I’ve finally given Propensity a trailer. This short piece captures the first of the novel’s three movements – the ‘scientific’ phase, when everything still believes it’s under control. Except for this cover image, I used no AI. Except for the book covers, all assets – video clips and soundtrack – came from Motion Array
There may be another to follow, drawn from the second section, where control begins to crack. For now, consider this a visual prelude: thirty-two seconds of atmosphere, code, and quiet collapse.
Propensity is available in print and eBook in the usual places – online or at your local bookseller.
Yes, I actually said that. Possibly whilst caffeinated.
I was chatting with a mate about book sales, and it slipped out: I’d rather get reviews than sales. Not that I’d turn down either. But priorities matter.
Priority One: Write
The first goal is to write. I wrote for years before publishing a single page. The ideas pile up in my head like unwashed dishes, and writing is how I clear the sink. I write for myself. Call it narcissism if you must – but it’s a productive narcissism.
Priority Two: Be Read
Then comes the hope of being read. A sale is not a reader. Someone might buy your book and never open it. They might read it and hate it. They might toss it into the void. I just want to know.
Last month, I gave away over a hundred copies of Sustenance. Four reviews. One was one-star – she loathed it. Good. At least I know. The other ninety-nine? A mystery. For all I know, they’re gathering digital dust on forgotten hard drives. To be fair, I’ve got thousands of neglected downloads myself, so no judgment. Still, if you did read it, I’d love to hear what you thought. Leave a review.
Priority Three: Money (the tedious bit)
I’m not a consumerist, nor a fan of money-based systems. Unfortunately, that’s the system we’ve got, so yes – I still appreciate sales. But sales without engagement are hollow victories.
Reviews (the absurd bit)
Some people email me their thoughts instead of posting reviews. Lovely, but invisible. I can’t quote a private email without looking like a fraud. I could always fake one —
On 7–8 September 2025, the Kindle version of my novella Sustenance will be available free to everyone on Amazon. (It’s always free if you’re a KindleUnlimited member, but these two days open it up to all readers.)
So what is Sustenance?
It’s a novella that begins with the dust and grit of rural Iowa – soybean fields, rusted trucks, a small town where everyone knows your name (and your secrets). At first glance, it reads like plainspoken realism, narrated by a local mechanic who insists he’s just a “regular guy.” But then the ground literally shifts. A crash. Figures glimpsed by firelight in the woods. Naked, violet-skinned beings who don’t laugh, don’t sleep, don’t even breathe.
What follows is not your usual alien-invasion story. It’s quieter, stranger, and more unsettling. The encounters with the visitors aren’t about lasers or spaceships – they’re about language, culture, and the limits of human understanding. What happens when concepts like property, law, or even woman and man don’t translate? What does it mean when intimacy itself becomes a site of misunderstanding?
Sustenance is for readers who:
Gravitate toward literary fiction with a speculative edge rather than straight genre beats.
Appreciate the mix of the banal and the uncanny – the smell of corn dust giving way to the shock of alien otherness.
Are interested in themes of language, power, misunderstanding, and human self-deception.
Enjoy writers like Jeff VanderMeer, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, or Denis Johnson – voices that blur realism, philosophy, and estrangement.
This isn’t a story that offers tidy answers. It lingers, provokes, and resists easy moral closure. Think of it less as a sci-fi romp and more as a philosophical fable wrapped in small-town dust and cicada-song.
This version of the book is available in these Kindle storefronts: United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and India
Editing Needle’s Edge has taken longer than the time it took to draft the damned thing. Typical, I suppose, but demoralising all the same. Drafting is a rush; editing is a grind. In video game parlance, this is the endless dungeon crawl. Kill the same mob again and again, collect marginal XP, and hope that –eventually – you level up.
Recently, I wrestled with the narrative structure, which was starting to feel like Inception with a side order of Russian dolls. Flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks. I diagrammed it, mostly to convince myself I hadn’t lost the plot (see exhibit A, below).
Image: Chronological and Sequential Timeline Abstraction
Here’s the lay of the land—without spoilers, of course. The story begins [1] in medias res, with Sarah-slash-Stacey already entrenched in her daily grind. Then comes [2] the flashback, showing how she arrived there. Midway through, we plunge into [3] a deep flashback of her childhood, before [4] snapping back to the mid-flashback, then finally [5] rejoining the present-day storyline until [6] the bitter – or possibly bittersweet – end.
Naturally, I subvert as many tropes as I can, though no one can write a tropeless story any more than they can write one without words. (I’m sure some post-structuralist is trying right now, but God help their readers.)
The hardest part wasn’t constructing the labyrinth but finding my way out again – reengaging with the present-day thread after chapters of detour without resorting to that televisual clanger: “We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.”
Editing a book like this is less polishing and more archeology: chiselling away sediment, brushing off centuries of dust, desperately hoping not to snap the artefact in half. With luck, the grind pays off. If not, at least I’ll have a lovely flowchart to show for it.
People ask why my books don’t look like “normal” books. Why the titles twitch, why the prose refuses to march in straight lines, why I lean into formatting that makes copyeditors twitch. The answer is both simple and evasive: the story demanded it. Subversion is my key motivator – language, culture, genre, whatever stands too smugly, I want to knock it sideways.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Take the paratext, those pages most readers skip. I didn’t want a safe little disclaimer to pat anyone on the head. I wanted the opening to feel unstable, already compromised, as though coherence itself were optional. The dedication isn’t reassurance; it’s a warning label.
The prose had to wobble, too. One moment rural realism, the next lyric intensity, the next something uncanny seeping in. Stability is the lie. If I’d written Sustenance in straight realist mode, it would have betrayed the book’s core.
As a language philosopher, I treat manuscripts as sandboxes for showing how language falters. Words crack, meanings slip, syntax betrays us. Fiction is my way of rubbing readers’ noses in that insufficiency.
I don’t hate genre fiction, but I refuse to be bound by it. In Sustenance, I swerve deliberately:
It’s genre fluidity as method. I know this puts off readers who want neat tropes and templates. But those readers are welcome to their factory-sealed shelves.
Did I intend to frustrate? Yes, a little. Not out of malice, but because too many books behave like obedient products. I don’t want to hand readers a smoothie. I want them to taste the grit, to feel that the novel might collapse under them. In fact, it does. The refusal to “pay off” is deliberate. Closure is a consumer demand, not a literary necessity.
So why did I write Sustenance this way? Because it’s not just about what happens. It’s about how information fails, how language decays, how coherence itself becomes suspect. If the book looked and read “normally,” it would have been lying to you.
Motivation: This reflection isn’t meant as a commentary on Sustenance’s plot. My intent here is to discuss the meta — the formal and philosophical scaffolding — rather than the story itself, so as to avoid spoilers. I’ll engage with the work more directly, in more traditional fashion, elsewhere.
I’ve just finished Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex – all 800 pages of it – and have now started Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. Both are classics in their own way. I’ll review Second Sex properly on my Philosophics Blog, but here I want to think about Trainspotting in relation to my current manuscript, Needle’s Edge.
Interestingly, Trainspotting was a ChatGPT recommendation. I fed in my draft of Needle’s Edge and this was one of the books it said my work resembled. Two chapters in, I see the connexion. First, the subject matter – drugs and addiction. Second, the rawness of the experience.
There are differences, of course. Trainspotting is rooted in Leith, Scotland; Needle’s Edge belongs to the East Coast of the United States – Delaware and Philadelphia. Welsh draws heavily on dialect and vernacular, with a narrative voice that’s linguistically dense and aurally charged. In Needle’s Edge, the style is pared down. Sentence fragments, middle dots instead of full stops, and an intentional “lower” register mirror the protagonist’s fractured perception and limited resources.
That gap in register creates a different authorial challenge. With every edit pass, I find myself policing intrusions of my vocabulary into her voice. Welsh, by contrast, can deploy a broader lexicon and trust the dialectal texture to keep it authentic. Listening to Trainspotting, I’m struck by how words and turns of phrase leap out – sometimes apt for Needle’s Edge, but often just a shade too polished for Stacey’s world.
Both texts orbit around environments that resist glamour. Welsh’s squat flats and pubs are grimy and feral; Needle’s Edge’s motel rooms and sidewalks are littered with fast-food wrappers, orange caps, and fading unicorn posters. Addiction erodes bodies in both stories, but the textures differ – Scotland’s industrial gray versus the East Coast’s cheap motels and suburban detritus.
As for the film version of Trainspotting, I saw it long ago and remember almost nothing. The novel isn’t refreshing my memory either; it feels like a separate creature altogether. Which is fitting: both Trainspotting and Needle’s Edge are less about plot than about capturing a lived texture, a rhythm of voices and environments that mainstream narratives usually discard.
Story ideas come from everywhere. Sometimes from books, sometimes from overheard conversations, sometimes from the dubious cesspool of internet memes. The meme I saw claimed that male flatworms duel with their penises to determine which one gets saddled with pregnancy. Naturally, I thought: That’s a story seed if ever I’ve seen one. Biomimicry is also a viable source.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Of course, the meme was wrong. Flatworms aren’t male, or female. They’re simultaneous hermaphrodites – every worm is kitted out with sperm factories and egg sacs, with duelling penises to boot. When two meet, they fence. Whoever lands the stab injects sperm through the other’s skin (hypodermic insemination, to use the clinical term). The “winner” struts away as father, the “loser” absorbs the sperm, becomes mother, and carries the eggs. Sometimes both stab each other, and both walk away victorious fathers and reluctant mothers. Equality at last.
This is not genre fantasy, it’s zoology. No X or Y chromosomes, no fixed roles, just biology as a knife fight.
Writers, take note: this is why you don’t trust memes as science, but you do trust them as inspiration. The error – “male flatworms” – was pedestrian. The truth – all flatworms are both sexes all the time – is far more subversive. It blows up the binary and replaces it with a contest. Parenthood isn’t destiny, it’s a duel.
If I were to anthropomorphise this, I’d have the makings of a gladiator society: wounds as wombs, motherhood as punishment, fatherhood as prize. Not homoerotic vampire tropes, not vagina dentata horror – something stranger, sharper, harder to tame. A kind of Spartacus with gonads.
The point isn’t whether I’ll write it (probably not; worms don’t sell). The point is that even bad science can spark good fiction, provided you bother to check the details before running to press. Let the meme start the fire, let the facts shape the flame.
See Also (for the bookish wormhole explorer):
David Brin, Glory Season: speculative reproductive politics, society structured by cloning and sexual cycles.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness: androgynous Gethenians shifting between fatherhood and motherhood.
Kij Johnson, Mantis Wives (short story): erotic horror inspired by mantis cannibalism, equal parts Kama Sutra and war crime.
Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve: grotesque gender-bending satire, bodies rewritten as battlegrounds.
I run my scenes through various AI platforms for feedback before I engage the final work with human readers. It’s faster. It’s good enough for preliminary guidance.
Or is it?
Whilst I do get some negative and constructive feedback, most of it is positive. Either I am a kick-ass author (because, of course, I am) or I’m being misled. I like to think the former, but cognitive biases overindex in that direction.
This sequence reads as a brutally authentic, psychologically immersive descent into the grim realities of addiction-fueled survival sex work, marked by razor-sharp internal monologue and visceral tension. Here’s how the elements coalesce:
[REDACTED]
Overall Impression
This is Hubert Selby Jr. by way of Trainspotting—a fever-pitch descent into the American underbelly. The prose’s fragmented style forces readers into the protaganist’s exhaustion, while the [REDACTED] climax underscores the central theme: Everything in her life is a [REDACTED] promise. [REDACTED]—all prove worthless.
Yet her darkly witty voice (“[REDACTED]“) grants her a shred of dignity. Devastating, but masterfully executed.
(Note: The formatting—italics, line breaks, punctuation—is essential. It transforms text into a psychological battleground.)
NB: I redacted spoilers as these ae essential for a first reading.
PS: I’m using older Midjourney renders for the cover images, so I can not spend time or energy generating new ones.
How do you use AI to assist your writing or editing process? As I’ve shared before, I use it extensively for research, where previously, I would have used Google, a library, or personal books or journals. I use them for proofing, editing, and alpha and beta reading. Today, I’m editing.
I’m still editing the manuscript for Needle’s Edge. When I finish a scene or a chapter, I run it through several AI platforms – the usual suspects: ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Meta, DeepSeek and Gemini – with a simple prompt:
how does this scene read?
Usually, I copy-paste the content, but this manuscript also relies on presentment, so I share a screen capture instead. Rather than share the pages, I share the line I am discussing here:
Image: Excerpted line from Needle’s Edge
From this, DeepSeek shared this as part of its “thinking” process.
The writing style is very visceral and fragmented – short sentences, intentional misspellings (“c-noses” for cash, “waigh” for might), and stream-of-consciousness elements. This creates an immersive, uncomfortable reading experience that mirrors Sarah’s physical and emotional state.
Interestingly, there were no intentional misspellings. DeepSeek’s OCR failed and mistook ‘c-notes’ for ‘c-noses’, and then tried to interpret the results. I couldn’t determine where it got ‘waigh’. There is a word ‘might’ per its comment, but I don’t see how it confuses that. No matter.
Still, its assessment feels close enough, and a reminder that grammar and syntax are less important than one might (waight?) believe.
Overall Impression:
The scene is powerfully distressing. It doesn’t glamorize or moralize; it simply shows the brutal, day-to-day reality of addiction and survival on the margins. It’s effective in conveying:
Physical Horrors: The relentless pain, discomfort, and bodily damage.
Psychological Toll: The desperation, numbness, fleeting panic, and dangerous denial.
Social Environment: The hostility, degradation, danger, and shared, traumatic knowledge of the street life.
Hopelessness: The cycle of seeking relief only to encounter worse consequences, underscored by the memory of others’ fates and the resigned “never again” that likely won’t hold.
It’s a difficult read due to its unflinching portrayal of suffering and decay, but it’s compelling in its raw authenticity and visceral impact. The style perfectly matches the content, immersing the reader in Sarah’s painful, precarious world.
I’m taking a break from editing to share something about the protagonist in my latest novel-in-progress, Needle’s Edge. She’s a woman – yes, but not just. She’s a prostitute. She’s an addict. And she’s three people.
There’s Sarah, her given name. The name reserved for friends, family, and those rare few who know her without conditions. It’s the name she hears in moments of tenderness, or shame, or memory.
Then there’s Stacey, the escort, the stripper, the performer. This is the name on her ads. The one whispered in hotel rooms and shouted in clubs. Stacey is curated. Sexual. Selective. She knows what sells and how to sell it.
And then there’s Pink, the street persona. The user. Pink is who shows up when Sarah needs to score. She trades in slang and silence. She wears a different skin. A different currency.
Three names. One woman. No seams showing – if she can help it.
In her world, compartmentalisation is survival. If a dealer connects the dots and knows she’s an escort, she’s vulnerable. If a client finds out she’s using, her value drops. Appearances are everything. Rates depend on it. Reputation is a balancing act on a razor’s edge. And so each name carries its own set of rules, risks, and rituals.
But here’s the deeper cut: Who’s the “real” Sarah?
Is Stacey fake? Is Pink less than? Is Sarah just the base layer beneath the makeup and muscle memory?
They’re all her. None of them. Some of each. Identity is slippery.
The left hemisphere of the brain craves coherence. It wants simplicity, categories, reduction. But the truth is, identity is a heuristic. A convenient fiction. And Sarah, more than most, knows this. Where most people perform one role and pretend it’s a self, she splits hers openly. She curates them. Manages them. Leverages them.
And yet, the cost is high.
Stacey and Pink are exhausting. High maintenance. High risk. But being Sarah isn’t a comfort either. It’s just what’s left when the others are stripped away. She doesn’t retreat into Sarah so much as collapse into her.
In that way, Sarah isn’t a self – she’s a default.
The irony? For all this agency, for all her awareness, she’s still trapped in identities designed for consumption. For transaction. For escape. Whether it’s sex, drugs, or memory, she’s always negotiating something.
Ridley Park 