Needle’s Edge – Ridley Park

Needle’s Edge: Pregnancy Continuity

August 30, 2025August 30, 2025Posted in Book, Needle's Edge, Status Update, WritingTagged books, continuity, editing, editing workflow, fiction, indie author, manuscript continuity, narrative structure, Needle’s Edge, novel, novel editing, pregnancy, pregnancy timeline, Ridley Park, scene revision, Writing, writing processLeave a comment

As per my recent post, I need a sanity break. I’ve been editing Needle’s Edge all day. Each time I hit a milestone, I consider drafting a blog post, but then I choose to persist. Not this time.

I’ve been untangling the spaghetti of a misplaced – or rather, overextended – pregnancy. It had stretched on for too long, so I weeded out contradictory events. Some of these had dependencies, so I relocated or eliminated them to preserve flow.

In the process, I re-oriented her conception date and reset any foreshadowing that tied into it. To keep myself honest, I started tracking her progress in the manuscript with markers: <p=X>. With each time-specific event, I increment X.

So far, I’ve reviewed 24 sequential scenes, not counting the half-dozen relocated ones I had to rework just enough to maintain continuity. This leaves the protagonist at 29 weeks. That also meant pruning irrelevant references, for instance, cutting any mention of pregnancy before it even began.

Being a typical human pregnancy, my target is 38 to 40 weeks. That leaves me with another 10-odd weeks to rummage through. Once I’ve untangled the draft, I still need to return for line edits, colour, and shape.

Editing is often pitched as polishing, but sometimes it’s surgery. Today, I’ve been elbows-deep in the operating theatre.

Needle’s Edge: Narrative Origami

August 29, 2025August 29, 2025Posted in Book, Needle's Edge, WritingTagged author blog, book editing grind, books, deep flashback, editing, fiction, fiction editing challenges, flashback, in medias res, Inception style storytelling, literary fiction, narrative experimentation, narrative structure, Needle’s Edge, novel, novel editing, postmodern storytelling, Ridley Park, story structure diagram, Writing, writing process, writing tropes1 Comment

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.

Trainspotting Takes Over

August 22, 2025Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, ChatGPT, Generative AI, review, Ridley Park, Setting, Status Update, WritingTagged addiction literature, ai, American East Coast, autofiction, book review, books, comparative literature, contemporary novels, Delaware, dialect and vernacular, drug culture, feminist classics, fiction, Generative AI, Irvine Welsh, literary fiction, literature, Needle’s Edge, novel, Philadelphia, postmodern writing, raw narrative voice, reading, Ridley Park, Scottish fiction, Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Trainspotting, Writing1 Comment

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.

Video: Discussing Needle’s Edge, Part 1

August 15, 2025Posted in Book, Interview, Needle's Edge, Ridley Park, Video, Writing, YouTubeTagged addiction, anthropologist perspective, author interview, behind the scenes writing, Bukowski influence, code switching, contemporary fiction, literary realism, middle class myth, Needle’s Edge, noir elements, novel in progress, personae, philosophy in fiction, Ridley Park, sex work, Simone de Beauvoir, social commentary, subverting tropes, urban grit, writing process1 Comment

Some novels are born in a lightning bolt. Needle’s Edge was forged in sediment: years of observations, contradictions, and lived experience settling into something that could no longer be ignored.

Video: Author Ridley Park Discusses Needle’s Edge

The video is intentionally, if not mercifully, short for all parties considered; it comes in under five minutes.

From the description:

Needle’s Edge is Ridley Park’s latest novel-in-progress, a raw, unvarnished work of literary realism with grit under its nails and philosophy in its bloodstream.

In this first episode of a new series on my writing process, I unpack the origins of Needle’s Edge: from life between the vantage point of an anthropologist and the poetry of Bukowski, to lived experience inside the worlds of sex work, addiction, and the quiet economies of trust and betrayal.

I reflect on the shift from speculative fiction to a tethered, reality-bound narrative, a story that rejects morality tales, subverts tropes, and meets its protagonist, Sarah, in the middle of her life before looping back to her beginnings. Along the way, he weaves in themes from Simone de Beauvoir, explores personae and code-switching, and interrogates the myths of middle-class respectability.

This is not a documentary – twenty years of lived history are compressed into five – but it’s true in its bones. Join me as he begins peeling back the layers of Needle’s Edge and the philosophy that drives it.

Needle’s Edge: Scene Feedback 01

August 4, 2025Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, critique, deepseek, Generative AI, Needle's Edge, review, Ridley Park, Software, WritingTagged addiction fiction, ai, AI editing, AI writing tools, author workflow, books, cognitive bias, editing, fiction, Generative AI, gritty fiction, Hubert Selby Jr., immersive prose, literary fiction, Midjourney cover art, Needle’s Edge, novel, psychological realism, Ridley Park, sex work in fiction, Speculative Fiction, Trainspotting style, trauma narrative, Writing, writing process1 Comment

1–2 minutes

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.

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Ridley Park