books – Page 7 – Ridley Park

Editing is a Vicious Sport

July 25, 2025July 25, 2025Posted in Book, Ridley Park, WritingTagged author blog, book editing, books, creative writing, editing, editing a novel, editing struggles, fiction, how to edit a book, indie author, left brain right brain, literary editing, novel, publishing, self-publishing, word count tracking, Writing, writing motivation, writing process, writing tipsLeave a comment

Measuring progress is far simpler when you’re writing. You can count words. Or characters, if you’re a sadist. Sure, half of them might be drivel. Whole chapters may end up ceremonially executed by draft five, but at least you’ve done something. There’s a metric. A tally. A sense of movement.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

You can even see your progress, pages stack, paragraphs grow fat with promise. And if you still write on physical media (bless your nostalgic heart), you get the added catharsis of crumpling your failures and lobbing them at the bin like a disgruntled poet. It’s theatre. It’s progress. It’s delusional.

Editing, by contrast, offers no such cheap thrills. The word count doesn’t so much creep as collapse. One minute you’re a literary demi-god sitting on 80,000 words. The next, you’re scraping along at 74k and wondering whether your “tightening” has amputated a limb.

Yes, the prose might be cleaner. Punchier. Less like a whisky-soaked rant and more like a distilled insult. But does it feel like progress? Not in the way dopamine understands it.

As I’ve written before, editing takes me five – maybe ten – times longer than drafting. It’s a full hemispheric shift: from right-brain dreamscapes to left-brain bureaucracy. Creativity gives way to spreadsheet logic. Grammar. Timelines. Continuity. Did she sit before she spoke, or after? Is this line meant to be his? Why is this in past tense? Is this in any tense?

And so, the grind.

Yes, there are flashes of satisfaction – a retooled transition here, a twist landed just-so there. But mostly, it’s a long, slow crawl through self-loathing and misplaced modifiers.

I’ve spent most of my adult life toggling between left-right hemisphere roles. And frankly, the left side still gives me hives. The corporate world, bless its hollow soul, tried to stuff me in a logic-shaped box. A coffin of metrics, meetings, and “measurable outcomes.” I’m still recovering.

So why not outsource editing? Why not let someone else swing the machete through this jungle?

Two reasons:

I secretly enjoy the act of refinement. It’s masochism, but it’s my masochism.
I operate on a margin so thin it’s practically theoretical. A Schrödinger’s budget – simultaneously there and not.

Still, the margin’s probably winning.

On the Rails and Off the Map: The Editing Mind

July 24, 2025July 24, 2025Posted in Book, Ridley Park, WritingTagged biographical fiction, books, character-driven fiction, compressing time in fiction, editing, editing fiction, experimental writing, fiction, hybrid narrative, Iain McGilchrist, indie author blog, left brain writing, literary fiction, narrative timeline, nonlinear storytelling, novel, novel editing, pantsing vs plotting, plot matrix, Ridley Park, right brain creativity, story structure, stream-of-consciousness fiction, Writing, writing process, writing tipsLeave a comment

I’m editing what I expect will become my next novel. Editing, for me, is a fundamentally different headspace than writing. When I’m drafting – especially when pantsing – I lean into a stream-of-consciousness flow. Iain McGilchrist might call this right-hemisphere activity. I don’t steer so much as ride shotgun, scribbling while the character drives.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

(Side note: I’ll share the tentative cover art soon, but this post is about process.)

Editing, by contrast, is all left hemisphere – angles, order, logic, connection. When I’m writing, I don’t worry if a detail makes sense. That’s future-me’s problem. In this project, future-me discovered that the protagonist had been pregnant for over thirteen months, undertaking activities most wouldn’t attempt in that state. In a nonlinear story, this might slip past many readers – but not past my editorial self. I mentioned this in a prior post.

I used to devour writing advice, but I don’t write like other people. Most advice seems geared toward genre fiction. I’m not opposed to that, but I lean literary and experimental. Templates don’t work for me.

I know the Hero’s Journey. I’ve read Save the Cat. But I don’t write about heroes – or even anti-heroes. That’s not the kind of story I’m telling, nor the kind I usually read.

I don’t much care about strong characters for their own sake. I care about what they allow me to explore philosophically. That said, this project is different. The main character is strong. So are the secondaries. And while it’s still fiction, it’s rooted in real people and events – compressed, reshaped, but recognisable.

I’ve condensed two decades of experience into a seven-year arc across ~200 pages. The first three years are flashbacks, brushed in for colour. The rest unfolds more or less in sequence. This time, I didn’t give myself free rein. There are rails. And while I occasionally jump them, I still need to land somewhere coherent.

The structure is a four-phase design. The book opens in media res and stays there for a few chapters. Then we rewind. And rewind again. Eventually, the timeline catches up, and the final half moves more linearly.

To tame this beast, I turned to spreadsheets. I built a plot matrix – numbering each section twice: narrative order (as written) and chronological order (as lived). I had to find the earliest flashbacks and stitch the rest together like some temporal jigsaw. It felt like Inception at times. Where am I? What layer is this?

From there, I started tracking time: days, weeks, months. That’s when I uncovered the 13-month pregnancy. Realistic for an elephant, not a human.

The root problem? I sequenced the conception too late and compressed the birth too early. I also omitted two earlier pregnancies to streamline the plot. To fix it, I reinstated one and used it to restore character depth that had been left on the cutting room floor. It worked – but it added new complications. Now I’m back in spreadsheet land, scanning for widows and orphans – narrative orphans, I mean – where scenes dangle or disconnect.

This is where editing diverges from writing. Writing is dreaming. Editing is retelling. And retelling demands coherence. Dreams ignore time, cause, and logic. Retelling insists on them: this happened before that, and then…

So-called “plotters” operate almost entirely in the left hemisphere. Structure first. Logic forward. Details coloured in after. It’s a valid approach – but one with fewer degrees of freedom. Creative constraints come with the template. You still get unique results, but you’ve narrowed the space. Stephen King’s version would differ wildly from JK Rowling’s – but both would be channelled through the same scaffolding.

You can argue that creativity happens in the choosing of the structure. Fair. But unless you’ve invented something truly novel, you’ve still chosen from a shelf of precedents. The story begins where freedom ends.

And yet, there’s value in that too.

Literary Fiction vs Commercial Fiction

July 21, 2025Posted in Ridley Park, WritingTagged art versus commerce, bestseller culture, book culture, book marketing, book review, books, commercial fiction, fiction, fiction writing, genre snobbery, high art, literary elitism, literary fiction, literary satire, low art, podcast, publishing industry, reading, Writing, writing craftLeave a comment

Welcome, dear reader, to the eternal skirmish between Art and Entertainment, or as the marketing departments like to call it, Literary Fiction vs Commercial Fiction. This is not just a genre squabble; it is the ideological showdown between truth-seeking masochists and market-savvy optimists.

Literary Fiction: Starving Artist Chic

Literary Fiction is what happens when someone spends ten years writing a novel that doesn’t sell but gets shortlisted for an award no one outside The Guardian has heard of. It is the sanctum of character studies, of prose polished until it cuts glass, of metaphors so dense they require footnotes and a whisky.

It doesn’t have to be inaccessible, of course—it just often chooses to be, on principle. Plot is optional, punctuation negotiable. The point is to mean something. To explore the human condition. To examine alienation in a post-industrial neoliberal hellscape, not to entertain your aunt with a beach read.

It’s not that Literary Fiction hates readers. It just isn’t convinced they’re entirely necessary.

Commercial Fiction: Mass Appeal on Tap

Enter Commercial Fiction: the cheerfully formulaic cousin who makes six figures ghostwriting romance under three pseudonyms while sipping cocktails on a cruise. It values clarity, pace, and payoff. There is a beginning, a middle, and—brace yourself—a satisfying end.

It’s written with the audience in mind. The actual audience, not the imagined one you conjure during your third espresso in a North London café while reworking the opening line for the sixth time.

Commercial Fiction exists to be read. Literary Fiction exists to be discussed. Possibly in a room full of mirrors. Possibly after death.

The High-Low Culture Divide

If this were the Renaissance, Literary Fiction would be frescoes in a cathedral—revered, roped-off, and best viewed with your neck craned in discomfort. Commercial Fiction would be the travelling puppet show outside: rowdy, raucous, full of cheap laughs and bawdy jokes. Guess which one brings joy to the masses and which one gets preserved by UNESCO.

There is still this Victorian hangover about high art and low art, as if prose needs a monocle and a trust fund to be taken seriously. Literary Fiction clings to its moral high ground, publishing monographs on the death of the novel, while Commercial Fiction’s out here resurrecting it one bestseller at a time.

Intention Matters

Let’s be honest: some literary writers stumble into the bestseller lists. It’s not beneath them—it just wasn’t the point. Conversely, when a commercially-minded author attempts “Art,” the results are often embarrassing—like a stand-up comic trying Shakespeare in clown shoes.

Approaching from a commercial angle and achieving something artistically resonant? That’s the alchemy. That’s the rare bird. But the reverse—starting with art and accidentally making money—is a tale as old as Joyce (who, let’s remember, died broke and banned).

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

No.
Just kidding. Sort of.

Yes, there is crossover. Yes, The Road is both. But let’s not pretend that Twilight and To the Lighthouse are playing the same game. One is trying to build a fanbase; the other is trying to dissect perception itself. And while both may involve vampires, only one is metaphorical.

In Conclusion

Commercial Fiction is a warm bath. Literary Fiction is a cold shower that leaves you questioning your life choices. One sells. The other sulks. One entertains. The other enlightens (maybe). You can love both, loathe both, or—if you’re cursed with a literary soul—you can write one while envying the other.

Either way, don’t pretend they’re the same. One is art. The other is commerce. Sometimes they shake hands. Occasionally they snog. But more often, they glare at each other from opposite ends of the bookstore, muttering into their blurbs.

Writing Props

July 21, 2025July 20, 2025Posted in Art, Awakening, Book, Everlasting Cocksucker, Hemo Sapiens, Propensity, Ridley Park, Setting, Sustenance, Tarot, WritingTagged book review, books, editing, fiction, literature, memories, poetry, props, reading, WritingLeave a comment

Does anyone else use writing props to help immerse yourself in adjascent fiction?

This unicorn image is from a poster. I am using it as a reference for a current project. It’s already seared into my brain, but it renders it somehow more real.

This unicorn poster hung on the wall of the inspiration for the protagonist of an upcoming novel, Needle’s Edge. It featuers prominently – almost has a speaking part.

Maps

Hemo Sapiens: Awakening is set in near-future Manchester, UK, so I had maps of Manchester at the ready. It helped me to add some realism. Because a trip from a nearby town into the city only took 15 to 20 minutes, I had to edit down a scene I was hoping would fill an hour. I could have used a location further away, but it wouldn’t have made sense to the plot, and I hate those sorts of plot gimmicks.

Sustenance is set in Iowa. I not only had a map of Iowa, I had resources on flora and fauna, so I could name-drop. I’ve visited parts of Iowa, but I couldn’t have drawn these details from memory—and I mightn’t have known the names or the onomonapoeia fascimiles.

Temporal Babel is set in New Mexico, so besides a map for highway references and distances from landmarks—towns, cities, and reservations—, I saved image resources of local photographs, landscapes, plants, buildings, attire, and so on. It really helps we with the description, something that is not otherwise my forte.

Propensity is set in no place in particular, so I used no maps, but I studied interiors of institutions, prisons, laboratories, and the like.

This is another unicorn sticker that was in the house of the protagonist, but it doesn’t make the cut. It still makes me chuckle.

Another unfinished novel, Everlasting Cocksucker, is set in Philly. I spent severl years in and around there, so I know the lay of the land. Still, I find maps useful.

I put this project ont he backburner because I received so much hate over the subject matter. I decided to concentrate on other projects. But, I created a physical shadowbox as a reminder of the protagonist.

**Image**: *Reconstruction of a shadowbox*.

In this story, this represents her life habits: Newport Menthol 100s in a box, Red Bull, Maruchan Ramen, and tarot readings. The Hanged Man is relevant to the plot. When I return to the manuscript, I’ll have this as, let’s call it, inspiraration.

If I wrote genre fiction, this wouldn’t work as well – Sci-Fi or Fantasy and whatnot. It might work for historical fiction though.

Do you have any habits that help you to write?

Writing is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

July 20, 2025July 20, 2025Posted in Book, Ridley Park, WritingTagged author, author burnout, author life, book launch, book marketing, book promotion, books, cover design, editing, formatting, independent publishing, indie author, mental health for writers, publishing, publishing iceberg, publishing tips, sales management, self-publishing, Writing, writing iceberg, writing motivation, writing process, writing strugglesLeave a comment

I hate to be the bearer of bad news – especially if you’re still slogging through a draft of your first manuscript. You know what some people say about writing a book is the hard part.

Lies. Damned lies. That’s the frothy, twinkly nonsense parroted by people who’ve never published anything beyond a social media post, probably only a comment.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Let me tell you the truth. The actual, bloodstained, coffee-fuelled truth:

Writing the book is the easy part.

It’s the visible tip of the iceberg, smugly floating above the surface, soaking up the praise and admiration. Meanwhile, everything else – the sleepless nights, the decimal-point royalty statements, the unpaid invoices to your own soul – is lurking beneath, waiting to sink your mental health like the HMS Delusion.

So here it is, for posterity and pity:

Post-Writing Gauntlet: The Real Job Begins

1. Editing (Five Times, If You’re Lucky)

Developmental editing – “Is your plot a plot or a pile of wet spaghetti?”
Line editing – Making your sentences less embarrassing.
Copyediting – Catching your consistent misuse of ‘affect’ and ‘effect’.
Proofreading – The last defence against the typo apocalypse.
Beta feedback – Friends who suddenly vanish when asked to read a draft.

2. Formatting and Typesetting

Print vs digital layouts. Word crimes meet paragraph crimes.
EPUBs that break for fun.
That one widow on page 243 you didn’t notice until the proof copy arrived.

3. Cover Design

DIY, Fiverr roulette, or mortgage your cat to hire a professional.
Matching tone, genre conventions, and market expectations.
Spelling your own name correctly. (Don’t laugh, it happens.)

4. ISBNs and Metadata Hell

ISBN purchases (if you’re not relying on Amazon’s identifiers).
Title, subtitle, BISAC categories, keywords, blurbs, author bio — all rewritten seventeen times.

5. Publishing Platform Setup

Kindle Direct Publishing, IngramSpark, Kobo, Draft2Digital, Smashwords — pick your poison.
Print proofs, bleed settings, trim sizes, the baffling difference between matte and gloss.

6. Marketing (a.k.a. Screaming Into the Void)

Author website & blog (SEO: your new religion).
Social media presence — the façade of charm over existential dread.
Newsletter with a totally non-spammy freebie opt-in.
Ads: Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Google. Burn money to test the water temperature.

7. Book Launch

ARCs, blog tours, launch events, or at least pretending you’re doing those things.
Coordinating reviews before anyone has read the damn thing.
Press kits and media outreach — basically shouting “LOOK AT ME” with tact.

8. Ongoing Sales Maintenance

Price promos, countdown deals, boxed sets, bundling — keep flogging the corpse.
Monitoring sales dashboards like a Victorian ghost watches the wallpaper peel.
Adjusting metadata because one reviewer didn’t understand it was satire.

9. Audiobook Production (If You Hate Money)

Narrator auditions, contracts, studio time.
Alternatively, read it yourself and discover your own voice is intolerable.
Or muddle through with an AI speech companion. Hullo, ElevenLabs.
Distribution through ACX or Findaway, both of which will pay you in dry leaves.

10. Accounting and Legal Fuss

Tracking royalties across platforms.
Filing taxes as an “author-publisher-entrepreneur-marketer-entity”.
Copyright registration, contracts, intellectual property trolls under the bridge.

11. Dealing With Readers

Responding to fan mail (both lovely and deranged).
Ignoring 1-star reviews that say “not what I expected, didn’t read it”.
Navigating book clubs who want a discount because they’re “doing you a favour”.

12. Mental Health and Motivation

Impostor syndrome, burnout, elation, despair — the writer’s buffet.
Rewriting your author bio weekly because you don’t know who you are anymore.

Optional Add-Ons (for masochists)

Translations and foreign rights – Because English isn’t the only language in which you can fail to sell books.
Merchandise – T-shirts nobody buys, mugs that mock your financial situation.
Public speaking / readings – Summon the courage to read your sex scenes aloud in a room of pensioners.

**Image**: *Publishing iceberg poster in all its glory*.

Spreadsheet Says No

July 19, 2025Posted in Book, Ridley Park, Software, Status Update, WritingTagged author blog, book review, books, editing, editing fiction timeline, Excel for writers, fiction, fixing plot holes, how to revise a novel, non-linear narrative tips, novel, novel revision process, plot matrix template, story structure problems, Writing, writing pregnancy timelines1 Comment

I was feeling smug. Fourth revision pass. Plot matrix built. Columns for chapter, scene, POV, date, time, location, word count, and emotional arc – because I’m that kind of monster. I even added colour-coding.

And it worked. Mostly.

After pruning and polishing, it finally felt ready to ship. Just a couple cosmetic tweaks. A trim here, a varnish there. Run a lint roller over the dialogue. Call it done.

Except.

The matrix – traitorous little bastard – exposed a structural fault so elegant I’d almost admired it. The problem? Pregnancy. Not mine, the protagonist’s. (Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

Turns out, I’d compressed over a decade of real-life events into two years of narrative space. Bold. Efficient. Reckless. I’d wrung out the filler, reshuffled a few puzzle pieces, and declared the thing plausible.

Only it wasn’t.

When I sorted the scenes chronologically, the matrix coughed. The story broke like a cheap lawn chair. There she was: visibly pregnant while also, somehow, gallivanting about in scenes that would’ve required a different physiology entirely. Not an Olympian, but the metaphor holds.

And that’s when it hit me: time may be a flat circle, but gestation is not. No amount of POV tricks or narrative backflips can make a third-trimester body do first-trimester things. Biology, the ultimate killjoy.

So now I’m doing surgery. Not delicate surgery, either. I’m sawing out whole sections, rebuilding connective tissue, and laying down scar tissue where the timeline used to be. I’ll need new plot scaffolding to support the pregnancy and its repercussions. It’s fine. It’s good. It’s hell.

This is revision. We go in thinking we’re buffing up the finish, only to discover we paved over a sinkhole.

Lesson of the week: spreadsheets don’t lie.

They just lie in wait.

New Book Release: Temporal Babel

July 18, 2025July 18, 2025Posted in Book, Ridley Park, Status Update, Temporal Babel, WritingTagged babel, book review, books, communication breakdown, contact story, contemporary surrealism, desert fiction, fantasy, fiction, future English, indie author, language mystery, linguistic sci-fi, literary fiction, new release, philosophical fiction, phonetic drift, Ridley Park, Speculative Fiction, Temporal Babel, time displacementLeave a comment

An unsolved literary mystery where language fails first.

I’m thrilled to announce the release of my latest novella, Temporal Babel, now available in paperback and hardcover. It’s a story about a man who arrives with no language the world can understand—and the woman who tries to name him anyway.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Set in small-town New Mexico, Temporal Babel is not a thriller. It’s not about saving the future or rewriting the past. It’s about the weird middle ground where things don’t quite translate—linguistically, temporally, emotionally.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to encounter someone truly out of place—where even the word where doesn’t land—you’ll find something resonant in these pages.

What’s it about?

A young woman discovers a man on the roadside.
He’s naked. Marked with strange blue scars.
And the words coming out of his mouth aren’t quite English.
Or anything else.

No memory. No ID. No history that the town of Anika can decipher. But as he begins to recover, the sound of his voice becomes its own riddle.

Some readers may call this speculative fiction. Others might shelve it under linguistic noir. I just call it a contact story—minus the aliens, or is it?

Why read it?

🔹 If you enjoy novels that refuse to explain themselves, this one’s for you.
🔹 If you like language play, phonetic drift, and dialect as plot, this one delivers.
🔹 If you like stories where the weirdness builds slowly, quietly, without fireworks—you’ll feel right at home.

“Dis kē?” he asks.
What is this?
No one knows. Not even the narrator.

📖 Temporal Babel is available now in paperback and hardcover.

Read it for free with KindleUnlimited.

You can explore the book page here or head straight to your favourite indie or online retailer.

Thank you for reading, for puzzling, and for letting mystery have the final word.

—Ridley

Le deuxième sexe – What Rises After the Fall

July 18, 2025July 18, 2025Posted in Book, WritingTagged book review, books, cooperative future, cultural construction of woman, decentralised power, emotional literacy, feminist future fiction, feminist speculative fiction, fiction, gender and society, literary science fiction, matriarchy vs patriarchy, novel, philosophical fiction, podcast, post-capitalist culture, post-collapse world, post-Enlightenment society, power and otherness, resonance over dominance, Ridley Park blog, Science Fiction, Simone de Beauvoir, speculative novel concept, The Second Sex, utopia alternative, WritingLeave a comment

I’m reading The Second Sex. It’s a story of women, about women, for women, and by a woman—but it’s also a story of otherness.

This post isn’t about that book.

It’s a reflection on a premise within it: that woman is a cultural construction.

Written in 1949, before the language of gender identity emerged, Beauvoir’s work distinguishes “female” as biological sex and “woman” as imposed gender.
But this post isn’t about that either.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

A Novel Possibility

This is about a seed of an idea—one that took root while reading—and the novel it might become.

A near-future world.
Shaped not by vengeance, utopia, or techno-salvation.
But by a quiet unravelling of power itself.

It is not a story of triumph.
Nor of ruin.
It is the aftermath of both.

After Collapse, Reconstitution

When extractive systems—ecological, economic, ideological—collapse, society does not revert, rebuild, or resist.
It reconstitutes.

Not as hierarchy repainted in pastel.
Not as hive-mind in harmony drag.

But as a resonant ecology:
A decentralised, cooperative, post-Enlightenment culture in which traditional male-coded traits—dominance, control, instrumental reason—have become maladaptive relics.

What Rises

The values that rise—attunement, memory, restraint, emotional literacy—are neither glorified nor enforced.
They are simply what works now.

This is not a matriarchy.
Not a revenge fantasy.
Not feminism cast in steel and slogans.

It’s a structural inversion:
A world in which those trained for dominance find themselves culturally disarmed—
While the formerly subordinate, at last, inhabit a society scaled to their sensibilities.

No Brain, No Throne

There is no single ideology.
No central brain.
No throne.

Power does not pool.
It diffuses—like mycelium beneath a forest.

Language shifts.
Leadership evaporates.
Progress, once a sacred cow, is now met with suspicion.

Not out of fear of change,
But for love of equilibrium.

Still, Tensions Remain

A generation raised in scarcity seeks to anchor stillness.
A younger one, born amid calm, yearns for momentum.

Outside the collective, remnants of the old world stir—
Confused. Indignant. Armed.

And within, a few still long to lead.

These tensions are not resolved by war.
Nor suppressed by force.

This is not a tale of rebellion or revolution.
But of repatterning.
And its cost.

   Tone: Literary. Spare. Sensory realism.
   Influences: Atwood, Le Guin, Ishiguro, Butler.
   Conflict: Emotional. Ideological. Structural.
   Message: A level playing field was always a myth. The tilt now favours something new.

What Comes After

The question isn’t how to stop the old world from returning.
The question is whether it ever really left—
and if so,
what takes its place.

Notes from the Underground

July 16, 2025July 16, 2025Posted in Book, review, WritingTagged 19th century literature, absurdism, absurdist fiction, alienation, book review, books, classic novels, consciousness, dark humour, Death of Ivan Ilych, Dostoevsky, existentialism, free will, human psychology, literary criticism, literature, misanthropy, Notes from Underground, novella, philosophical fiction, philosophy, philosophy of suffering, proto-modernism, rationalism, reading, Russian literature, satire, self-sabotage, tolstoy, unreliable narrator1 Comment

★★★★★ – “I Am a Sick Man. I Am a Spiteful Man. I Am, Apparently, Hilarious.”

Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is a masterclass in misanthropic soliloquy — part philosophical treatise, part psychological farce, and altogether one of the most darkly entertaining monologues I’ve ever had the guilty pleasure of eavesdropping upon. It’s a screaming match between Enlightenment rationality and the petty, pulsing irrationality of actual human life — and guess who wins? (Hint: not the utopians.)

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

The first part, a searing, feverish diatribe, reads like the diary of a man who’s been locked in a room with too much Hegel and not enough human contact. It’s Dostoevsky’s pre-emptive strike against every social engineer who’s ever said, “Well, surely man will behave if we just fix the plumbing.” The Underground Man begs to differ — loudly, neurotically, and with an almost Shakespearean flourish of self-abuse.

But it’s the second part — Apropos of the Wet Snow — where things truly fall gloriously apart. Here the theoretical gives way to the tragically tangible. Our narrator, more unhinged by the page, lurches into society like a moth into a bonfire — vengeful, humiliated, self-aware to the point of paralysis. His disastrous encounter with Liza is almost unbearable in its sincerity and cruelty, a pas de deux of hope and destruction that left me squirming and spellbound.

What surprised me most was the humour. Not the cheap slapstick of caricature, but the agonising, close-to-the-bone absurdity that arises when a man is too clever to be functional and too self-aware to change. The Underground Man doesn’t just dig his hole — he drafts blueprints, writes footnotes, and criticises the soil quality.

As a companion read, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych provides a poignant counterpoint. Where Tolstoy charts the steady, ghastly march of bourgeois conformity towards a deathbed revelation, Dostoevsky gives us a man already buried in his psyche, clawing at the dirt and calling it philosophy. Ivan Ilych dies trying to make sense of his life; the Underground Man lives trying to make death of sense itself.

Together, they are a fine Russian reminder that being alive is no guarantee of being well — or even remotely rational.

The Loneliest Table in the Room

July 13, 2025July 13, 2025Posted in Book, WritingTagged author fears, author life, author resilience, book signing, books, creative courage, debut author, empty event, fiction, introvert writer, literary events, Moore to Lyfe, motivation for writers, publishing reality, reading, self-publishing, Tamika Ford, Writing, writing journeyLeave a comment

What if you scheduled a book signing… and no one showed?

I’ve had that thought more than once. The kind of creeping doubt that slinks in just after you order the bookmarks and rehearse your elevator pitch in the mirror.

It happened to Tamika Ford.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/18niMMYv3C

I don’t know this woman, but this post appeared in my feed:

First book signing

I showed up. I sat at the table. Books neatly stacked, pen ready, heart open — and no one came.

At first, it stung. But then I realized… I’m still proud. Proud that I created something from my story. Proud that I had the courage to show up, even when the seats were empty.

Every table won’t be full. Every event won’t be packed. But every moment is a seed. And I’m still planting.

www.mooretolyfe.net

I don’t know Tamika personally. This post just floated into my feed. But her candour caught me off guard—because I’ve imagined the same thing.

Audio: NotebookLM Podcast on this topic.

A book signing. It sounds like the natural next step. A rite of passage. Something authors do. I’m an introvert, but I’ve taught lecture halls full of glazed-over undergrads and stood before execs who paid me not to bore them. Public speaking doesn’t rattle me.

But the idea of speaking to an empty room? That’s different.

As a professor, the audience is compulsory. As a consultant, the client paid to listen. But a signing? That’s a gamble. No RSVP, no guaranteed bodies. Just hope in paperback.

I’ve published three books, with two more on the way. There are still a few manuscripts in editorial purgatory and some non-fiction titles pacing impatiently backstage. No wonder people hire publicists. It’s a circus, and some days, you don’t even get the monkey.

Tamika said, “At first, it stung.” And how could it not?

She’d already written the book. That’s the real accomplishment. She could have been proud before the signing, without the signing. But she showed up. That’s the part that wrecks me a bit.

She probably rehearsed the scene in her head. Smiling, shaking hands. Someone saying, “I loved this part.” A moment of affirmation.

Instead: silence. Stale air and the slow tick of a wall clock.

And yet there she is in the photo—beaming. She shared the moment not to seek pity but to offer calibration for anyone planting seeds of their own.

May her next event be packed. May strangers pick up her book and find something that speaks to them. Failing that, may they at least buy the damn thing.

Either way, she’s already won.