Writing isn’t a 100-metre dash—but it’s being treated like one. Why does the hint of AI get the craft accused of crime? 👉 ridleypark.blog/2025/11/12/c... #WritingLife #AI #AuthorLife #AmWriting #Blog #Philosophy #Psychology #Art #Creativity #Books #Society #Madness #technology #robots

ridleypark.blog/2025/11/08/w... #books #amwriting #editing #fiction #indyauthor #cowboys #starwars

🎥Propensity now has a book trailer. Check it out. 🎬 www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K0w... #Propensity #RidleyPark #BookTrailer #SpeculativeFiction #Philosophy #PostmodernFiction #Amwriting #fiction #amreading

Gave away 100 copies of Sustenance. Got 4 reviews. One was a glorious 1-star hate read. The rest? Lost in the digital abyss. Still, I’d rather have a bad review than no readers. ridleypark.blog/2025/11/06/r... #Writing #Books #IndieAuthor #Readers #Fiction #WritingLife #IndieAuthor #AmWriting #blog

In this post, I question the idea of making an audiobook. One size does not fit all. 👉 ridleypark.blog/.../02/shoul... #books #fictionbooks #audiobooks #blogpost #amwriting #listening #fiction #Listen

In Simulacra (Ch 26 of Propensity), the copy replaces the real. A scene written as script, a morality performed for a camera no one controls. ridleypark.blog/2025/11/01/s... #LiteraryFiction #Simulacra #RidleyPark #Baudrillard #SpeculativeFiction #Books #AmWriting #Script #Manuscript #Fiction #crows

A pair of Aces philosophics.blog/2025/10/31/p... #books #printing #publishing #amwriting #enlightenment #propensity #proof #fiction #nonfiction #philosophy #blogs #bookclub #paperback #clothbound #fancy

New post: On accidental kinship with Stanisław Lem and the limits of originality. Turns out my 'unique' story about alien consciousness and dual suns? Lem did it in 1961. Before the moon landing. So what now? ridleypark.blog/2025/10/22/o... #WritingCommunity #SpecFic #Solaris #AmWriting

Sharing a review of my novel, Propensity, on my blog. Check it out. 👀📚 Leave your own review on Amazon or Goodreads – or comment on my blog. I'm not picky. ridleypark.blog/2025/10/19/r... #books #amwriting #AmWritingFiction #amreading #bookreview #bookreviewerswanted #blog

I recommend Zamyatin's We. Written in 1921, it's a precursor to dystopian classics such as 1984 and Brave New World – better, at least relative to the depth of its political narrative. ridleypark.blog/2025/10/15/r... #books #classics #reading #AmReading #novels #dystopian #fiction #Literature

Stop quoting Orwell memes. Forget 1984 and Brave New World. The real mirror of our times is Zamyatin’s We: a world where we happily surrender ourselves to the algorithm. ridleypark.blog/2025/09/17/t... #Dystopia #Orwell #CriticalTheory #Books #booksuggestions #Philosophy #Surveillance

Octavia Butler’s Lilith in Dawn is meant as radical, but she ends up repeating archetypes of Western femininity. Judith Butler would see her as pure performativity. My reflection → philosophics.blog/2025/09/08/b... #Philosophy #CriticalTheory #OctaviaButler #JudithButler #Postmodernism #AmReading

Aliens don’t breathe, but authors live off reviews. 💜 Thank you for reading Sustenance and sharing your words. 📝 New post: ridleypark.blog/2025/09/09/t... #IndieAuthor #SciFiBooks #SpecFic #LiterarySciFi #WeirdLit #AlienFiction #BookTwitter #BookReview #KindleUnlimited #KindleBook #SciFi #Iowa

👽 Literary sci-fi meets cornfields and confusion. Sustenance explores alien encounters, human projection, and awkward rural intimacy—with a healthy dose of crop-circle weirdness. 📕 Out now in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle: www.amazon.com/dp/B0F9VGH8FP #SpecFic #SciFi #IndieAuthor #WeirdFiction

What’s with the violet aliens on the cover of Sustenance? Midwest barns. Crop circles. American Gothic. ridleypark.blog/2025/09/08/w... 📚 Kindle edition is FREE www.amazon.com/dp/B0F9BDWKFD #kindlebooks #SciFiBooks #bookcoverdesign #Books #America #IndieAuthors #coverart #KindleUnlimited

Sartre: “Inaction is a choice.” Zinn: “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” Butler’s alien: “You committed mass suicide.” Maybe agency is just a Modernist myth we don’t actually need. 👉 philosophics.blog/2025/09/07/o... #Philosophy #Postmodernism #Agency #ScienceFiction #Books #AmReading

🚨 Free for 2 days! 🚨 My novella Sustenance – small-town Iowa meets the uncanny – is free on Kindle Sept 7–8. Always free with KU, but free for everyone with this promo. 📚 www.amazon.com/dp/B0F9PTK9N2 #FreeBook #KindleFree #SpecFic #LiteraryFiction #IndieAuthor #BookTwitter #AmReading #Book #Books

⭐⭐⭐ I finished Anna Kavan’s Ice. tl;dr: I gave it a 3 of 5 stars. Fuller review on blog or Goodreads. ridleypark.blog/2025/09/03/i... #AmReading #AnnaKavan #Slipstream #SpeculativeFiction #LiteraryFiction #ModernistFiction #WeirdLit #ExistentialFiction #BookBlog #BookReview #Book #Review #Books

Five chapters into Anna Kavan’s Ice, and it’s less spree than seizure. A frozen hallucination where compulsion outpaces logic—dive in. ridleypark.blog/2025/09/03/i... #AmReading #AnnaKavan #Slipstream #SpeculativeFiction #LiteraryFiction #ModernistFiction #WeirdLit #ExistentialFiction #BookBlog

Facebook: deleted. Ridley: collateral damage. The bots won’t be missed. I may re-establish a Ridley-only presence, but for now, we’re free of the machine. ridleypark.blog/2025/09/02/d... #Facebook #Meta #Bots #Kafkaesque #AmWriting #Writing #SocialMedia #BlogPost #Bollox #Blogging #AuthorLife

I don’t wish to be branded an AI apologist. Some say AI art lacks feelings. I don’t need hubris to validate my art. ridleypark.blog/2025/09/02/t... #AIArt #Philosophy #Art #GenerativeAI #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #Creativity #Innovation #Technology #CriticalThinking #Writing #AmWriting

I’ve finally completed the so-called dystopia canon – Orwell, Atwood, Burgess, Huxley… and now Gattaca. Sharp premise; rigid script. 👍Completion achieved. 👎Satisfaction minimal. ridleypark.blog/2025/09/01/g... #Critique #ScienceFiction #Writing #amwriting #SciFi #movie #Review #movieReview

Never took creative writing at uni—finance swallowed that dream. What I got instead: feminist critiques, penguins, and a final essay signed “My name is not David Grace.” ridleypark.blog/2025/09/01/r... #WritingCommunity #AuthorLife #LitCrit #Philosophy #AmWriting #English #Writing #nostalgia

This is not a political post. The Venn in this diagram feels viscerally correct, but the unions don't work. ridleypark.blog/2025/08/31/n... #Dystopia #Philosophy #Satire #Orwell #Atwood #Huxley #Burgess #TheMatrix #Gattaca #Brazil #SoylentGreen #AnimalFarm #Fahrenheit451 #BraveNewWorld #RidleyPark

Editing isn’t always polish; it’s surgery. Spent today untangling a misplaced pregnancy in Needle’s Edge and stitching the timeline back together. ridleypark.blog/2025/08/30/n... #WritingCommunity #AmEditing #Fiction #Editing #AmWriting #LiteraryFiction #IndieAuthor #Writing #Books #FictionWriting

Finding Focus ⌛🧐 This is as much a reminder for me as a PSA. Time is the most limited resource you’ve got. ridleypark.blog/2025/08/30/f... #amwriting #amwritingfiction #writingcommunity #writing #writingtips #timemanagement #books #timemanagementtips #PSA #book #time

Spent more time editing Needle’s Edge than drafting it. Editing isn’t polishing; it’s grinding, chiselling, archaeology. ridleypark.blog/2025/08/29/n... #WritingCommunity #AmEditing #RidleyPark #Fiction #LiteraryFiction #IndieAuthor #BookEditing #StoryStructure #books #writing #editing #structure

Kafka gave us Gregor Samsa: turned into vermin, stripped of usefulness, left to rot in silence. Irvine Welsh answered with Boab Coyle in The Granton Star Cause. philosophics.blog/2025/08/29/b... #AmReading #AmWatching #CriticalTheory #SocialCommentary #LiteraryAnalysis #BookCommunity #Storytelling

Yesterday, I wrote about how some movies are better than the books they were sourced from, but sometimes a book and a film are synergistic. ridleypark.blog/2025/08/28/w... #Cinema #MoviesBetterThanBooks #Storytelling #AmReading #AmWatching #Reading #Movies #Film #Books #booksuggestions #Blogpost

When the movie does the book a mercy killing: from Jaws to Blade Runner, here’s my rogue’s gallery of films that outshine their novels. ridleypark.blog/2025/08/27/w... #BookVsMovie #FilmAdaptation #Cinema #MoviesBetterThanBooks #Storytelling #AmReading #AmWatching #Reading #Movies #Film #Books

Most novels behave like products. Sustenance doesn’t. Paratext as warning label. Prose that wobbles. Realism swerving into horror, SF, rural noir. Grit instead of smoothies. Closure denied. philosophics.blog/2025/08/25/s... #fiction #AmWritingFiction #AmWriting #FictionOnly

Less Than Zero was gutted. Trainspotting, diluted. Both novels exposed Reagan’s children + Thatcher’s lost boys. The films sold us photogenic junkies. 🔗 philosophics.blog/2025/08/22/f... #LessThanZero #Trainspotting #FilmAdaptation #Addiction #CulturalCritique #Baudrillard #AmReading #Books #Films

A beta reader isn’t your editor. Their job is not to fix commas or rewrite your book. It’s to tell you if the story tasted like what you meant to cook. 👉 ridleypark.blog/2025/08/22/w... #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #BetaReaders #IndieAuthors #NovelWriting #WritingTips #AmReading #Editing #Reading

Thanks #AI #Spellcheckers like #Copilot. Useful #ideas. #Nature and #Wilderness are clearly #synonyms. #humour #satire #screenshot #writing #editing

Beauvoir’s The Second Sex → Welsh’s Trainspotting. 2 classics, 2 registers. My Needle’s Edge sits somewhere between: pared-down motel grit vs. dialect-rich Scotland. ridleypark.blog/2025/08/22/t... #Trainspotting #AddictionLit #LiteraryFiction #AmReading #AmWriting #BookTalk #ContemporaryFiction

A meme about male flatworms across the net, but worms aren’t male or female. They’re hermaphrodites fighting with hypodermic penises. Winner = father; loser = mother. Sometimes both. ridleypark.blog/2025/08/21/w... #WritingCommunity #Gender #Power #books  #speculativefiction #AmWriting #Writing

I've read 22 books so far this year, a parade of intellectual triumphs and spectacular flops. ChatGPT offered better advice than humans. Sorry people. ridleypark.blog/2025/08/21/b... #2025Reads #ReadingInsights #BookReview #AIRecommendations #Goodreads #ThoughtfulReading #Reading #BookList

Zach Cregger wrote 50 pages of Weapons before he even knew if he had a story. Pantsing: thrilling if it pays off. ridleypark.blog/2025/08/18/w... #WritingCommunity #ScreenwritersLife #CreativeJourney #StoryDiscovery #WritingInspiration #AmWriting #Screenwriting #Pantsers #Plotters #Film #Writing

Hot take patrol: if you don’t understand how language works, you’re not qualified to critique LLMs. The licence to comment has conditions. 🚨 philosophics.blog/2025/08/17/i... #LLMs #GenerativeAI #PhilosophyOfLanguage #LanguageMatters #Semiotics #Poststructuralism #PhilosophicsBlog #AuthorLife #AI

AI doesn’t feel? Cute. Neither does language, yet here we are, moved to tears. Saussure, Wittgenstein, Derrida walk into a blog post… and unmask the fallacy. ridleypark.blog/2025/08/17/g... #GenerativeAI #WritingCommunity #AIandArt #LanguageMatters #Saussure #Wittgenstein #Derrida #Poststructuralism

The first rule of writing is that there are no rules. Lists comfort; they also constrict. Don’t build your cathedral from scaffolding. ridleypark.blog/2025/08/16/t... #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #ArtNotRules #IndieWriters #CreativeProcess #AuthorLife #BookMarketing #IndiePublishing #WritingTips

The origins of Needle’s Edge: a novel born from years of raw observation, lived experience, and a refusal to play by the rules of morality tales. 5 minutes on my writing process. ▶ www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Njp... #AmWriting #WritingCommunity #AuthorLife #FictionWriting #AuthorInterview #Video

What do She’s Come Undone, Citizen Kane, and a bear on a sledge have in common? 🐻❄️ The answer might get me flagged for spoilers. 📍 Read it here: ridleypark.blog/2025/08/14/s... #Goodreads #BookHumour #LiterarySatire #RidleyPark #SpoilerEtiquette #Rosebud #BearsOnSleds #BookReviews #Spoilers

What if AI doesn’t need to be intelligent or have feelings? I use it to tell me what my manuscript reads like, Woolf, Vonnegut, or a cereal box. No feelings required, just a difference engine. ridleypark.blog/2025/08/13/d... #AI #Writing #Authors #GenAI #AmWriting #Creativity #Editing #BookWriting

Human exceptionalism seems to expand beyond Thesists. Creativity is recombination. Humans & AI both do it. Only AI admits it. philosophics.blog/2025/08/11/t... #Creativity #AI #Philosophy #HumanExceptionalism #Myth #CausaSui #NoBears #GenAI #Cognition #Remix #Podcast

AI’s not here to dethrone Nabokov. History’s clear: the printing press didn’t kill manuscripts, and photography didn’t kill painting. ridleypark.blog/2025/08/10/s... #AIWriting #TechCulture #GenAI #AIWriting #FictionWriting #AuthorWorkflow #AIWritingTools #WritingLife

Authors Talking to Authors While the Readers Are Elsewhere Authors’ forums are full of talented writers — all shouting “Read my book!” at each other while the actual readers are elsewhere. I’m not hunting fellow gardeners; I’m looking for bees. And you don’t find many bees in a greenhouse full of…

“Most art isn’t high art. Most writing isn’t literature. Readers don’t crave artistic purity. If AI helps them get there, let them. What's the outrage? #AIWriting #GenerativeAI #HighArt #LowArt #LiterarySnobbery #CreativeProcess #WritingCommunity #BookCulture

Predictive text: proof that Markov chains are running the asylum. Start typing something poetic, and it hands you a bureaucratic nightmare. Maths is everywhere—even if you pretend you’ve never used algebra. philosophics.blog/2025/07/29/o... #MachineLearning #StochasticLife #MathBehindTheCurtain

Chapter 28 of Propensity is a standardised test. Not a joke. Not a metaphor. Just 100% narrative deviance. Free to download. ridleypark.blog/2025/07/29/o... #RidleyPark #Propensity #ExperimentalFiction #WeirdBooks #MetaLit #Chapter28 #FreeChapter #IndieLit