I was feeling smug. Fourth revision pass. Plot matrix built. Columns for chapter, scene, POV, date, time, location, word count, and emotional arc – because I’m that kind of monster. I even added colour-coding.
And it worked. Mostly.
After pruning and polishing, it finally felt ready to ship. Just a couple cosmetic tweaks. A trim here, a varnish there. Run a lint roller over the dialogue. Call it done.
Except.
The matrix – traitorous little bastard – exposed a structural fault so elegant I’d almost admired it. The problem? Pregnancy. Not mine, the protagonist’s. (Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)
Turns out, I’d compressed over a decade of real-life events into two years of narrative space. Bold. Efficient. Reckless. I’d wrung out the filler, reshuffled a few puzzle pieces, and declared the thing plausible.
Only it wasn’t.
When I sorted the scenes chronologically, the matrix coughed. The story broke like a cheap lawn chair. There she was: visibly pregnant while also, somehow, gallivanting about in scenes that would’ve required a different physiology entirely. Not an Olympian, but the metaphor holds.
And that’s when it hit me: time may be a flat circle, but gestation is not. No amount of POV tricks or narrative backflips can make a third-trimester body do first-trimester things. Biology, the ultimate killjoy.
So now I’m doing surgery. Not delicate surgery, either. I’m sawing out whole sections, rebuilding connective tissue, and laying down scar tissue where the timeline used to be. I’ll need new plot scaffolding to support the pregnancy and its repercussions. It’s fine. It’s good. It’s hell.
This is revision. We go in thinking we’re buffing up the finish, only to discover we paved over a sinkhole.
I’m reading The Second Sex. It’s a story of women, about women, for women, and by a woman—but it’s also a story of otherness.
This post isn’t about that book.
It’s a reflection on a premise within it: that woman is a cultural construction.
Written in 1949, before the language of gender identity emerged, Beauvoir’s work distinguishes “female” as biological sex and “woman” as imposed gender. But this post isn’t about that either.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
A Novel Possibility
This is about a seed of an idea—one that took root while reading—and the novel it might become.
A near-future world. Shaped not by vengeance, utopia, or techno-salvation. But by a quiet unravelling of power itself.
It is not a story of triumph. Nor of ruin. It is the aftermath of both.
After Collapse, Reconstitution
When extractive systems—ecological, economic, ideological—collapse, society does not revert, rebuild, or resist. It reconstitutes.
Not as hierarchy repainted in pastel. Not as hive-mind in harmony drag.
But as a resonant ecology: A decentralised, cooperative, post-Enlightenment culture in which traditional male-coded traits—dominance, control, instrumental reason—have become maladaptive relics.
What Rises
The values that rise—attunement, memory, restraint, emotional literacy—are neither glorified nor enforced. They are simply what works now.
This is not a matriarchy. Not a revenge fantasy. Not feminism cast in steel and slogans.
It’s a structural inversion: A world in which those trained for dominance find themselves culturally disarmed— While the formerly subordinate, at last, inhabit a society scaled to their sensibilities.
No Brain, No Throne
There is no single ideology. No central brain. No throne.
Power does not pool. It diffuses—like mycelium beneath a forest.
Language shifts. Leadership evaporates. Progress, once a sacred cow, is now met with suspicion.
Not out of fear of change, But for love of equilibrium.
Still, Tensions Remain
A generation raised in scarcity seeks to anchor stillness. A younger one, born amid calm, yearns for momentum.
Outside the collective, remnants of the old world stir— Confused. Indignant. Armed.
And within, a few still long to lead.
These tensions are not resolved by war. Nor suppressed by force.
This is not a tale of rebellion or revolution. But of repatterning. And its cost.
Tone: Literary. Spare. Sensory realism.
Influences: Atwood, Le Guin, Ishiguro, Butler.
Conflict: Emotional. Ideological. Structural.
Message: A level playing field was always a myth. The tilt now favours something new.
What Comes After
The question isn’t how to stop the old world from returning. The question is whether it ever really left— and if so, what takes its place.
I’ve got a bone to pick with Claire Fraise, dammit. I’ve lost 2 days I’ll never get back — including the time it’s taking me to create this post.
Claire shared a YouTube video on using plot grids for your writing process. Being me and heeding her advice, I decided to create a plot grid – I call it a plot matrix; same thing – for a project I am editing.
Video: What is a plot grid?
I should probably create a video response, but I didn’t have even more time to lose.
Full Disclosure: By lose time, I don’t want to imply by any means that this is wasted time.
Since the plot matrix I created is for an unpublished manuscript, I decided to create one for the first chapter of my published book, Sustenance. It contains two sections or scenes.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
I’ll share the process I used and reference the Excel document I created. Download it if you’d like to follow along.
After the explanations, I’ll discuss how I use ChatGPT to help me with this, as well as some challenges you may wish to be aware of.
Below is a screenshot of a portion of the plot matrix.
Image: Portion of plot matrix
I’ll start by sharing the column headers and a brief explanation of what each means. Some should be obvious, but I’ll describe them as well.
Narrative Order: The order a scene appears in the manuscript.
Chronological Order: The sequence in which events occur in story-time, enabling tracking of flashbacks or non-linear jumps.
Sentiment: A numerical indicator of the scene’s emotional tone, from deeply negative (–5) to strongly positive (+5).
Chapter: The chapter or section title in which the scene appears.
Plot Points: A summary of key events, revelations, or decisions that occur in the scene.
Time: When the scene takes place, whether exact or relative (e.g., “early morning,” “flashback,” “six months later”).
Primary Characters in Scene: The characters actively driving or anchoring the scene.
Secondary Characters in Scene: Important but less central characters who influence or are present in the scene.
Minor Characters in Scene: Tertiary figures mentioned or briefly appearing without narrative weight.
Word Count: The number of words in the scene, useful for pacing and balance.
Emotional Beat/Theme: The scene’s dominant emotional tone or thematic current (e.g., betrayal, longing, discovery).
Emotional State: The internal condition or affective register of the POV character(s) during the scene.
Scene Function: What the scene accomplishes narratively (e.g., exposition, climax, setup, reversal).
Character Arc: How a character is developing, stagnating, or regressing within the scene.
External Stakes: The tangible, real-world risks or consequences present in the scene.
Internal Stakes: The emotional, psychological, or relational consequences at play.
Needs Clarification?: A flag to indicate whether a scene contains confusing elements or ambiguous logic.
Revision Priority: A ranking of how urgently the scene needs refinement.
Conflict Type: The dominant form of conflict (e.g., internal, interpersonal, systemic, environmental).
Turning Point?: Whether the scene marks a key reversal or decision point in the narrative.
Turning Point Direction: Indicates the shift’s trajectory (positive, negative, neutral, ambiguous).
Direction Commentary: A brief rationale for how and why the narrative tone or direction changes.
Reinforces: Themes, motifs, or ideas the scene strengthens.
Undermines: Themes or ideas the scene weakens, contradicts, or questions.
Reveals: New information, secrets, or understandings brought to light.
Conceals: Key details or truths the scene deliberately withholds.
Distorts: Misunderstandings, biases, or unreliable elements introduced.
Inverts: Role, expectation, or thematic reversals subverted in the scene.
Echoes: Recurrent phrases, images, or patterns from earlier scenes or motifs.
Revision Commentary: Notes on potential rewrites, improvements, or cautions.
Punch List: Specific edits or action items needed in revision.
Resolved?: Whether the scene’s tension, question, or arc has been closed.
Location: Where the scene is physically set—important for continuity, blocking, and worldbuilding.
Iowa: Opening Scene
Narrative Order: The order a scene appears in the manuscript.
I am tracking scenes/sections rather than chapters because that’s the way I’ve organised the manuscript. I want to capture the smalled logical element of the story.
Being a spreadsheet, I need to keep track of the sections, so I give each scene a number. In this case, we are looking at section 1 of the narrative order, the first section a reader encounters.
Chronological Order: The sequence in which events occur in story-time, enabling tracking of flashbacks or non-linear jumps.
This manuscript has no flashbacks at this point, so the sequencing tracks 1-to-1. In the manuscript I am editing, it starts in media res, and there are two large jumps back and forth in time.
Being in a spreadsheet table, I can sort the story by narrative or chronology, which helps me track logical progressions that I might miss otherwise.
Sentiment: A numerical indicator of the scene’s emotional tone, from deeply negative (–5) to strongly positive (+5).
I like to track sentiment, so I can provide emotional dynamics to the reader. I don’t want to come across as bleak or euphoric for extended periods.
By this scale, 0 is neutral, -5 is gawdawful, and +5 is over the moon.
In these first two scenes, the protagonist, Kenny, is tracking just under baseline to neutral. Nothing much is happening emotionally, as we are just establishing the place.
Chapter: The chapter or section title in which the scene appears.
The name of this chapter is Iowa.
Plot Points: A summary of key events, revelations, or decisions that occur in the scene.
In scene 1, we have this:
Narrator establishes his identity, location, and tone.
Mentions girl, Bruce’s death, and being misunderstood.
Foreshadows larger story.
Time: When the scene takes place, whether exact or relative (e.g., “early morning,” “flashback,” “six months later”).
We are in the now.
Retrospective/Near-Present
Primary Characters in Scene: The characters actively driving or anchoring the scene.
This is a first-person, present, limited, deep POV story, so Kenny is one with the narrator.
Secondary Characters in Scene: Important but less central characters who influence or are present in the scene.
Kenny is just setting up the scene, and he mentions two secondary characters:
Bruce (mentioned)
‘Her’ (mentioned)
My preference is to scope the characters globally. This means that if some character interacts with a significant character but doesn’t appear elsewhere, I’ll consider them to be a tertiary or minor character. Some writers prefer to track these characters at a scene level. This is a personal preference.
Minor Characters in Scene: Tertiary figures mentioned or briefly appearing without narrative weight.
These are incidental characters that you might want to track in case you want to expand or adjust them.
Jake (mentioned)
narrator’s dad (mentioned)
Word Count: The number of words in the scene, useful for pacing and balance.
These are two short scenes: 247 and 502 words.
Emotional Beat/Theme: The scene’s dominant emotional tone or thematic current (e.g., betrayal, longing, discovery).
What’s going on here? Am I conveying what I aim to?
Isolation, defensiveness, curiosity
Belonging vs alienation; repetition vs rupture
Emotional State: The internal condition or affective register of the POV character(s) during the scene.
What’s the POV character feeling?
Guarded, nostalgic, lonely
Resigned, mildly boastful, reflective
Scene Function: What the scene accomplishes narratively (e.g., exposition, climax, setup, reversal).
Why does this scene exist? If it doesn’t serve a purpose, get rid of it, or give it one. Make sure every scene builds on characters or advances the plot.
Narrator introduction; frame story establishment; tonally primes the reader
Establishes rural setting, background on narrator’s world and connections, foreshadows disruption
Character Arc: How a character is developing, stagnating, or regressing within the scene.
Again, ensure your characters(s) have movement. In this story, there are several characters with an arc, but Kenny is the only one being tracked thus far. Being the start of the story, the question is, where does he go from here?
Establishes base-level insecurity masked by bravado
Solidifies narrator’s self-image and history within town hierarchy
External Stakes: The tangible, real-world risks or consequences present in the scene.
What external considerations might the character be making in this scene, whether they do or don’t do something?
Implied social stigma or alienation
Community perception and social standing
Internal Stakes: The emotional, psychological, or relational consequences at play.
What internal considerations might the character be making in this scene, whether they do or don’t do something?
Fear of being misunderstood or blamed
Fear of irrelevance, unresolved identity
Needs Clarification?: A flag to indicate whether a scene contains confusing elements or ambiguous logic.
When sketching a scene idea, you may have unresolved loose ends that you either need to tie up in the scene or somewhere else. Usually, this is more interested in making sure a reader doesn’t leave the scene confused — unless, of course, this is your intent.
Revision Priority: A ranking of how urgently the scene needs refinement.
This is important in a reviewing/editing phase. As you are cleaning up your manuscript, are there massive holes that need to be plugged, or might this just need some minor refinements?
Conflict Type: The dominant form of conflict (e.g., internal, interpersonal, systemic, environmental).
This could be a post of its own, so I won’t belabour the issue here. Readers like conflict. It gives something to resolve. Is this conflict related to the person, their past, another person, their environment, society, and so on? Document it here. Several conflicts make for more complex characters and stories.
Internal (identity, credibility)
Internal (identity vs environment)
Turning Point?: Whether the scene marks a key reversal or decision point in the narrative.
In this case, the first scene has now; the second does.
No
Yes
Turning Point Direction: Indicates the shift’s trajectory (positive, negative, neutral, ambiguous).
If there is a turning point, what’s the direction? A stable or lateral vector is fine.
None
Foreshadows disruption
Direction Commentary: A brief rationale for how and why the narrative tone or direction changes.
If there is a shift in direction, what is it? This might help to orient you when scanning, so you can know in the scene where to edit.
None
Last line (“Until that day”) subtly transitions from ordinary routine into impending change
This next section captures how the scene functions from several perspectives.
Reinforces: Themes, motifs, or ideas the scene strengthens.
Undermines: Themes or ideas the scene weakens, contradicts, or questions.
I like to subvert tropes and expectations as well as make social commentary, so this can be informative for me. In this case, I want to depict these things in a different light.
Traditional heroic framing
Romanticisation of small-town life
Reveals: New information, secrets, or understandings brought to light.
What does this scene reveal?
Setting, tone, perspective
Social fabric of the town, Kenny’s values and limitations
Conceals: Key details or truths the scene deliberately withholds.
In the first scene, I mention matter-of-factly,
Real details of Bruce’s death and who ‘she’ is
The event that disrupted the routine
So the reader knows there’s a “Bruce” and a “she,” but who they are remains to be seen. And Bruce died. How?
Distorts: Misunderstandings, biases, or unreliable elements introduced.
This is getting more nitpicky, but sometimes I like to obscur some things?
Narrator’s reliability and possible biases
Self-perception vs actual social role
Is this a reliable narrator? Even if he wants to be, is his perception accurate?
Inverts: Role, expectation, or thematic reversals subverted in the scene.
I like to subvert tropes and expectations here, too. This can also be used to intentionally have a character act out of character.
Traditional ‘boy meets girl’ trope
The classic “tight-knit community” mythos
Echoes: Recurrent phrases, images, or patterns from earlier scenes or motifs.
Early on, this most captures echoes of the external world, as this does. Later on, a scene might echo (and perhaps amplify) a prior scene.
Small-town fatalism
American nostalgia, masculine banality
Revision Commentary: Notes on potential rewrites, improvements, or cautions.
Here, the AI gods advise me to streamline these scenes, but I answer to no gods. 😉
Could trim repetition or streamline internal monologue for pacing
Minor streamlining of “rural inventory” might improve pacing without losing tone
Punch List: Specific edits or action items needed in revision.
If there are revisions to be made, capture them here, so you’ll remember what you were thinking about when you suggested a revision. In this case, the reminder is the same. Too late, it’s already published.
None
Possibly trim town description repetition
Resolved?: Whether the scene’s tension, question, or arc has been closed.
In both case, the answer here is no. Being an opening scene, hopefully, this open issues and questions – unless you prefer to resolve everything immediately.
Location: Where the scene is physically set—important for continuity, blocking, and worldbuilding.
This is setting information. This will be more helpful in a complex environment. In this case, there’s not a lot to say. He’s on his front porch step, rambling away about his town and his story.
Iowa, unspecified small town
Iowa, narrator’s town and neighbouring town
ChatGPT and Plot Matrices
After completing my manuscript, say a first draft, I feed it into a ChatGPT project. Then I run this prompt.
Let's use this format. I'll provide the value of (X). From where we are, Narrative and Chronological orders have converged and will remain so. They are equal to Row ID - 1. I'll use Row ID (X) as a reference marker.
Row ID (2), Narrative Order (), Chronological Order (), Sentiment, (Integer: Range between -5 and +5), Chapter (Iowa), Plot Points, Time, Primary Characters in Scene, Secondary Characters in Scene, Minor Characters in Scene, Word Count (247), Emotional Beat/Theme, Emotional State, Scene Function, Character Arc, External Stakes, Internal Stakes, Needs Clarification?, Revision Priority, Conflict Type, Turning Point?, Turning Point Direction, Direction Commentary, Reinforces, Undermines, Reveals, Conceals, Distorts, Inverts, Echoes, Revison Commentary, Punch List, Resolved?, Location
I know you’ve heard this before.
Boy meets girl. Different places. Different cultures.
Not quite Romeo and Juliet. Not yet, anyway.
It could’ve been Nebraska. Montana. Oklahoma.
But it wasn’t. We’re in Iowa.
I remember the first time I saw her—or saw them.
But I want to talk about her.
And yes, the misunderstanding.
But I’ll get to that. Don’t rush me.
Everyone wants to hear about how Bruce died.
Another misunderstanding. These things happen.
It wasn’t her fault.
It wasn’t mine.
I wasn’t even there.
But she was. And he was.
Let’s go back to the start.
It was over a year ago.
A bit before that.
But first, let’s set the facts straight. I’m a
regular guy. Graduated high school. Not some conspiracy theorist, if that’s what you’re thinking.
Never left Iowa. Not even for college. The furthest
I’ve been’s Jake’s and the flea market a couple towns West. I know this place the way some folks know scripture—by scent, not verse. The way the soybean dust hits your throat during harvest. The way old barn wood smells after rain.
I believe in Jesus, but I’m not one of those Jesus freaks. Don’t paint me with that broad brush.
And I’m not one of them incels either. I’ve had girls. I’ll tell you about Jake’s. I even had a girlfriend for a few weeks, but it didn’t work out. A guy needs some space. That’s all. I’m sure you know what I mean.
I find that ChatGPT isn’t great tracking within larger documents, so I’ll pass in a section at a time, as shown above. This is the first scene of the first chapter of Substance.
Noticing that this scene sets up a flashback to a year in the past, the narrative and chronological order values should differ. Since this is just an example, I hope you learn from my mistakes. Also, I’d reorder the columns next time, but I created this prompt in steps as I progressed.
You need to be careful about what AI outputs. Don’t take it all at face value. If you incorporate a lot of nuance or subtext, the AI will likely miss the point. AI is a low-context system. Most communication in the West (notably excepting the South in the United States) is high-context.
High-context cultures rely heavily on shared understanding, nonverbal cues, and implied meaning—much is left unsaid because context fills in the gaps. Low-context cultures prioritise explicit, direct communication where meaning is made clear through words, not assumptions.
The AI picks out the plot points from your passage. This is usually uncontroversial.
The way ChatGPT uses Time could be better. This is almost an extension of the setting. What I was initially hoping for in my more complex story is a method to ensure my timeline wasn’t convoluted. I didn’t want to have a pregnancy delivery flashback to a conception two weeks earlier – unless that is an intentional plot point… or we’re talking about flies or something.
I find that some of the scene descriptions are a bit suss, but you can tweak them if they are too far off target. To be fair, you can share your manuscript with a dozen readers and get a dozen renditions – none of them in line with your own. It happens.
I commented on the Revision Commentary earlier. Just like a human editor, you can take or leave the advice. In the end, the writing is that of the author.
In many cases, you can ask the AI to elaborate: What do you mean it’s too long? or some such.
Or you can explain your intent. For example, I wrote another book and intentionally left it open-ended. The AI came back with, What happened?
I explained that the reader could draw their own conclusions, and the AI came into line.
One parting thought: You may pass the same passage through the same AI several times and get several outputs. They aren’t usually diametric, but be aware of this. Also, if you run this on Claude, Perplexity, or another platform, your results might vary there, too.
Anyway, if you got this far, what did you think? Do you use pilot grids? Do you use AI to assist in your editing? I use AI for research. Do you? Some people use AI for writing. I’m not as keen on this, but I’m not judging.
I, Ridley Park, am an independent author and publisher. Before this literary turn, I did time as an economist, business analyst, and management consultant – none of which prepared me for the peculiar economics of modern publishing.
Much like traditional music in the Digital Age, traditional publishing has lost a bit of its lustre. Its gatekeeping function remains, but the gates are now rusted, and half the guards have been made redundant.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
From a business standpoint, the Independent™ must ask: Is the distribution reach of a traditional publisher or third-party distributor worth the revenue share they demand? It’s tempting to cast them as parasites feeding off your creative lifeblood—but statistically, the average indie author sells only 60 copies of their book. Yes, that includes the five you bought yourself and the ten your mum distributed among reluctant neighbours.
Could you sell more than average? Possibly. Less? Almost certainly. Better to sell 100 copies and earn a pittance than to earn 100% of nothing. But if the publisher can’t move your book either, and if they’re not investing in you as an author, you may well find yourself in the red. Especially if you’re the one paying them for the privilege of being published. That’s not publishing – that’s vanity cosplay.
Publishers also offer (read: upsell) services like editing, formatting, and cover design. As an Independent™, you either pay for these à la carte or do them yourself. Or, if you’re like me, you cobble together a mixed strategy of DIY, AI, and professional outsourcing – whatever the project demands.
For Hemo Sapiens, I did everything except the typography for the title and byline on the cover. That part I outsourced; I know my limits. The rest – cover composition, layout, typesetting – I handled. I also brought in beta readers, who offered some valuable copyedits and corrections.
With Sustenance, I went end-to-end solo, with AI in the wings for flow and proofing support.
Propensity followed a similar path – except I made the rare (some might say perverse) choice of hiring a beta reader after release. Heretical, I know. But the feedback was so incisive I’m now considering a mid-edition revision, particularly in the middle third, where things get a bit heady.
As for Temporal Babel – still unreleased – I’ve done everything myself thus far, but I’m leaning toward bringing that same beta reader back for another round of bruising clarity.
Beta readers, it turns out, are worth their weight in snark and red ink. I’ll save my ruminations on them for another post, which I promise will be full of revelations and at least one semi-poetic lament.
I could say more here, but there are other things demanding my time – and no publisher breathing down my neck.
Bless MidJourney for the cover art based on this prompt:
beautiful woman wearing glasses and a sheer top, holding a red pen, reading a book, office setting
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.
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.
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.
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.
If Propensity was about engineered peace through probabilistic compliance, Sustenance asks what happens when understanding itself breaks down—and nothing you think is mutual, is.
No war. No invasion. No end-of-days. Just a quiet landing. And a failure to translate.
The Premise
A group of non-human beings arrive—not in conquest, not in friendship, but in continuity. They are not like us. They do not see like us. They don’t even mean like us.
There is no universal translator. No welcome committee.
Just humans—interpreting through projection, desire, and confusion.
And aliens—operating by a logic that doesn’t require interpretation.
The Themes
Sustenance explores what happens when:
Language fails and nothing fills the gap
Consent becomes guesswork
Culture is mistaken for nature
Property has no meaning, and law no parallel
Sex isn’t private, sacred, violent—or even especially enjoyable
Memory becomes narrative, and narrative becomes defence
Contact isn’t miraculous—it’s awkward, biological, and quietly irreversible
This is a story about misunderstanding. Not just what others mean—but who we are when we assume we understand anything at all.
The Tone
Think Arrival but rural. Annihilation without the shimmer.
A bit of VanderMeer. A hint of Flannery O’Connor. The cornfields are real. The discomfort is earned.
No apocalypse.
Just a failure to process.
And maybe, something new inside the gap that opens when the old stories no longer apply.
Why Write This?
Because contact doesn’t have to be violent to be destabilising.
Because not all miscommunication is linguistic—some is anatomical.
Because the most alien thing we can encounter is ourselves, misinterpreted.
Because I wanted to write a story where the question isn’t “what do they want?” but “what have we already assumed?”
A note from Ridley Park on behaviour, control, and the illusion of peace.
Well, it’s out. Propensity has officially launched.
This one’s been brewing for a while. If Sustenance asked what happens when we can’t understand each other, Propensity asks what happens when we stop needing to.
No invasion. No superintelligence. No overt dystopia. Just a device—quietly implemented—that modulates human behaviour through neurochemical cues. Less anger. Less risk. Less faith, libido, disobedience. More calm. More compliance. More… nothing.
And nobody notices. Because the best control doesn’t look like control.
The Premise
Imagine a world where we solve violence—not through laws, treaties, or education—but by dampening the neurological signals that make people aggressive in the first place. You don’t choose peace. Peace is chosen for you, chemically. You just comply.
That’s the Propensity Device: a system designed not to control what you do, but to shift what you’re likely to do. Your odds of revolt drop. Your odds of submission rise. It’s not sedative. It’s statistical.
Free will doesn’t vanish. It just stops being statistically significant.
The Themes
The novel explores what happens when:
Free will is reframed as background noise
Consent is irrelevant because no one thinks to object
Violence becomes programmable—but only directionally
Peace is achieved without ideology, meaning, or narrative
Narrative itself becomes residue
There’s horror in here, but it’s not loud. It’s administrative. Institutional. Clean.
The horror of things working exactly as designed.
The Tone
Think Black Mirror but less sensational. Think Ballard after a lobotomy.
A dash of Ligotti. A flicker of DeLillo. A long stare from Atwood. Propensity is soft dystopia—flattened, not broken.
And yes, there’s a fall. But it’s not a collapse. It’s an asymptote. A tapering. A loss of signal fidelity. A kind of surrender.
Why Write This?
Because we’re already doing it.
Because behavioural nudge theory isn’t fiction.
Because control doesn’t need to be malicious—just implemented.
Because some of the worst horrors are quiet, polite, and empirically validated.
Because I wanted to ask: what if peace worked too well?
Now Available
You can get Propensity on Amazon and other booksellers.
If you do read it—thank you. If you don’t, that’s alright. The system will keep humming either way.
