books – Page 9 – Ridley Park

Simulacra: A Screenplay Inside a Novel

June 22, 2025Posted in Book, Character, Propensity, Ridley Park, Setting, WritingTagged books, experimental, novel, screenplay, WritingLeave a comment

Chapter 26 of Propensity shifts form once again.

Much like Chapter 10 (Memorandum), it functions less as narrative propulsion and more as an aperture, fleshing out character psychology and relational tension. But unlike the bureaucratic memo of Chapter 10, this one adopts the cinematic grammar of a screenplay.

Three teens. One post-collapse flat. No script but survival.

Teddy, Lena, and Jamal, three of the few who’ve retained volition after the global cognitive outage, attempt to negotiate the boundaries of self, sex, and something like ethics. The world has gone silent. Behavioural modulations have zeroed out the rest of humanity. What’s left is not exactly freedom, but the residue of agency.

Teddy wants to dominate; he flirts with tyranny and the post-moral indulgence of the moment.

Jamal wants to refuse the cycle; he recognises the scaffoldings that led to collapse and hopes not to rebuild them.
Lena wants… something else entirely. Survival, perhaps. Or at least integrity.

Their conversation, unfolding through stage direction and dialogu, wrestles with autonomy, desire, and disgust. What counts as a violation in a world where the victims cannot resist? What norms persist when no one is left to enforce them?

This chapter doesn’t tell the reader what to think. It lets the contradictions breathe. And for a few pages, the novel becomes a film that cannot be watched, only read.

Ballard’s High-Rise: When Brutalism Meets Behavioural Collapse

June 22, 2025June 22, 2025Posted in Book, critique, review, WritingTagged 1970s fiction, allegory, architecture and society, Art, Ballard, book review, books, British fiction, brutalism, class warfare, dystopian fiction, extrinsic motivation, High-Rise, JG Ballard, literary critique, mental-health, modern society, nihilism, novel, philosophical fiction, Ridley Park, satire, Science Fiction, social decay, stephen king, Writing1 Comment

I’ve been reading J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise (1975), a brutalist fever dream dressed in concrete and ennui. It’s a story that doesn’t so much depict a descent into chaos as suggest that chaos is the natural state, politely waiting in the wings until the lift stops working and someone pees in the pool.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

This isn’t horror in the Stephen King sense—there’s no room 1408 here, no haunted sheets or malevolent chandeliers. The building isn’t animated; it’s engineered. But like all great systems, it doesn’t need a soul to kill you. The real haunting, as ever, is society itself. Ballard simply does away with the need for ghosts and lets architecture and aspiration do the dirty work.

Compared to Crash—where characters make love to car crashes and each other with equal mechanical indifference—High-Rise has something resembling a cast. I say “resembling” because these aren’t people so much as archetypes on a descent escalator. There’s Laing, a kind of blank-eyed anthropologist; Wilder, who mistakes brute force for authenticity; and Royal, the man literally living in a penthouse and metaphorically in a delusion.

Do I care about them? Not in the slightest. But that might be Ballard’s point. Their motivations are as shallow as a puddle in the car park after the water’s been shut off. Much of the action feels contrived, like a staged rehearsal for an apocalypse that already happened.

And yet—isn’t that precisely what society is? A tepid soup of extrinsic motivators dressed up in motivational posters and mission statements. Nobody in the high-rise acts out of depth or conviction. They act because someone else did it first, because no one told them not to, or because the lift only goes so far down and what else is there to do?

If Crash explored the eroticism of the machine, High-Rise explores the nihilism of comfort. Ballard’s thesis seems to be that civilisation is little more than a thin laminate over our baser instincts—and once it peels, there’s nothing underneath but turf wars and brand loyalty to floor numbers.

The modern reader might recognise the high-rise in everything from gated communities to Meta’s metaverse: sanitised, stratified, severed from consequence. A self-cleaning coffin of convenience.

And, as in the United States today, it all comes heavily medicated and prettily lit—with lipstick, meet pig.

Aesthetic Artefacts in Propensity

June 21, 2025Posted in Art, Book, Propensity, Status Update, WritingTagged aesthetic artifact, books, chapter showcase, character immersion, epistolary chapter, experimental fiction, fictional documents, internal memo, literary sci-fi, narrative foreshadowing, Propensity, Propensity novel, psychological sci-fi, Ridley Park, sci-fi worldbuilding, Speculative Fiction, speculative narrative devices1 Comment

Chapter 10 of Propensity is a memorandum—fashioned in the style of a… wait for it… memorandum.

It doesn’t advance the plot much. That’s not its job. Like a dead-end corridor in a brutalist government building, it exists for atmosphere. Aesthetic artefact. Light foreshadowing. Bureaucratic texture. You know the type.

The memo comes from a psychologist involved in the Propensity experiment—writing to the study’s director about unexpected side effects. What they describe isn’t quite failure. It’s something stranger: drift, persistence, compulsive symbolism, the return of narrative despite modulation.

A precursor. A warning. And a throwback to a time when language still tried to make sense of things.

This chapter is one of several experimental inserts throughout the novel. I’ll be showcasing each of them here—in principle, if not in full.

Book Review: Crash

June 20, 2025Posted in Book, review, Status UpdateTagged book review, books, crash, goodreads, J. G. Ballard, novel, reviewLeave 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

New Video: Why I Write the Way I Do

June 15, 2025Posted in Ridley Park, Video, Writing, YouTube, YouTuberTagged books, editing, thought experiments, WritingLeave a comment

Close-up of a human eye with digital glitch effects and overlaid text reading 'What if reality is wrong?'—a visual metaphor for distorted perception and unreliable truth.

Ever wondered why my characters are displaced, disillusioned, or linguistically marooned? Why my fiction leans philosophical, post-structural, and just a touch anti-humanist?

In this short video, I explain the underlying motivations behind my stories—from Heidegger’s Geworfenheit to Galen Strawson’s Causa Sui, with detours through identity, agency, and the lies we call language.

This isn’t about world-building. It’s about world-dismantling.

▶️ Watch now: Why I Write the Way I Do

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.