Writing – Page 4 – Ridley Park

Octavia Butler Dawn Crosspost

September 7, 2025Posted in Book, critique, review, Ridley Park, Sci-Fi, WritingTagged book review, books, fiction, novel, WritingLeave a comment

I began reading Octavia Butler’s Dawn, and it raised some interesting* philosophical questions.

In the early chapters of Dawn, an alien declares that humanity has “committed mass suicide.” Sartre insists, “Inaction is still a choice.” Howard Zinn reminds us, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” Each collapses complexity into the fiction of agency, a story that props up Modernist notions of responsibility and blame. But what if agency itself is an unnecessary fiction? I’ve explored this tension in a new essay on my Philosophics blog:

On Agency, Suicide, and the Moving Train

Someone on social media, commenting on my Dystopian Venn post, asked me why I hadn’t read Octavia E Butler. Challenge accepted.

* Questions interesting to me.

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Ridley Park

Free for Two Days Only: Sustenance (Kindle Edition)

September 6, 2025Posted in Book, Ridley Park, SustenanceTagged alien encounter, Amazon ebook, book announcement, book launch, book promotion, book review, books, experimental fiction, fiction, free ebook, free Kindle book, free literary fiction, free on Kindle, free sci fi book, indie author, Iowa setting, Kindle, Kindle promo, KindleUnlimited, literary fiction, novel, novella, philosophical fiction, reading, Ridley Park, September 2025, small town America, Speculative Fiction, Sustenance, weird fiction, WritingLeave a comment

1–2 minutes

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

For more details, visit the Sustenance page.

📚 Grab your free Kindle copy on 7–8 September 2025.

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Ridley Park

Autofiction Break

September 5, 2025Posted in Book, Status UpdateTagged autofiction, books, novel, novelette, novella, reading, Trainspotting, WritingLeave a comment

Three of the last four books I’ve read have been autofiction of one flavour or another.

I had never read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, but I picked it up after finishing The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector. The there was Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh.

I found Hour of the Star to be an interesting experiement, but I would have preferred a short story over a novelette. A Room of One’s Own is interesting and well-written, though the content resonates with me historically rather than personally. I’ve already written a bit on Trainspotting, which hit me quite close to home. I liked it the best but needed a change of scenery before engaging in its prequel, Skagboys. I need more motivation before I embark on a 500 page journey. I like Welsh’s writing, but it’s not an easy read, I I need more stamina or a break first.

I haven’t decided what to pick up next.

Ice by Anna Kavan – Five Chapters In

September 3, 2025September 4, 2025Posted in Book, critique, review, WritingTagged book review, books, fiction, novella, reading, WritingLeave a comment

1–2 minutes

Five chapters down, and Anna Kavan’s Ice is already proving itself to be less a novel than a feverish novelette-length hallucination. It hits differently than the sprawling sagas I’ve been chewing through – leaner, sharper, like a shard of frozen glass pressed against the skin.

This isn’t realism. If you try to read it as realist narrative you’ll only tie yourself in knots, muttering that the protagonist keeps chasing a girl he half-admits isn’t even there. He catches glimpses, shadows, phantoms – and follows them anyway. Contrived? Yes, if you expect logic. Coherent? Absolutely, if you treat it as dream grammar, where compulsion replaces causality and the world obeys obsession more than physics.

The point-of-view is the real hall of mirrors. Not so much “unreliable narrator” as unreliable perspective: the voice flickers, sometimes inside his skull, sometimes inside hers, sometimes perched like an outside observer. As in a dream, identities blur. The supposed rescuer blurts out sadistic fantasies, sounding alarmingly like the blue-eyed Warden he claims to oppose. It’s less “out of character” than a reminder that character itself is already compromised.

So, no, you can’t hold this text to the rules of straight narrative. You have to read it the way you stumble through a nightmare: half-convinced, half-sceptical, fully captive.

Where it all leads? I’ve got perhaps seventy pages left to find out. For now, I’m letting the ice close over me, listening for the crunch of those imaginary bones.

EDIT: I’ve finished Ice and left a review on Goodreads. tl;dr: I gave it a 3 of 5 stars. ⭐⭐⭐ It was good. Mercifully it was short. As it reads like a dream sequence, there are no stakes. From the start, I wasn’t heavily invested in what happened to the protagonist nor the subject of his attrction. There were some good scenes, but not enough for me to give it more than a 3.

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Ridley Park

The Veneer of Human Exceptionalism in Art

September 2, 2025September 2, 2025Posted in Art, Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, Claude, critique, Dall-E, Generative AI, Video, Writing, YouTubeTagged ai, AI art, AI versus human creativity, art and metaphysics, art philosophy, artist ego, ChatGPT, creativity and AI, editing, fiction, Generative AI, human art, human exceptionalism, philosophy, Rachel Barr, Ridley Park blog, Romantic myth, species ego, technology, writers and musicians, WritingLeave a comment

I don’t want to develop a reputation as an AI apologist – I really don’t. But I do want to strip away the veneer humans so lovingly lacquer over themselves: the idea that art is some mystical emanation of a “soul,” accessible only to those blessed by the Muse and willing to suffer nobly in a garret.

Video: YouTube Short by Jonny Thompson of his interview with Rachel Barr

Rachel Barr argues that AI art can never be the same as human art, no matter how “perfect,” because AI has no feelings or drive. Cue the violins. These arguments always seem to hinge on metaphysical window-dressing. When Rachel says “we”, she’s not talking about humanity at large; she’s talking about herself and a very particular subset of humans who identify as artists. And when she invokes “masters”, the circle shrinks still further, to the cloistered guild who’ve anointed themselves the keepers of aesthetic legitimacy.

But here’s the bit they’d rather you didn’t notice: feelings and drive aren’t prerequisites for art. They’re just one of the many myths humans tell about art, usually the most flattering one. Strip away the Romantic varnish and art is often craft, habit, accident, repetition. A compulsive tic in oil paint. A mistake on the guitar that somehow worked. A poet bashing words together until something sticks.

And I say this not as a detached observer but as a writer, artist, and musician in my own right. I sympathise with the instinct to defend one’s turf, but I don’t need to steep myself in hubris to retain self-worth. My work stands or falls on its own. It doesn’t require a metaphysical monopoly.

So when someone insists AI art can never be “the same,” what they mean is it doesn’t flatter our myths. Because if an algorithm can spit out a perfect sonnet or an exquisite image without the tortured soul attached, then what have we been worshipping all this time? The art itself, or the halo around the artist?

Perhaps the real fear isn’t that AI art lacks feelings. It’s that human art doesn’t require them either. And that’s a blow to the species ego – an ego already so fragile it cracks if you so much as ask whether the Mona Lisa is just paint on a board.

Ridley at Uni

September 1, 2025Posted in WritingTagged academic nostalgia, American literature, books, creative writing, critical writing, fiction, Gloria Steinem, handwritten essays, literature, literature professors, philosophy electives, poetry, Roland Barthes, sardonic humour, student memories, Thorstein Veblen, university writing courses, WritingLeave a comment

2–3 minutes

I never took creative writing courses at university. I wanted to, but I was shackled to a double major in economics and finance, worlds far removed from literature. With only four free electives to spend, I squandered them on philosophy (which, in retrospect, I should have pursued outright). That’s a story for another day. I did manage to complete a couple of critical writing courses and a couple of literature courses, and those linger in my memory.

My critical writing professor was a lesbian feminist. She assigned us nothing but female authors – save one strange detour, when I was made to compare Gloria Steinem with Thorstein Veblen on economics. In our very first class, she asked for a handwritten sample, pen on paper, no dictionaries, no spellcheck. This was the late ’80s; such tools barely existed. My handwriting was atrocious then – as now –, so I resorted to all-caps block letters. She commented on the novelty. She was a marvellous teacher.

My first literature professor adored poetry, though I did not. He made the best of it. He also had a curious fixation on penguins and mocked the way I pronounced finance (short “i,” the way I still say it). He was equally amused when I once asked to “interject” – apparently not the word he thought I should have chosen.

My last literature professor was enthralled by all things American. Our reading list was composed entirely of American writers, perhaps some women among them, though I don’t recall. Before his class, their works didn’t quite resonate with me. Still, it was enjoyable. He also insisted that one must understand an author’s history to grasp the text, an idea Barthes would have scoffed at. He, in turn, scoffed at Barthes.

My favourite moment came at the end. After the term ended, he posted back our final essays. On mine, he scribbled two lines alongside the grade:

I’ll miss your sardonic humour.
My name is not David Grace.

I had typed the wrong name on the title page – borrowing one from a maths professor whose name stuck, while my literature professor’s did not. I still can’t recall his name. But I remember him fondly all the same.

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Ridley Park

The Dystopia Venn: Four Circles of Absolute Nonsense

August 31, 2025August 31, 2025Posted in Art, Book, critique, Sci-Fi, WritingTagged animal farm, atwood, book review, books, brave new world, brazil, burgess, dystopia, dystopian fiction, dystopian literature, dystopian meme, fahrenheit 451, fiction, gattaca, huxley, life, literary critique, Lord of the Flies, mental-health, novel, orwell, philosophical satire, politics, soylent green, the matrix, venn diagram, Writing2 Comments

2–3 minutes

This particular meme has been making the rounds like a drunk uncle at a wedding – loud, colourful, and convinced it’s profound. A Venn diagram, no less! Four big circles stuffed with dystopias, slapped together as if geometry itself conferred wisdom. Most of them are books, a few are films, and one – Gattaca – is glaring at me because I haven’t seen it. That omission alone feels like a character flaw. I might grit my teeth and watch it just to close the loop, though it doesn’t exactly scream, “Pour a glass of wine and enjoy.”

DISCLAIMER: This is not a political post.

Here’s the thing: as art, it’s rather lovely. As a piece of intellectual cartography? It’s rubbish. It pretends to classify but in fact it merely collages. Orwell is pressed up against Burgess, Atwood rubs shoulders with Logan’s bloody Run, and in the middle sits Animal Farm, as if pigs with clipboards are somehow the Rosetta Stone of dystopia.

And yet – if you squint just so, tilt your head like a dog hearing a harmonica, you can just about see some tenuous ligatures:

Surveillance and conditioning: 1984, Clockwork Orange, and The Matrix all insist that the human mind is clay to be moulded by boot, syringe, or simulation.
Reproduction and regulation: Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale, and yes, Gattaca (apparently) fret endlessly over who gets to breed, who gets culled, and whose DNA deserves a future.
Bodies as resource: Soylent Green, Brazil, Gattaca again – people ground down into spreadsheets, rations, or literal mince.
The veneer of civilisation: Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm showing us that civilisation is just papier-mâché over the swamp.

But let’s be honest: the diagram isn’t actually saying this. It’s just four intersecting blobs, with titles hurled in like darts at a pub quiz. The apparent “structure” is nothing more than meme-magic – order conjured out of chaos to make you nod gravely as you scroll by.

So yes: as art, it works. As a Venn diagram, it’s a travesty. And maybe that’s the deeper joke. We live in an age where every complexity gets crushed into an infographic, every horror squeezed into a digestible meme. Which, if you think about it, is itself a bit dystopian.

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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.

Focus Matters

August 30, 2025Posted in Book, WritingTagged bloog post, books, distractions, diversions, editing, focus, games, go away, goals, opportunity costs, perspective, plannings, plans, priorities, psa, social media, Writing1 Comment

This is as much a reminder for me as a PSA. Time is the most limited resource you’ve got.

Consider your goals, and plan accordingly. Not everyone has concrete goals. As writers, we likely do. Finish that sentence, that page, that chapter, that draft, those edits, that book…

There’s social media – that’s this place – video games, partying, family and mates, eating and sleeping. Whatevs.

And don’t forget to take care of your mental health.

You may have many goals – or just one or two. Consider opportunity costs.

This blog post is distracting me from my editing. Still, I want to share. maybe it will help you.

Perspective is key.

Define your goals. Prioritise them. Make it happen.

Go away now!

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.