
In Hemo Sapiens: Origin, I am mixing French and English dialogues and tags. The challenge I am having is switch between the languages.
For example, see this passage:
« Où est maman ? » Camille asks Claire just as her parents come into view. « Maman » she exclaims, starting to weep again. « Papa. » She receives his hug.
French and English dialogue and speech markers work differently. I I were depicting large swathes of each language, I’d simply apply the specific language rules, but I am mixing it up, and that creates challenges. I haven’t seen any good examples how to present this.
Some obvious differences are the guillemets « » in French versus ‘ ‘ in English. In French, ? and ! are spaced after the sentence, and all content internal to guillemets is offset by leading and terminal spaces. Another big difference is that guillemets offset dialogue blocks whereas English uses speech marks to identify each speaker’s dialogue.
Referencing the example above—in English for English readers—, if I were to convey the content using French presentation rules, it might look something like this:
« Where’s mum ? Camille asks Claire just as her parents come into view.
— Mum, she exclaims, starting to weep again.
— Dad. She receives his hug. »
Notice that the entire block is enquoted. I’ve considered this, but I feel it will not track well for English readers, who are used to the speaker-reference convention.
Also, I really want to set off the French language content, and the guillemets serve that function.
Regarding dialogue, French and English punctuation rules are similar enough, but there aren’t many cases of a comma (virgule) following a speech mark given the convention. To my eyes, it looks better inside the marks, but it feels off. The Oxford English style guide suggests not even using commas to separate the dialogue from the tag, but I don’t see that much in the wild.
Again, referencing the example above, one can see how I am solving this at the moment.
At first, I indicate the French dialogue by guillemets and employ French punctuation rules followed by a dialogue tag and descriptive content.
« Où est maman ? » Camille asks Claire just as her parents come into view.
Next, I use the English format, but I replace quotation marks with guillemets. I’ve omitted the trailing comma—after ‘Maman’—in this example.
« Maman » she exclaims, starting to weep again.
Finally, since ‘Papa’ expresses a complete thought, I enclose the full stop within the guillemets. Rather than a dialogue tag, I opt for a stand-alone sentence.
« Papa. » She receives his hug.
When I write mixed language copy, I usually identify a foreign language in italics, but I didn’t choose to do this for French dialogue. Firstly, because I am already using italics for other foreign words, e.g. Latin; secondly, because these also depict internal dialogue/monologue, so I don’t want to create too many visual design patterns.
Has anyone else solved this problem? I’d love to know.
As for the cover image, Dall-E 3 still can’t quite figure out words and can’t spell in French or English. I share it if only for the absurdity of it. Here was my other choice:
Is Voldemort secretly François-Marie Arouet? I’ve never seen the two in the same place.
I am fleshing out the outline for Hemo Sapiens: Origins and I was sharing a chapter structure with Claude. One of the bullet points cites a quip by Voltaire:
« Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer. »
Voltaire
English Translation: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”.
I fed the chapter outline to Claude. Among other things, it mentioned this:
Masterful architecture capped with that second Voldemort quote again for anyone tracking!
— Claude
I did a double-take. I re-scanned my copy and looked for a quote that might be interpreted as being said by Voldemort. Alas, there was only one quote—Voltaire’s.
My AI had confused Voldemort with Voltaire. I’ve never seen these two in the same place either, so it could be fact.
I’ve just wrapped up three days of outlining Hemo Sapiens: Origins, the prequel to Hemo Sapiens: Awakening. I feel it’s in a good place to get started.
As I wait to get Beta feedback on Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, I want to continue to make progress in this universe. As of now, my working titles for this series are as follows:
I know what I want to happen over the arc of Epsilon Rising, and I know some key events for Aftermath, but Aftermath just needs to bridge the gap between Awakening and Epsilon Rising to lend plausibility to the events in Epsilon Rising.
This project was supposed to have been a side-project—a few short stories to cleanse my creative palate. Instead, I imagined a universe and this series. I’m looking forward to returning to my original project after I put this behind me. There is plenty of ground to tread here. For now, I just want to strike when the inspiration is here.
NB: I chose the cover image because the alternate was rendered with human teeth. That’s just going too far. 🤖
I love origin stories. In fact, my next writing project is an origin story.
But that’s a tale for another day. This post is to reveal the reason for the pseudonym, Ridley Park. This story starts in Delaware, where I lived from 2018 until 2023. I often travelled up 95 North to get to the aeroport or Philadelphia. On this drive, a road sign often caught my eye: Ridley Park.
I cached the name to memory, thinking it might make for an interesting character name. Each trip, this was further imprinted and reinforced.
In April 2022, I was writing another novel. The topic is beyond controversial. In fact, I haven’t yet found anyone who’s not abhorred by the concept, so I know I have to publish it when I finish it. Because of the subject matter, I felt a pen name was in order, and I decided to use Ridley Park. To be fair, the unfinished book is set in Philly, so the name felt particularly apt.
I’ll guess that most of us have heard of the film director, Ridley Scott. The connexion is beyond obvious. It maintains the same cadence.
I’ve never visited Ridley Park. All I know is that it’s a suburb south of Philly, and I’ve borrowed the name. In the end, as it turns out, the question was never ‘Who is Ridley Park?’ Rather, it’s ‘Where is Ridley Park?’ all along.
Now that the first draft of Hemo Sapiens: Awakening is done, I can let it marinate for a few days before I return to polish it up for Beta readers. Meantime, I can cleanse my palate and concentrate on other matter like cover art. Here’s the third or fourth draft. I know what direction I’m looking for. I was thinking of commissioning a cover, but I might just go it on my own.
I think I’m going with an 9″ x 6″ form factor, so this would be the aspect ratio. I used OpenAI’s Dall-E 3 to render the eyes as well as the overlay with Greek characters. I may have made it too transparent, so I might need to pull it up a few clicks.
Interesting enough, I am compositing in PowerPoint of all things and exporting to PNG. I usually use Paint Shop Pro, but this may be good enough. I still need to compose the back cover and the spine.
My paginated draft comes in at about 320 pages. It was 256 unpaginated pages. There are 38 chapters, and each chapter begins on an odd page number. The facing page is always blank. This creates a lot of blank pages. I could render some line art on the facing pages, but I’m not taking that option at this point. Probably won’t.
My goal for the cover (as might everyone) is to catch a potential reader’s eye and signal something about the content. In this case, the Hemo Sapiens have violet eyes, so I thought that would make a unique image hook. The are open (obviously) to capture the Awakening aspect. The Greek letters on the overlay represent the science aspect. There are 5 versions of Hemo Sapiens so far, named Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon by their creator. I’ve highlighted those characters in a blood red.
Speaking of blood, this is obviously captured in the colour choice and the dripping font of the subtitle. This is also reflected in the stylised O, but I don’t wish to explain the significance of the stylisation now.
As is the entire cover still in progress, so is the treatment of the title as I am playing with a few options. The novel is set in the near future, 2045, so I was thinking of conveying a future with a silver font face, but the gold felt somehow warmer. I wanted to hint at the dystopian angle by distressing the letters.
So, there’s my confession. If you have any comments on the design, I’d love to read them—for better and for worse.
Ridley Park 