I watched a YouTube video that referenced Hemingway App as an authors’ tool. Here, I pasted some sample content from Hemo Sapiens: Origins to see what it might suggest.
It’s a short passage, but the only things it found were trivial nits.
Highlighted, the complaint is that the top sentence (in yellow) is too complex, so I should break it up as shown in green. The only difference is that it swapped the semicolon with a full stop and capitalised the next letter to begin the next sentence. It also declared the Grade 11 writing sample to be reduced to Grade 6.
Is this really worth more than the free trial or the time and effort?
It highlighted two other related challenges: both adverbs, and neither with remediation advice. In the sceen shot, you can read ‘slightly crispy’. Honestly, I don’t have a more direct way to show this information. I suppose if it was ‘crispy’, I could specify a ‘crunch’ sound. But how is the crispy crunch diminished when it’s just ‘slightly’? Enquiring minds want to know.
So this happened. I submitted Hemo Sapiens: Awakening as an audiobook, and it was rejected. The site says that they’ll let me know why in a couple days. My question is: if you rejected it, don’t you immediately know why?
I think I know why, but I can’t ‘fix’ the problem if I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to act on an assumption.
I believe they’ll inform me that I can’t use AI-generated narration. This would be odd because they have a programme in Beta where they provide the service of automatically converting the text of a book to audio. To be honest, it doesn’t sound amazing. It appears that they are using their own Amazon Polly, which I like, but you need to babysit it hard. It is very unlikely to sound good without heavy hand-holding. As it is, I hand-held my ElevenLabs AI to make the outcome sound like a professional human.
Audible offers some voiceover actors, but I didn’t like any of them, and they couldn’t compete with my ElevenLabs voice. I can understand that they don’t want to sell audiobooks that sound like Stephen Hawking, but theirs sound closer to him than mine.
On another note, I had to render and upload square cover art. There was a stated restriction disallowing padding a rectangular cover image with space or colour to make it square. I followed this rule, but this is exactly what they do. They take the cover of the book you’re selling through Amazon, and they pad the left and right margins with filler colour. I may append the rationale they provide once I’ve received it. Until them, my audiobook is on hold.
If you are interested in Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, but you don’t want to commit your hard-earned shekels, the first four and a half chapters are available for FREE (woohoo). I mean, you’ll miss the best chapters, but what can I say. Dip your toe in the water.
If you have Kindle Unlimited, you can read the entire book for free. Sounds like a win-win to me. You are a winner, right?
Now that Hemo Sapiens: Awakening has been released into the wild, I can again focus on Hemo Sapiens: Origins. I started writing Origins a few weeks ago, but I was interrupted by the review and production process of Awakening.
In the world of Pantsers and Plotters, I tend to fall somewhere in between, but I favour plotting.
I write in Word. In the example above, you can see the working chapter titles, the year(s) a chapter covers and its starting page. Some of the chapters already contain preliminary copy.
As a writer, I don’t necessarily work chronologically. I find the chapters that are the most compelling and interesting to me. Then, I work down to the bridging chapters, hoping that the meat of the chapters penned earlier will support and inspire the later ones.
As I write, I usually create a ‘Boneyard’ chapter. This is where ideas go to incubate or die. Workable ideas are resurrected whilst others are laid to rest. Some ideas are like zombies, but at the end a project, they are either among the dead or living.
At the start, a chapter looks something like this. It’s a blend between ideas and story beats. Each chapter is outlined similarly. The other advantage this lends me is that I can *ahem* walk away from writing for a while and still have handholds and reminders when I return. For short fiction, I just write. No outlines. Perhaps just an idea to explore.
I’d like to thank the person in India who earned me $0.02 by reading 17 Kindle pages of Hemo Sapiens: Awakening. Reading on Kindle Unlimited is free—time aside. Read the whole book, and I’ve earned $0.50. In time, we’ll be as rich as astronauts.
The trailer advert for Hemo Sapiens: Awakening is now available on YouTube as a 60-second short.
I think I’ll stick to writing. The cover-making wasn’t half bad, but video production with Generative AI is not all it’s cracked up to be.
I considered Artlist.io, but I didn’t want to spend the cash. Maybe next time.
Let me know what you think. You can find a copy of the book from a link on my announcement page. If you get a copy, leave a review. It helps to appease the algorithm gods.
Here thee, hear thee. It’s about time. Hemo Sapiens: Awakening is finally published and available for purchase reading.
It’s been quite the journey. It started in August 2023 as a diversion from another project, but it ended up taking precedence.
Per the blurb on Amazon, the book is about this:
Genetically engineered and cloned in secret, the “Hemo Sapiens” have lived isolated on a farm in Manchester for decades—until their extraordinary nature is revealed.
Suddenly these “Bloodsucking Intelligent Humans” find themselves persecuted as dangerous outsiders. As hysteria escalates and mobs attack, the fiercely loyal and mostly innocent family fights for acceptance while struggling to find answers about their shadowy origins and uncertain destiny.
A genetics professor’s rash scientific revelation sets off an explosive chain reaction entangling ethics, prejudice and politics. At stake is nothing less than the family’s human rights—and what it truly means to belong.
Can these reluctant pioneers overcome fear to integrate into a society both fascinated and repulsed by their very existence? This thought-provoking saga confronts what diversity, progress and being human entail in an increasingly hostile, high-tech surveillance state that is meant to protect but may also oppress.
Amazon Marketing Blurb
The book currently available in many global regions as hard cover, paperback, or Kindle. I am currently working on the audiobook version, which should be available by March 2004.
For the sake of simplicity, below are links to the various marketplaces: Australia, Brasil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States. Not all formats are available in all regions. As of today, this is the availability.
Hard Cover
(ISBN: 979-8872481942, Case Laminate 6″ x 9″, gloss)
My first novel, Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, is locked and loaded. I’ve reviewed the digital proofs, and the physical copy should be arriving in the post in the next few days. I wasn’t willing to pay more to shave off a day.
I am publishing a paperback and case laminate hardcover. I ordered one of each to proof, but the hardcover has a 4 to 5 week delay, so I won’t bother. The paperback is the same interior content. I had to render a larger cover for the hardcover. Not because of the dust jacket—because there is none. They have to wrap some around the edges. The case laminate reminds me of grade school books, like Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. It feels a bit amateurish, but it doesn’t cost me more to set it up, so I figure why not.
It does cost more for materials and handling—almost double—, so I have to charge more and have lower margins. I’ll leave that for the reader to decide if the durability is worth it. I decided to take even smaller margins in ex-US markets just to have more even prices.
As it stands, the hardcover will be available for USD 20 and the paperback USD 12.99. This affords me room for promotional discounting later. In Europe, hardcover prices will be £15 and €18.
Paperback prices will be £10.21 (I know. Wierd.) and €11.75. There will also be APAC editions ¥1980 and AUD 20.99 (each including VAT). In Canada, it should cost CAD 15.
There’s a park outside London where the trees keep secrets and the air hums with untold stories. Nigel, a chap with calloused hands and a life measured in paycheques, stumbles upon a moment that’ll unravel him. A purse, unguarded on a bench, whispers temptation. He’s no thief, just a man cornered by circumstance.
The park, draped in the solemnity of dusk, watches as Nigel succumbs. He lifts the cash, a weight heavier than coins, and returns the purse to its owner, an elderly lady scattering crumbs for birds, her gaze lost in yesterdays.
It begins as a murmur on the wind. “I know what you’ve done,” whispers a disembodied voice. Nigel whirls around, searches the empty park in vain. He shakes off the words as a trick of his fraying mind.
But the voice persists, insidious as poison, relentless as the tide. Nigel wanders the park’s paths, and the leaves hiss with recrimination while shadows seem to lean in, heavy with judgment.
Reality blurs, the line between guilt and madness thinning. Nigel confides in a mate over a pint, his voice taut with fear and disbelief. “I’m hearing things in the park, a voice saying ‘I seen what you done.’ But I can’t find where it comes from.” His words trip over themselves.
The whispers follow Nigel everywhere, rustles of feathers echoing each accusation. His desperation cresting, Nigel finally flees the park. But even as he runs, the voice pursues, wings beating in the darkness over his head.
In his panicked flight, Nigel fails to see the lorry barreling down the street. It connects with a sickening crunch, leaving his broken body splayed on the pavement.
“I know what you’ve done,” it declares, Nigel’s crime given feathered form. A final cosmic jest, as this guardian of the park delivers justice for his misdeed.
Quoth the parrot, “Nevermore.”
Sometimes you just get in the mood to write a short piece of nonsense. In this case, I liked the theme of a paranoid person haunted by a talking parrot. From there, I wanted to capture elements of Edgar Allen Poe’s Telltale heart and (obviously) The Raven with a bit of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
As usual, creating cover art is an adventure. I asked Dall-E to render an image of the elderly woman on a park bench with a wooded background and a parrot perched in a tree behind.
It decided on this. It was hilarious to me, so I kept it. NB: I did not ask for it to be rendered on a faux book cover. smh
Dall-E’s first take before I asked for the revision described above.
A challenge with beginning a story in media res and then writing a prequel, is that one is able to kick the creative can down the kerb and cross the bridge when you come to it. I’ve painted myself into a few corners, but exowombs, or artificial wombs, are one of them.
Being speculative fiction, I have some leeway, but I need to make some plausible connexions. Exowombs have existed for a few years now, but they are for premature infants and animals, so my literary licence needs to stretch that. To be honest, when I was contemplating things at a fifty-thousand-foot level, I was going from test tube to petri dish to incubator, but I overlooked the gestation bit. Oopsie. My bad.
This is not a work of hard science fiction, so I can take liberties there as well. I just hadn’t researched the current state of science until now. I’ve got a plot device in place, and it seems I’ve got some ideas for early concept and cover art that I can share here.
I rendered these with Dall-E 3. By default, it chose a green hue. I modified it to blue, and I wanted to see how it looked in violet to match their irises—this being an artistic rather than scientific choice. Bubbles in cylinders suspended with wires and tubes.
Violet Gestation Cylinders
Rendering these early can also help me to write descriptive prose with visual references. Dall-E seems to have a thing for spheroids, so I asked it for cylinders instead. I do like this one.
Blue Exowomb
My first correction got me to here. I like the metaphor of the egg membrane encasing the foetus in the tube.
Cylindrical Exowomb
Next, I wanted to envisage multiple cylinders with perspective, so I got these two.
Exowombs in Perspective
The problem I have is that it seems to be too large of a scale, but it’s still cool. We seem to have lost the egg-shaped membrane by now.
Industrial Production of Foetuses in Exowombs
Before settling on violet, I wanted to see what six across looked like. Dall-E’s maths skills are pretty dodgy, so this is what six looks like to it. You’ll notice that the violet render at the top does contain six.
Seven Exowombs in a Row
I don’t have much to say beyond sharing these images. I don’t want to give too much away, but I am excited to be writing Chapter 5 where these are relevant to the narrative in play.
What do you think of the images? Let me know in the comments.
