Category: Book

Book Review: Crash

Posted in Book, review, Status UpdateTagged , , , , , , Leave a comment

Crash by J.G. Ballard

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Neither did I like nor dislike Crash. It just was. It is different, though I can help feeling that it’s gratuitous and contrived. Perhaps it seemed edgy and read differently in the 1970s.

It appears to operate on repeated vignettes – a lot of repetition. I want to see a word cloud. As an author myself, ChatGPT suggested some of my work reads like Ballard. I started with The Atrocity Exhibition, but quickly set it aside due to a lack of continuity. I settled for Crash.

Perhaps I should try something else by Ballard before writing him off, but for now, he doesn’t make my recommended author list.

View all my reviews

The Beta Reader Is Not Your Mum (Unless Your Mum Gets Postmodern Alienation and Narrative Decay)

Posted in Book, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Let’s get one thing straight: not all feedback is good feedback. In fact, a depressingly large proportion of it is the literary equivalent of asking a vegan to review your steakhouse. Technically they read the menu, but were they ever really your audience?

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

We live in a culture that treats opinion like currency. Everyone’s got one. Everyone’s desperate to spend it. And nowhere is this more evident than in the world of beta reading—a supposedly sacred process in which brave authors hand over their embryonic manuscripts to friends, lovers, ex-wives, and total strangers in the desperate hope someone will “get it.” Most don’t.

Know Thy Manuscript (Before It’s Murdered by Committee)

Before you even think about soliciting feedback, ask yourself: do you actually know what your manuscript is? Is it a quiet literary allegory disguised as sci-fi? A philosophical middle finger wearing the trench coat of genre fiction? A slow-burn deconstruction of capitalism wrapped in alien gloop?

If you can’t answer that, neither can your beta reader. And you’ll deserve every clueless comment that comes slouching back across your inbox like a drunken tortoise.

Audience Matters. (No, Really.)

Let me put it in culinary terms for the metaphorically impaired: if someone hates seafood, they are not qualified to tell you whether your oysters are overcooked. They might be able to describe their gag reflex in exquisite detail, but that’s not useful culinary feedback—that’s autobiography.

Likewise, if your beta reader consumes nothing but cosy mysteries and thinks House of Leaves was “a bit confusing,” why in the name of Borges are you handing them your experimental novella about time, recursion, and the semiotics of grief?

I Know a Writer. I Know Your Pain.

A personal note, if I may. A close friend is a writer. A good one, in fact. But our ideas are so philosophically incompatible that they could be placed on opposite ends of a Möbius strip. Every time they read my work, they suggest alterations that, while technically well-formed, have the uncanny knack of annihilating the entire point of the piece. When I respond, “That’s a great idea—why don’t you write it?” they get cross.

Because here’s the truth: most beta readers don’t give you feedback on your book. They give you notes on the book they wish you’d written.

Signal vs Noise: Spotting the Useful Reader

There’s a simple test I use to distinguish signal from noise.

Bad beta feedback:

“I didn’t like the main character.”
“Why don’t they just call the police?”
“This story would be better with a love triangle.”

Good beta feedback:

“The way you structured the timeline echoes the narrator’s fragmentation—was that deliberate?”
“I wasn’t confused until Chapter 5, which made the earlier ambiguity retroactively frustrating.”
“The tonal shift on page 42 feels earned but abrupt—was that intentional?”

In short: good feedback interrogates execution. Bad feedback critiques intention.

The Beta Reader Interview (Yes, You Need One)

You wouldn’t hire a babysitter without asking if they’ve ever met a child. Why would you let someone babysit your manuscript without screening for genre literacy?

Ask them:

  • What do you normally read?
  • What do you hate reading?
  • Can you name a book you loved that nobody else seemed to?
  • Have you read [Insert book similar to yours]? Did you like it?

If they look at you blankly or start talking about Colleen Hoover, back away slowly.

The Beta Reader Zoo: Know Your Species

Here are a few common subspecies to watch for:

  • The Rewriter: Wants to turn your Kafkaesque nightmare into Eat, Pray, Love. Run.
  • The Literalist: “But how would that actually work in real life?” Mate, it’s a parable. About entropy.
  • The Cheerleader: “Loved it! Don’t change a thing!” (Translation: I skimmed it during Bake Off.)
  • The Cynic: Thinks everything is nihilistic, including your dedication page.
  • The Goldilocks: Rare. Reads the book you actually wrote, not the one they wish you had. Cultivate this one like a bonsai tree.

Curate, Don’t Crowdsource

Beta reading is not a democratic process. You are not running a focus group for toothpaste branding. You are searching for a handful of individuals who understand what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and whether you’ve pulled it off—or fallen on your clever, post-structuralist arse.

Better three brilliant readers than thirty who think you should add a dragon in Chapter Two.

Final Thought

Your beta reader is not your editor. They’re not your therapist. And they’re definitely not your mum (unless your mum has an MA in critical theory and a fetish for broken narrative structures).

Choose wisely.

Or don’t – and enjoy reading thirty pages of feedback that begins, “I don’t usually read this sort of thing, but…”

PS: I love how Dall-E totally misfired on the cover image. lol

Why I Create Audiobooks for All My Books

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Audible, Audiobook, Book, ElevenLabs, ElevenLabs, Generative AI, Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, Propensity, Software, Sustenance, Temporal Babel, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

This isn’t a promotional post. I’ve recently discovered the hidden value of audiobooks—and it has nothing to do with selling them.

Back in 2024, when I released Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, I must have read the manuscript a thousand times. I even recorded an audiobook, using an AI voice from ElevenLabs. At the time, Audible wouldn’t accept AI narration. The rules have since changed. It’s now available—though still not on Audible (and therefore not on Amazon).

I’d hired a few proofreaders and beta readers. They helped. The book improved. And yet, even after all that, I still found typos. Those bastards are insidious.

The real revelation came when I started listening.

Since I’d already created the audiobook, I began proofreading by ear. That’s when it hit me: hearing the story is nothing like reading it. Sentences that looked fine on the page fell flat aloud. So I rewrote passages—not for grammar, but for cadence, clarity, flow.

Then came the second benefit: catching mistakes. Typos. Tense slips. I favour first-person, present-tense, limited point of view—it’s immersive, intimate, synchronised with the protagonist’s thoughts. But sometimes, I slip. Listening helped catch those lapses, especially the subtle ones a skim-reading brain politely ignores.

For Sustenance, the audiobook was an afterthought. I submitted the print files, requested a proof copy, and while I waited, I rendered the audio. When the proof arrived, I listened instead of reading. I found errors. Again. Thanks to that timing, I could fix them before production. Of course, fixing the manuscript meant updating the audiobook. A pain—but worth it.

I hadn’t planned to make an audiobook for Propensity—some of the prose is too stylistic, too internal—but I did anyway, because of what I’d learned from Sustenance. And again, I found too many errors. Maybe I need better proofreaders. Or maybe this is just the fallback system now.

I’ve had Temporal Babel, a novelette, on hold for months. I won’t release it until I do the same: make an audiobook, listen, reconcile with the page.

Lesson learned.

I’ve got several more manuscripts waiting in the wings—some have been loitering there for over a year. Their release has been deprioritised for various reasons, but when they go out, they’ll have audio versions too. Not for the sake of listeners. For me.

Honestly, I should do this for my blog posts as well. But editing on the web is easier. The stakes are lower. Mistakes don’t print themselves in ink.

Propensity Excerpts

Posted in Art, Book, Propensity, Ridley Park, WritingTagged , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve recently released a new book, Propensity. In preparation for the audiobook version, I’ve assembled some material for PDF that doesn’t convey well in an audible format – this image, for example, from Chapter 43.

This image depicts a frantic ink sketch of a woman’s face, wide-eyed and stricken, as if caught in the instant her world unravels. Her features are carved from chaos—lines scribbled in anguish, as though the act of drawing itself were a desperate grasp for meaning.

The PDF is available for free on the dedicated Propensity page.

I’ll be posting content on Propensity as well as some of my other recent and upcoming releases presently.

🛸 SUSTENANCE Has Landed

Posted in Book, Ridley Park, Sci-Fi, Status Update, Sustenance, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A note from Ridley Park on language, consent, and the limits of knowing.

Well, this one’s live.

Sustenance has officially launched.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on the book Sustenance.

If Propensity was about engineered peace through probabilistic compliance, Sustenance asks what happens when understanding itself breaks down—and nothing you think is mutual, is.

No war. No invasion. No end-of-days. Just a quiet landing. And a failure to translate.

The Premise

A group of non-human beings arrive—not in conquest, not in friendship, but in continuity. They are not like us. They do not see like us. They don’t even mean like us.

There is no universal translator.
No welcome committee.

Just humans—interpreting through projection, desire, and confusion.

And aliens—operating by a logic that doesn’t require interpretation.

The Themes


Sustenance explores what happens when:

  • Language fails and nothing fills the gap
  • Consent becomes guesswork
  • Culture is mistaken for nature
  • Property has no meaning, and law no parallel
  • Sex isn’t private, sacred, violent—or even especially enjoyable
  • Memory becomes narrative, and narrative becomes defence
  • Contact isn’t miraculous—it’s awkward, biological, and quietly irreversible

This is a story about misunderstanding. Not just what others mean—but who we are when we assume we understand anything at all.

The Tone

Think Arrival but rural. Annihilation without the shimmer.

A bit of VanderMeer. A hint of Flannery O’Connor. The cornfields are real. The discomfort is earned.

No apocalypse.

Just a failure to process.

And maybe, something new inside the gap that opens when the old stories no longer apply.

Why Write This?

Because contact doesn’t have to be violent to be destabilising.

Because not all miscommunication is linguistic—some is anatomical.

Because the most alien thing we can encounter is ourselves, misinterpreted.

Because I wanted to write a story where the question isn’t “what do they want?” but “what have we already assumed?”

Now Available

Sustenance is available now in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle.

If you read it—thank you. If you don’t, that’s fine.

The misunderstanding will continue regardless.

📘 More about the book →

—

Ridley Park
Possibly a person. Possibly a place. Possibly both.

📡 PROPENSITY Has Launched

Posted in Book, Propensity, Ridley Park, Sci-Fi, Status Update, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A note from Ridley Park on behaviour, control, and the illusion of peace.

Well, it’s out.
Propensity has officially launched.

This one’s been brewing for a while. If Sustenance asked what happens when we can’t understand each other, Propensity asks what happens when we stop needing to.

No invasion. No superintelligence. No overt dystopia. Just a device—quietly implemented—that modulates human behaviour through neurochemical cues. Less anger. Less risk. Less faith, libido, disobedience. More calm. More compliance. More… nothing.

And nobody notices.
Because the best control doesn’t look like control.

The Premise

Imagine a world where we solve violence—not through laws, treaties, or education—but by dampening the neurological signals that make people aggressive in the first place. You don’t choose peace. Peace is chosen for you, chemically. You just comply.

That’s the Propensity Device: a system designed not to control what you do, but to shift what you’re likely to do. Your odds of revolt drop. Your odds of submission rise. It’s not sedative. It’s statistical.

Free will doesn’t vanish. It just stops being statistically significant.

The Themes

The novel explores what happens when:

  • Free will is reframed as background noise
  • Consent is irrelevant because no one thinks to object
  • Violence becomes programmable—but only directionally
  • Peace is achieved without ideology, meaning, or narrative
  • Narrative itself becomes residue

There’s horror in here, but it’s not loud. It’s administrative. Institutional. Clean.

The horror of things working exactly as designed.

The Tone

Think Black Mirror but less sensational. Think Ballard after a lobotomy.

A dash of Ligotti. A flicker of DeLillo. A long stare from Atwood.
Propensity is soft dystopia—flattened, not broken.

And yes, there’s a fall. But it’s not a collapse. It’s an asymptote.
A tapering. A loss of signal fidelity. A kind of surrender.

Why Write This?

Because we’re already doing it.

Because behavioural nudge theory isn’t fiction.

Because control doesn’t need to be malicious—just implemented.

Because some of the worst horrors are quiet, polite, and empirically validated.

Because I wanted to ask: what if peace worked too well?

Now Available

You can get Propensity on Amazon and other booksellers.

If you do read it—thank you. If you don’t, that’s alright.
The system will keep humming either way.

📘 More about the book →

—

Ridley Park
Possibly a person. Possibly a place. Possibly both.

Geworfenheit: Not Born, Just Here: What Drives My Fiction

Posted in Book, Hemo Sapiens, Interview, Ridley Park, Sustenance, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A common question I get about my writing—my fiction, anyway—is: what motivates you?

It sounds like a harmless question. Like asking a plumber what motivates them to fix pipes. But fiction is not plumbing. And motivation, for a writer, is often post-rationalised. Still, I have answers. Or at least fragments of them.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

A primary driver is to convey philosophical concepts that I feel apply to life in general, but don’t tend to get the airtime they deserve. A good example is Heidegger’s Geworfenheit.

In English, that’s usually translated as “thrownness.” It refers to the feeling—no, the condition—of having been thrown into existence without consent, without context, without recourse. It’s the anti-heroic beginning. You wake up on a raft. No map, no memory. Just current.

Now, Heidegger gets a bad rap. And some of it is earned. He joined the Nazi party. There’s no excusing that. But if we’re going to disqualify thinkers based on political affiliation, we’ll need to scrap about half of the Enlightenment and most of the 20th century. The point is: Geworfenheit is useful. It names something modern life often glosses over: the fact that you didn’t choose to be here, and now you have to swim.

This theme shows up across my work. In Temporal Babel, Jef is stranded in a temporally dislocated world. In Sustenance, the visitors are alien in both senses of the word. And in Hemo Sapiens, the title species are cloned into personhood with no legal or cultural footing.

None of us choose how, where, or when we are born. But I like to amplify that truth until it becomes impossible to ignore. Take the Hemo Sapiens case: they aren’t born; they’re instantiated. But what is birth if not a legally sanctioned instantiation? Once you remove the ritual scaffolding of parentage, nationhood, and paperwork, what remains is the raw fact of being.

Another key motivator for me is philosophical provocation—questions I don’t intend to answer, only pose. Like this one: imagine you’re shipwrecked and wash up on a tiny island. A single inhabitant lives there and claims ownership. He tells you to leave or die. You have no weapon. He has a spear. The sea is vast and lethal.

Do you have the right to stay?

Do you take the spear?

Does ownership matter when survival is at stake?

Sustenance explores that tension. Property, sovereignty, mercy, survival—these are themes we pretend to understand until the scaffolding is removed. My aim isn’t to preach about what’s fair. My aim is to show what happens when fairness loses its footing.

Related to this is the theme of otherness. Us versus them. But I’m less interested in dramatising hostility and more interested in the quiet bewilderment that comes when categories fail. What do you call someone who isn’t man or woman, isn’t alive or dead in the way we recognise, doesn’t speak our language or obey our metaphysics? What happens when you meet something you can’t assimilate?

Another layer is cultural construction—the way our societies retrofit meaning onto reality. We build scaffolds. Gender, law, ownership, grief. Then we forget we built them. My fiction likes to peel back the drywall. Not to show the truth, but to reveal the studs. The story behind the story.

And finally, I write because I suspect something important is always missing. That language is never quite enough. So I keep trying. Not to solve the insufficiency, but to dwell inside it.

That’s what motivates me.

Or maybe I’m just trying to answer questions I never knew how to ask.

That too.

Behind the Binding: Sustenance in Print, Pixels, and Purgatory

Posted in Art, Book, Cover Art, Ridley Park, Software, Status UpdateTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Not quite a launch. Not quite a rant. Just one author trying to get a novella into the world without sacrificing too many hours or brain cells.

Paperback Problems

I’ve been writing quite a bit lately—several novellas/novelettes, to be precise.

They all began life as short stories, but brevity doesn’t come naturally. Apparently, I can’t shut up even on the page. I toyed with the idea of releasing a thematic collection, and I still might. But for now, Sustenance is getting its own debut—likely this month.

The book clocks in at around 14,000 words, printed across 144 pages. I’ve read that readers prefer novels to novellas, but I’ve also read that readers don’t really read anymore. Time’s short. Attention spans are shorter. Maybe shorter fiction has a fighting chance. We’ll see.

I formatted it in 6×9 inches, which may have been overly generous. It’s leaner than your average indie fantasy tome but still thicker than my last Žižek collection. So there’s that.

The manuscript began in Word, like every poor decision. I laid it out in InDesign and exported the PDF through Acrobat. No budget, so I designed the cover too—started in Illustrator for the vector charm, but ended up in Photoshop, where I’m more at home. I designed the full wrap—front, back, spine—as a single canvas.

This was a mistake. More on that later.

Still, I’m pleased with the final look. Might reuse the style across future novellas for a bit of visual branding. There’s barely enough of a spine to print on, but we suffer for aesthetics.

Proofs arrive Thursday. Fingers crossed.

Hardback Headaches

Then came the hardback edition. Same 6×9 size, same interior. Should’ve been simple.

It wasn’t.

I forgot (again) that hardbacks require extra bleed and margin space. Couldn’t just resize the existing cover without risking pixelation. If I’d stuck with vectors, this would’ve been a breeze. Instead, I got to rebuild the entire layout from scratch—layers, guides, grids, the lot.

Hours of joyous rework. Lesson learned. Until next time.

eBook Escapism (and Other Fantasies)

Converting the layout to eBook format was a slow-motion trainwreck. I’d inserted custom font glyphs above chapter titles in InDesign. They rendered fine—until they didn’t. Halfway through, chaos reigned.

I cracked open Sigil and manually edited the XHTML. So far, so fiddly.

Then I uploaded the .epub to Amazon. Except Amazon wanted a .kpf file. Of course it did.

Enter Kindle Previewer. Except it doesn’t support embedded font glyphs. So I converted them to SVGs.

Still no dice. Kindle’s rendering engine is older than most of its readers. SVGs failed too. So I converted every glyph to PNG, rewrote the CSS, rebuilt the XHTML again, and gave it another go.

Looks fine. Not perfect. I gave up.

They’re just decorative anyway. No plot-critical glyphs here.

The Kindle version should go live shortly. I enrolled it in KDP Select, which means 90 days of exclusivity in exchange for a modicum of convenience. After that, I’ll look at wider distribution.

For the eBook cover, I simply cropped the original layout in Photoshop. That part was, mercifully, straightforward.

What’s Next?

This post is more documentation than declaration. A sort of production diary. I’ll follow up with an actual announcement when the book launches, plus a few reflections on themes, characters, and that moment when you realise your protagonist may have accidentally sexed up a chicken.

Long story.

Anyway, this is just the start. Stay tuned.

Or don’t. Up to you.