Simone de Beauvoir – Ridley Park

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.

On Goodreads, Social Media, and Not Giving a Toss About What You’re Reading

August 1, 2025August 1, 2025Posted in critique, Ridley Park, WritingTagged AI book recommendations, book review, book trends backlash, book-reviews, books, BookTok critique, Dostoevsky, fiction, Foucault, genre fiction fatigue, goodreads, Goodreads alternatives, Goodreads vs Amazon, literary taste, mood-based reading, nonfiction reader, original writing, quitting Goodreads, reader isolation, reading, reading and introverts, reading habits of writers, reading philosophy, Simone de Beauvoir, social media detox, social reading fatigue, tolstoy, WritingLeave a comment

I watched this video this morning: Why I Quit Goodreads. Apparently, people are fleeing Goodreads like it’s a sinking ship. Frankly, I didn’t realise they’d ever boarded.

Video: Why I Quit Goodreads by Alison Reads Books

I’ve used Goodreads for years. Not out of love – habit. I was on another platform before Amazon bought both and quietly euthanised the lesser one. So, like any good digital serf, I migrated. Goodreads never really improved. But that’s not what this post is about.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/32XALXA0hGNxNNTW6QUeti?si=9ZRpCnSiSVG_yOcU8l5o8A

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

The woman in the video, Alison, recounts how she got sucked into the vortex of reading-as-performance. A treadmill of trending titles, five-star pressure, and dopamine farming. In short: social media with spines. She, like me, identifies as an introvert. Social media, she says, offered connection on her terms.

Fine. But here’s where we part ways: I don’t read what’s popular. I read like I write: deliberately, slowly, and mostly alone. I don’t care what the hive is reading. I don’t follow BookTok. I’m not hunting genre tropes like Pokémon. I’m not even watching telly.

That’s not snobbery. That’s filtration.

Yes, I read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, not because they’re trending, but because they have staying power. I read Beauvoir and Foucault, not because they’re fashionable, but because they dismantle the very notion of fashion.

Ironically, AI has been more useful to me than Goodreads ever was. I ask it about tropes, continuity, and which authors my work resembles. Sometimes, it throws out a name I don’t know. So I investigate. If I see a resonance, great; I might lean in or veer away. Not because I want to copy, but because “originality” is a fairytale. Everything is recombinant DNA, literary or otherwise.

I’ve read friend recommendations. Mixed results. Often disastrous. I don’t care how many millions adore The Hunger Games, or William Gibson, or Taylor bloody Swift. That’s not an insult; it’s a mismatch. Their work just doesn’t speak to me. And that’s the point of art, it’s not for everyone.

Because of this, I’ve grown wary of recommendations. I no longer approach them with hope; I approach them like a suspicious mushroom in a stranger’s risotto.

So why do I still use Goodreads? To track what I’ve read and, occasionally, write reviews…for myself. If others find those reviews useful, great. If Goodreads’ recommendation engine serves up a gem, brilliant; but it rarely does. Algorithms don’t understand headspace. They see pattern, not mood.

I might binge Dostoevsky and Tolstoy one week, but that doesn’t mean I want a Russian lit syllabus. After Notes from Underground and The Death of Ivan Ilych, I finally cracked open The Second Sex – a book that’s loomed on my TBR like a monument.

Sometimes reading fuels my writing. Sometimes it stalls it. But unlike Alison, I never needed Goodreads to tell me who I am as a reader. And I sure as hell don’t need social media to validate my literary tastes.

If you’re quitting Goodreads because it became too performative, maybe you were never using it for the right reasons. Or maybe, like most platforms, it just stopped being fun once everyone else showed up.

About the cover image: “photo of a stereotypical punk rocker anarchist reading a book in a crowd of people staring at their mobile phones”

I’m not sure this Midjourney render captures much of the essence of my prompt, but there it is.

Needle’s Edge Cover Reveal

July 31, 2025July 31, 2025Posted in Art, Book, Character, Cover Art, Ridley Park, WritingTagged addiction, book blog, books, coming of age, contemporary fiction, cover reveal, developmental edit, editing, editing process, feminist literature, gender construction, literary fiction, marginalization, novel, podcast, prostitution, Ridley Park, Simone de Beauvoir, societal critique, structural violence, survival narrative, The Second Sex, trauma, upcoming novel, Writing1 Comment

I’m sharing a comp of the cover art* for my upcoming novel – a story about a prostitute. More accurately, it’s a story about prostitutes, addiction, survival, and the consequences of living at the periphery – not just of society, but of personhood itself.

The earliest notes I have are dated 2019. I finished the first draft in June. I’m now editing – both structurally and line by line, which is probably a bad idea, but here we are. Because I’m reorganising scenes, I need to ensure the transitions make sense, emotionally and narratively.

Since completing the draft, I’ve been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. First published in 1949, the edition I’m reading was translated in 2011. It’s given me language for something I was already trying to do.

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
— Simone de Beauvoir

This line is central to my approach. My protagonist isn’t born a prostitute. More importantly, she isn’t even born a woman. She’s made into one by church ladies, jealous sisters, careless boys, and indifferent systems. Through gestures, punishments, expectations, and neglect. Through the crucible of a society that offers her a script before she understands the stage.

Yes, her psychology matters. But the world matters more.

That’s what I’m trying to explore — not just the facts of a life on the edge, but the forces that shape it.

* I’ve actually designed two covers – one for hardcover and the other for paperback. It provides me with options.

Le deuxième sexe – What Rises After the Fall

July 18, 2025July 18, 2025Posted in Book, WritingTagged book review, books, cooperative future, cultural construction of woman, decentralised power, emotional literacy, feminist future fiction, feminist speculative fiction, fiction, gender and society, literary science fiction, matriarchy vs patriarchy, novel, philosophical fiction, podcast, post-capitalist culture, post-collapse world, post-Enlightenment society, power and otherness, resonance over dominance, Ridley Park blog, Science Fiction, Simone de Beauvoir, speculative novel concept, The Second Sex, utopia alternative, WritingLeave a comment

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.