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

June 14, 2025June 14, 2025Posted in Book, WritingTagged author tips, bad writing advice, Beta readers, book editing, books, choosing readers, creative writing, editing, editing process, genre mismatch, how to find beta readers, literary criticism, manuscript feedback, publishing, publishing tips, reader feedback, Speculative Fiction, target audience, Writing, writing advice, writing community1 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

June 12, 2025June 12, 2025Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Audible, Audiobook, Book, ElevenLabs, ElevenLabs, Generative AI, Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, Propensity, Software, Sustenance, Temporal Babel, WritingTagged AI narration, Audiobook, audiobook editing, audiobook production, audiobooks, author lessons, books, editing, ElevenLabs, first-person narrative, hemo sapiens, indie author workflow, manuscript editing, novel, present tense writing, print proofing, proofreading tips, publishing process, self-publishing, typos in books, WritingLeave 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.

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

May 27, 2025May 27, 2025Posted in Book, Hemo Sapiens, Interview, Ridley Park, Sustenance, WritingTagged alienation, book review, books, character estrangement, cultural constructs, existentialism, fiction writing, Geworfenheit, Heidegger, hemo sapiens, language insufficiency, literary theory, meaning-making, metaphysics, narrative motivation, narrative philosophy, otherness, philosophical fiction, philosophy, postmodern fiction, property and survival, reading, Speculative Fiction, storytelling and identity, Sustenance, Temporal Babel, thrownness, writer’s soliloquy, WritingLeave 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.

Characters Are Overrated: A Treatise Against the Tyranny of Arcs

May 26, 2025May 26, 2025Posted in Character, critique, Ridley Park, WritingTagged antihero, books, character development, existential fiction, fiction, fiction without resolution, literary philosophy, literary structure, Meursault, myth of agency, narrative realism, narrative theory, postmodern fiction, protagonist as pawn, Ridley Park, storytelling, storytelling critique, Writing, writing against the arc, writing tipsLeave a comment

You’ll hear it a thousand times in creative writing circles, often whispered with the reverence of sacred doctrine: character is king. Give your protagonist an arc, they say. Make them grow. Show them change. Rinse. Resolve. Repeat.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Forgive me, but I’m not here for that workshop claptrap.

“I don’t build arcs. I drop people into a world and let them drown, float, or disappear.”

My writing isn’t character-driven in the conventional sense. I don’t sculpt protagonists to take heroic journeys or undergo epiphanic transformations. I’m not interested in plumbing the depths of their souls or bandaging their inner wounds with moral insight. My primary concern is the world—the philosophical or sociological structure—through which characters drift, orbit, or plummet. Sometimes they leave a mark. Often, they don’t.

Because real life isn’t narrative. It doesn’t arc. It drifts. And most of us don’t develop. We adapt. We cope. We muddle through.

“From a narrative perspective, we start somewhere in the middle and end somewhere else in the middle.”

Resolution, in most stories, is a parlour trick—narrative taxidermy dressed as transcendence. In reality, most encounters don’t resolve. They expire. People come and go. You cross paths with strangers who change your life—or don’t—and then vanish back into the abyss of statistical anonymity.

One of my recent manuscripts begins with a woman named Sena discovering a body by the roadside. She reports it, the authorities arrive, and the narrative follows them—until it doesn’t. It dissipates. No tidy resolution, no tight bow. Just the unfurling tedium of systemic procedure and human irrelevance. It’s not a mystery story. It’s a story with mystery in it. Big difference.

We like to pretend we’re central to our own story, each of us a protagonist in a universe scripted for personal development. But sometimes, we’re not even side characters. Sometimes, we’re scenery. Camus’ Meursault had it right: the sun matters more than your feelings, and death shows up whether you’ve had your arc or not.

“Psychologically, we like to assume we have agency. That’s why we tell stories with resolution—because it flatters us to imagine things make sense.”

Yes, some readers crave grandiosity—heroes, villains, the Great Man Theory dressed in narrative drag. Napoleon didn’t just wage war; he “struggled with destiny.” Stalin wasn’t just a paranoid bureaucrat; he was “a force of history.” These are characters written by history with the same myth-making brush that writes fiction. Convenient, cathartic, utterly inaccurate.

But I don’t write demigods. I write witnesses, floaters, participants without insight. They’re often not even granted the courtesy of closure. They move through a world that refuses to acknowledge their significance. And why should it? The cosmos doesn’t care if your backstory is tragic or if your girlfriend left you on page forty-two.

Sometimes the character who seems central is merely catalytic. Other times, they’re inert—filler between philosophies. If someone changes, maybe it’s society, not them. Maybe the reader. Or maybe no one.

So no, I don’t build arcs. I don’t force characters to evolve like Pokémon just because Act III demands it. I drop them into a world and watch what happens—often, nothing. Because that, more than any tidy redemption tale, is how life actually works.

“In my stories, characters are pawns—how I envisage others: merely players, perhaps trying to make sense of the world they’ve been thrown into.”

That’s the work. Not myth-making. Not therapy. Observation. Dissection. Not a ladder to transcendence but a mirror, tilted just so.

Welcome to Ridley Park. Watch your footing. There are no arcs—only echoes.

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

May 20, 2025Posted in Art, Book, Cover Art, Ridley Park, Software, Status UpdateTagged Adobe Photoshop, author diary, book design, book production, books, Cover Art, ebook formatting, formatting hell, InDesign, indie author, kdp, KDP Select, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle formatting, novella, paperback publishing, print vs digital, publishing, publishing woes, self-publishing, vector art, Writing, writing life, writing processLeave 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.

AI Editor Issues

March 25, 2025March 25, 2025Posted in Artificial Intelligence, AutoCrit, ChatGPT, Claude, critique, Generative AI, Short Story, Software, WritingTagged ai, AutoCrit, books, ChatGPT, ChatGPT 4, fiction, Generative AI, reading, Short Story, Writing, writing tipsLeave a comment

I employ AI editors for copyediting and alpha-reading. They are useful but have limitations.

Some of my writing is ordinary – Acts I, II, and III; Beginning, Middle, and End. This is AI’s sweet spot: assess a piece and compare it to a million similar pieces, sharing plot structures, story and character arcs, heroes’ journeys, and saving cats.

Other stories are experimental. They don’t follow the Western tradition of tidy storylines and neat little bows, evey aspect strongly telegraphed, so as not to lose any readers along the journey.

Mary approaches a doorway. Mary opens the door. She walks through the doorway — the doorway she had approached.

Obviously, this is silly and exaggerated, but the point remains. AI presumes that readers need to be spoonfed, especially American audiences. (No offence.)

But life doesn’t work like this. We often witness events where we have no idea what happens after we experience them. We pass strangers on the street, not knowing anything about their past or future. We overhear something interesting, never to get a resolution. We get passed by for a promotion but never know the reason why.

In science, there are lots of dead ends. Do we want to know the answers? Yes. Is one likely? Maybe; maybe not. Will we make up answers just to satisfy our need for closure? It happens all the time.

In writing, we seem to not accept these loose ends. How many times have you read a review or critique where the complaint is, “What happened to this character?” or “Why didn’t Harry Potter use his invisibility cloak more than once despite it being an obvious solution to many prior and future challenges he faced?”

Sure. I agree that it feels like a plot hole, but the author doesn’t have to tell you that Harry lost it in a poker match, it got lost in the wash, or Ron snatched it.

I’m finishing a story, and various AIs provide similar commentary. Even more humorous are the times it can’t follow a thread, but when a human reviewer reads it, they have no difficulty. In the end, there may be unanswered questions. Some of these leave the universe open for further exploration, but not all questions have answers. AI has difficulty grasping this perspective.

Rhoticity Chicken: The Final Cluckfrontation

March 21, 2025March 21, 2025Posted in Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, flash fiction, Short Story, WritingTagged ai, books, ChatGPT, chicken, fantasy, fiction, Generative AI, nonsense, rhoticity, Short Story, WritingLeave a comment

The skies darkened over the Coop of Justice. Inside, Rhoticity Chicken—a rooster of unparalleled enunciation—perched on his golden roost, adjusting his crimson cape. His mission was simple: to defend the final R in English against the insidious forces of vowel decay.

Audio: NotebookLM discusses this topic.

Across the barnyard, his greatest nemesis, Non-Rhotic Chicken, cackled from atop his weathered soapbox. “Togethah, my feathah’d comrades,” he declared, wings outstretched, “we shall ERASE the intrusive ‘R’ from this land. Wintah, summah, law and ordah—it shall all flow smoothly once more!”

A murmur rippled through the coop. Some hens clucked nervously. Others nodded, spellbound by his seamless vowel transitions.

But then, a mighty R echoed through the barn like thunder.

“NEVER!”

Rhoticity Chicken flapped into the air, his chest puffed out with impeccable articulation. “You shall NOT take the final ‘R’! I have defended it from the creeping shadows of elision for YEARS, and I shall not fail now!”

From the shadows emerged The Trilled Chick Henchmen, a gang of feathered mercenaries trained in rolled Rs. They trilled menacingly, their Spanish and Italian inflections rattling the walls of the barn.

“Señor Rhoticity, your time is up,” rasped El Gallito, the leader of the henchmen. “Your crude American Rs will be smoothed away like an old dialect in the sands of time. Trill, my hermanos!”

They rolled their Rs in unison, a sinister wave of phonetic force blasting toward Rhoticity Chicken. He staggered, his own hard R wavering against the onslaught of linguistic variation.

But he clenched his beak and stood firm.

“No,” he declared, eyes blazing. “You can roll your Rs, you can drop them, but you will NEVER take away my right… to pronounce… HARD R’s!”

With a mighty CROW, he unleashed his ultimate attack:

THE RHOTIC RESONANCE

A shockwave of perfectly articulated, non-trilled Rs blasted through the barn. It swept across the land, restoring all lost R’s to their rightful places.

Non-Rhotic Chicken gasped as his vowels stiffened. “No—NOOOO! My beautiful syllabic flow—GONE!” He clutched his throat as a long-forgotten ‘R’ slipped back into his speech.

“I… I… can’t… say cah anymore… I… I just said… car.”

The barn fell silent.

Defeated, Non-Rhotic Chicken collapsed into a pile of feathers, mumbling in fully articulated rhoticity.

The Trilled Chick Henchmen scattered, their rolling Rs faltering into incoherent babbling.

Rhoticity Chicken stood victorious. He fluffed his cape, took a dignified breath, and proclaimed:

“Justice. Honor. Pronunciation.”

And with that, he flew into the night, ready to defend hard R’s wherever they were threatened.

THE END…?

Against the Grain

March 19, 2025March 19, 2025Posted in Status UpdateTagged Art, books, creativity, notebooks, WritingLeave a comment

As a writer, I fully embrace the digital age – word processors, AI, eBooks, print-on-demand, and so on. Still, I like to proof my drafts on paper. I also render audio with ElevenLabs, so I can hear the flow. You might be surprised how often that picks up awkward phrases and typos. I’ll save this for another post.

I find that printing double-sided on A5 creates just the right form factor for a paperback. A problem is that the grain is running the wrong way. This means that the pages curl horizontally, left to right. You want the page to curl to to bottom, especially if you want to bind it in book or booklet.

A solution to this is to print to A4 in a booklet form, and then fold the pages into a booklet. The result is a book having an A5 page size. And, the grain is now vertical, top to bottom, eliminating that pesky curl.

I take two approaches to this A4 technique.

First: Print a sheet containing four pages at a time, e.g., 1, 2, 3, and 4. This creates pages, 4 and 1 on the obverse and and 3 and two on the reverse. When folded, the pages are ordered as expected for a book.

TIP: Ensure you’ve set your printer to landscape and use a booklet template. I tend to print to PDF first, and use its format settings.

Rinse and repeate for pages 5 to 8, in counts of four. Stacked and ordered, you’ve got a booklet. The beenfit of this approach is that you can stack as many of these as you like until you’ve got all your entire book printed. Use a long stapler or pinch binders to fasten.

TIP: Be sure to account for a gutter, especially for books with more pages, so your text doesn’t get lost in the fold and is presents as expected.

Second: Print two of four sheets at a time. I recommend four but no more. Printing four A4 pages in a booklet format creates a 16-page booklet. And you thought, you’d never need to use maths out of school. The reason I recommend no more than four sheets is that the page ends don’t align well with more. The page ends start getting a curvature. Again, more maths. This is not an issue printing the previous style, but you need to keep it in mind here.

With four sheets at a time, the book is incremented (obviously) in groups of sixteen, so your finished booklet should be a multiple of sixteen. Blank pages at the start and end are fine. Consider a faux cover of sorts.

Also, of you only need a pamphlet – say, sixteen pages – you’re in luck.

In a Bind

If you want to be a real fancy pants, you might considering binding the pages. Say you want to create a bound novella for freinds and family. Punch holes through the folds, and stitch them together. This is fancier than staples.

Stack a series of 16, 32, 48, 64, and so on to create your book. If you have access to a binding machine, create a cover with heavier card stock and wrap it around, fixing it with adhesive.

The cover will need to be larger than A4 because of the aforementioned size problem. Plus, you’ll need to account for the thickness of all of the pages. B5 or even Legal-sized paper may be a solution. I haven’t done it or the maths, so this will be your assignment.

Parting Shots

You may be able to create a booklet with Letter and Landscape paper as long as you are OK with the final dimensions.

You may also be able to find A5 paper with a top-to-bottom grain, in which case, use it. You can settle with standard A5 sheets, but just know that you may be quickly frustrated when your pages start turing in.

Note: A4 and A5 are standard in the world except in the United States, where is is difficult to find and priced significantly higher there. If you know a source of decent quality A4 or A5 paper in the US, let me know in the comments.

AutoCrit Challenges

March 11, 2025Posted in Artificial Intelligence, AutoCrit, ChatGPT, Claude, critique, Generative AI, Short Story, Software, WritingTagged ai, AutoCrit, book review, book-reviews, books, characters, ChatGPT, ChatGPT 4, Claude, closure, consistency, critique, deepseek, editing, emotional quotient, emotions, eq, fiction, Generative AI, human condition, narratives, real life, reality, resolution, stories, variability, WritingLeave a comment

I don’t hide the fact that I rely on AI for early editorial feedback. Once a story is complete, I break out AutoCrit. This programme works well for typical stories that follow standard practices with common tropes. It gets quite confused when I feed it intentionally awkward stories, not the least of which is to advise me to eliminate the awkwardness.

This is a challenge with AI more generally. In this particular story, I leave a lot of loose ends and misdirects, as it’s a commentary on the conspiracy-driven culture we inhabit. The advice, is along the lines of, “You forget to close this lopp. What happened to so and so.”

But this is life. We don’t always know the full story. We drive past an multi-car accident where cares are overturned and in flames, but we never find out what happens – even if we scour the newspapers and internet. Who was that? What happened? What caused it?

We often never find out. In most books and movies, we find out everythung, and it all comes packaged with a nice bow. This is what AI expects. It’s the diet it’s been fed.

Some stories subvert these notions here and there, but by and large, this is not typical American fare. Readers and viewers need to be spoonfed without inconsistencies.

Speaking of inconsistencies addressing one scene, AutoCrit said that a character should act impulsively in one situation and reserved moments later. This was flagged as an iinconsistent character.

In the scene, a woman stops her car immediately to help an injured man on the roadside, but as she gets out of her car an approaches her, she shows caution.

This was a red flag. Why would she have always been rash or always been cautious?

My response, because that how real people act. She acts on instinct but quickly considers that she’s a vulnerable woman alone with a man miles from anywhere.

I don’t suspect a human reader would find this surprising. This is the intelligence absent from Artificial Intelligence — cultural intelligence, a cousin of EQ, emotional quotient.

I know how I want the character to act. I do want AutoCrit to inform me that character A is wielding a pistol but then stabs another character, or that character B is a teetotaler and is getting drunk or that character C has a shellfish allergy but is downing lobsters like they’re going out of style. And I certainly what to be shown continuity errors.

The biggest challenge I have with AutoCrit that is less promonent with other AIs is that I can preface my content with a note explaining my intent. I can even do this after the fact.

If I feed ChatGPT, Claude, or DeepSeek a story of segment to critique without a preface, the responses may be similar to AutoCrit, but when I follow up with some meta, the response may be, “Now it makes sense, but why is John wearing lipstick?” Perhaps he’s metrosexual or non-traditional. Perhaps it’s an oversight.

I dont meán to demean AutoCrit. I’m just advising that if you are writing stories not compliant with 80 per cent of published works, take the advice with a grain of salt, or reserve AutoCrit for more standard fare.

AI Humour and Irony

March 11, 2025March 11, 2025Posted in Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, Claude, Generative AI, Sci-Fi, Short Story, Status Update, WritingTagged books, fantasy, fiction, Science Fiction, WritingLeave a comment

I’m wrapping up a short story, and I ran it through several generative AIs for feedback.

The first problem is that. although AI provides critique, it is programmatically overly optimistic.

The second problem is that it doesn’t understand nuance.

The working title of this story is Temporal Babel. It’s a low-key absurd, mundane, ironic satirical journey through space-time, language, and identity.

An unconscious, naked man is discovered on a roadside. Events unfold. Who is this bloke, and how did he get here?

I fed the draft into these AI platforms and processed the responses:

Anthropic Claude
DeepSeek
Google Gemini
Grok
OpenAI ChatGPT
Perplexity

I tried to use some other platforms, but they were wholly inadequate:

Liquid Labs
Doesn’t accept attachments.
Meta AI
Doesn’t accept document attachments. Images only.
Not Diamond AI
Just an aggregator that employs the other AIs.
Pi AI
Conversational AI. Not designed for this type of critique.

I also use AutoCrit, but not until my draft is complete, so not yet.

With the draft, they each get the same starting prompt:

I am drafting this story. It’s not ended yet, but might you evaluate it as-is?

The draft includes copious notes about ideas not yet captured, as I tend to outline my material and then add resolution. It’s like taking a sketch to a final drawing, adding and shading until it’s complete.

Without fail, the AIs complained about a lack of an ending – despite being informed the ending is not yet written.

Some AIs miss the point (even having the benefit of explanatory notes). This is still useful because it allows me to reevaluate whether a reader will be as lost or confused.

I don’t want to share any spoilers, but I’ll copy-paste some high-level commentary, reiterating the optimism bias. This is not me humble-bragging. It’s what the AIs yield. DeepSeek seems to be the most critical on the surface

Anthropic Claude 3.7 Sonnet

Based on what you’ve shared, “Temporal Babel” presents a fascinating premise with strong potential. You’re developing a unique take on time travel that focuses on language evolution and the mundane aspects of humanity rather than the typical science fiction tropes.

DeepSeek

Temporal Babel is an intriguing and ambitious piece that blends elements of science fiction, mystery, and psychological drama. The narrative structure, with its shifting points of view and fragmented memories, creates a sense of disorientation that mirrors the protagonist’s own confusion, which is effective for the story you’re telling.

Google Gemini 2.0 Flash

{This is a well-written and intriguing story. The characters are well-developed and the plot is suspenseful. The story is also thought-provoking, raising questions about time travel, identity, and communication. I am eager to see how the story ends.}

Grok 3

Thank you for sharing your draft! It’s a compelling story with a strong sense of mystery and an intriguing premise that blends science fiction, cultural displacement, and human connection. Below, I’ll provide an evaluation of the story as it stands, focusing on its strengths, areas for potential improvement, and some thoughts on its current trajectory. Since it’s unfinished, I’ll avoid speculating too much about the ending but will offer suggestions based on what’s here so far.

OpenAI ChatGPT 4o

This is a fascinating and well-executed piece so far. You’ve managed to blend speculative fiction with grounded procedural storytelling, creating an atmosphere of quiet unease. The linguistic elements are some of the strongest aspects, making this feel fresh rather than like another “mysterious visitor” trope. The lack of easy resolution enhances the realism, and your characters feel distinctive and lived-in.

You’re well on your way to crafting something intelligent, immersive, and deeply intriguing. Keep pushing the subtle strangeness, and this could be an incredibly compelling read.

Perplexity (Auto)

The story has a strong, suspenseful opening. You’ve established a good sense of place and effectively built tension through Sena’s observations and internal thoughts. The mystery surrounding the naked man with strange markings is intriguing, and the arrival of the authorities adds another layer of suspense.

The Rest

Except for Gemini, perhaps a feature of its Flash model, the others provided more extensive feedback and summary.

To be fair, I am no fan of Elon Musk or X (formerly known as Twitter), but I liked Grok. Its responses felt more natural and less forced optimism. It also picked up on some nuance the others missed. This said, it not only missed others, after some dialogue about the satirical ironic intend, it offered me suggestions that felt as natural as Steve Buscemi’s “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme.

Here’s a non-spoiler sample:

Nurse in “Assessment”: “Hold still, E.T., no phoning home yet.” Jef blinks, “No compile,” thinking she means coffee—absurdly off.

Neither story context nor character profiles do anyhting to set up or frame this delivery. “The nurse” is a character. I have no idea where the ET reference comes from, nor by extension, the “phone home” line. How any of this relates to coffee is beyond me.

Grok, don’t quit your day job.

Closing

This story is intentionally anti-science fiction, anti-trope. To clarify, I’m not sure one can write a story devoid of tropes, but I prefer to subvert the expectations that come with some.

Those who follow my Philosophics Blog know that I am a Postmodern philosopher. I don’t buy into teleological notions of progress and associated metanarratives, leading to shiny spaceships and a Jetson existence. Technology is neither Skynet nor a saviour. It’s just a tool.