However, like how I still play CD’s for old time sake, I still also read paper books, and I still check the occasional one out of the library every now and then, or find myself re-reading one of the many dusty ones still on my bookshelf. I also know there are a lot of people out there who still do not like e-books due to a variety of reasons. I can understand most of them, but the only real one for me is the fact you do not actually own any eBook you buy, that is why with my last novel I released a paperback edition.

Anyway, to the point of this post. Looking at the paperback version of that last book I had a massive wave of pride and nostalgia and sat there for maybe an hour just holding it, feeling it, smelling it and thought to myself, I really do need my first book on the bookshelf next to it. So I have finally decided to right the mistake of getting my first book “The Summer of Reasoning” into a format suitable for printing.

Unfortunately at 370,000 words, it did not lend itself well to printing as a paperback (unless I resorted to stupidly small fonts like the average bible) and so making it a single novel was a non-starter. However the book is already configured in three parts which almost works for three books. Almost, but not quite, as there is no real break in the flow between parts 2 (Singularity) and 3 (end-game) so I had to make a best guess at the best place to end the flow. It’s not perfect, but as I am expecting to be my only customer, and I will still have the US$2.99 eBook version out there I went ahead and created three paperback books of 116,000 Words, 142,000 Words and 111,000 Words.

The Summer of Reasoning Trilogy.

Amazon links to paperback book series (AU / UK / US)

Yes, they are exactly the same book, just split into the three parts and only available in paperback format. As the existing eBook already contains all three books, and is quite inexpensive already I did not really see any point in making each available as its own shorter e-book. Also they are only for sale on Amazon, but as I say I only expect me to be the customer so I can live with it for now.

As a side-note, they are not cheap to make or buy, I rounded the publishing costs up to the next .99 cents so only making about 20-70 cents on each in royalty payment. Of course Amazon will add about a 100% profit margin to this so I may try and get some author samples and send them to the local library. (if they will have them!)

Anyway, that is all this post was for, to try and put right the original wrong, and, more importantly, to give me another three physical copies I can caress indefinitely.

A Level of Consciousness is a thought provoking techno-thriller set in a world not unlike our own, and about a woman who might have lived in it. It is a story about a witch who was not a witch, and a dragon that was not a dragon. It is a story set in the present day, between how much we know about the universe and how much we still have to learn. It is a story that starts with a friendship and ends with a romance. It is however not a story for children, nor is it a story for the faint of heart

The paperback and Kindle edition can be bought from Amazon here => Amazon

https://ko-fi.com/s/22d8cc6d97 – Free Download with option to donate ($0 is fine)

Or Direct download here => A-Level-of-Consciousness.epub (477KB)

You should save the epub file somewhere on your computer, but unless you have an eReader program installed like Calibre, you wont be able to view the book, and will need to transfer it to your eReader manually. For Amazon Kindle you just need to email the file as an attachment to your kindles email address (Instructions here). I have also found instructions for the Kobo and the Nook but I am sure one of the many AI’s out there can explain how to do it much better than me.

So, what’s it about? Well, first a confession, I really did want this new book to be a romance novel, and that is how it started. Technically it still sort-of a romance novel (by some weird definitions), and the first iteration of the cover for the e-book and the paperback even had a sweet, girl-friendly click-bait cover image. However several people did point out that it was definitely not a romance!

Normal romantic tropes, even the supposedly exciting ones, tend to be a bit lame and a bit predictable, which is why I found myself in the middle of the book wanting a bit more of a darker plot which would surround the girl, boy, lovey-dove parts. Unfortunately, that was when it morphed into something a lot more sinister!

Original Click-Bait Faux-Romance Cover

So, the new book is not technically a romance as it has a much much, much darker premise.. A ‘dark romance’ maybe? But ‘dark romance’ is actually a genre, and one which this book definitely does not fit. So what we have here is yet another book impossible to fit into the normal genre Venn-diagram as it covers topics much beloved in romantic novels such as terrorism, mind-reading, Nazi occult practices, mythical monsters and secret criminal societies bent on world domination. The writing also goes much more into graphic detail on the gory parts and uses a bit fruitier language than the previous book. Because of this, the book will get a 13+ rating and probably won’t want to be read by the normal readers of the romance genre!

Finally, an apology. The heroine is yet another young woman, though quite a different one from my other books (The Summer of Reasoning). But don’t stereotype me just yet! The reason for this is that for the last ten years I have been writing various scenes, and what-if scenarios, and had literally hundreds of them with young heroines. Rather than waste them, I used one set of women in my last book, and the other set in this one. However, the premise of the next book (still mostly in my head) will be different still as I have now run out of strong female characters.

Unlike the previous books, this new book is stand-alone and comes in at just 112,000 words which is more the length of a normal paperback thriller and so is suitable for a real printed version. If dead-trees are your preferred option, then the printed book is also available.

Every now and then I search for them on the Kindle site and see that one now has 3.5-stars and the other has 4.1-stars over 86 reviews. Both were $0.99, but both totally forgettable IMHO (the six people that gave 1 and 2-star ratings were spot on!). Writing them taught me two lessons, firstly, that writing was good fun, and secondly, there is no accounting for taste. What my first books also taught me was that writing done to please others would be far more successful that writing done to please yourself, and that writing done to please yourself, probably will not please others.

The reason is, that while you as a person are unique, you always find yourself going the same (safe) road in life, same friends, same food, same politics, same type of holidays, same route to work and same types of books, music and shows. Anything outside your norm is usually enough to cause you to avoid it, and this is how the algorithm works. You are a male or you watch enough violent action movies on Netflix, and it is highly likely you will never see any of the hundreds of PG romance movies. Same with YouTube, Spotify, etc., they know what you like and what you will click on and so won’t bother even showing you anything different. Don’t believe me? then look at your friends or partners view of the same site.

The Amazon algorithm is no different, you will only get pushed the authors you have bought before, or what those in the same demographic as you have bought before, and 99.99% of other authors will never be shown. The problem with all the algorithms is there is no way out. If you start from scratch, you are immediately recommended the top authors, top YouTube influencers and the top musicians. So, while I do love Coldplay as a band, I also like The Nudge, and while I do like Iain Banks, Dan Brown or JK Rowling as novelists, I also like E.N Able. Neither of these unknown artists would ever have been recommended to me by the algorithm, and it makes me sad that there are literally hundreds of others I will never find.

You may hate violence or sex, you may hate westerns or sci-fi, you may hate romance novels where it takes 200+ pages of ‘faffing-around’ before the man or woman gets to first base and then pow the book ends. Yet people love these tropes, and millions buy and read them every day. If you make your woman a ‘slutty bitch’ and your man a ‘billionaire business tycoon’, then it doesn’t matter what the story is about, or how much it is the same as all the others out there then there will always be an audience for it. The same is true of military Sci-Fi, which is basically take any normal military or naval story, swap the Russians for Klingons, the machine gun for a laser gun, and the submarine for a spaceship. The problem is, they are not much fun to write, and writing such a book might as well be done by an AI. I actually expect either now or in the near future hundreds a day will be churned out onto Amazon, making it almost impossible for the actual writer of this genre to make a living. Same with other artists, new humans will get pushed out of the loop, unless they are well known, lucky or spend a lot on publicity.

Even I am not immune to the algorithm. I often find myself repeatedly buying into the same narrative or good-looking book cover only to find a shallow veneer, and then once in a blue moon, picking up a book that I would never in a million years think I would like and thoroughly enjoying it. I even find myself reading best-sellers with thousands of 5-star review which were so bad, my two shit-novels under my anonymous nom-de-plume would have given them a run for their money, this is also why I like libraries where I can physically browse a shelf.

So, you cannot please everyone, but you can please yourself. I think everyone has a story to tell, I have been trying to convince a couple of my friends to give it a go, but as they will tell you, it is actually quite hard to do. I have no advice for them except to keep going, and like any long journey you will eventually get there.

But if it’s so hard to do, why write novels for fun?

Do you remember all those movies and books where the hero does a complete ‘dick-move’ like when someone walks into the haunted graveyard, or the woman gets into the car with the stranger, or the hero puts his down gun for the baddie holding somebody hostage, or the evil mastermind doesn’t kill the hero immediately they capture them? The “What-the-fuck!!” moment, that you just know would never happen in real life, and don’t you just wish you could make another decision and re-write the book where that did not happen? Well, if you are the author, you can!

I throw away chapter after chapter of these types of things because I re-read them, and they are unbelievable, or don’t make sense, or just because I can. I can also make the hero do awesome things, because I can, or blow something up because I can. And best of all if I don’t like someone, they are gone, or even better, killed gruesomely! Books are organic, they never go or finish the way you expect, just like one of those chose your own adventure novels from the eighties. I have dozens of half-finished novels that will always be half-finished, and even more one or two pages of drivel that may actually have a story in them. Like walking a strange road in a dark forest, I don’t know where I will end up, I may get eaten by a bear or find a lovely mountain view with a fairy-tale waterfall, and that is why I love it.

The Summer of Reasoning is a series of three paperback books whose timeline begins in 2025 and follows one optimistic and possible future of the technological singularity for mankind.

The first book in the trilogy, The Phoney War, starts the journey off, introducing the main characters and the plot, it is a lighter and slower paced read than the second two books, mainly concentrating on how everything starts, developing the plot, the characters, the science and the technology for the action in the second two.

The paperbacks can be bought from Amazon (click the pictures above to re-direct) or if dead trees is not your thing then the whole book series is is also available as a single 370,000 word eBook using the links below:

Amazon Kindle – Note Amazon specify a minimum eBook price of $0.99

https://ko-fi.com/s/ab3e74d64d – Gives an option to donate (completely optional)

Or Direct download => The-Summer-of-Reasoning.epub (1.2MB)

You should save the epub file somewhere on your computer, but unless you have an eReader program installed like Calibre, you wont be able to view the book, and will need to transfer it to your eReader manually. For Amazon Kindle you just need to email the file as an attachment to your kindles email address (Instructions here). I have also found instructions for the Kobo and the Nook but I am sure one of the many AI’s out there can explain how to do it much better than me.

The Writing Journey

Image Shows Original Cover

This was a really long journey, I think I started writing snippets and chapters for the last ten years, no story getting past ten thousand words before fizzling out or me losing interest. But I finally picked a story (A Sci-Fi story my daughter might optimistically read – Young Adult is the official term), found my mojo and I actually finished and published it as a two-hundred-and-fifty-page amazon eBook in Jan 2022. So, job done, wrote a book, ticked it off the bucket list!

But upon re-reading it, I thought, hmmm, it’s a quaint little story, but it concentrated on the character, science and technological build up, and all the action I wanted to fit in was not there. So barely a month later I removed it from sale.

So, with zero publicity, zero interest and zero sales in the first book, I decided, what the hell lets finish the sequel. The sequel became another 240,000 words and two more books (Singularity and End Game), moving the plot, adding more action, more intrigue, cooler technologies, (AI’s, flying-saucers, robots, wormholes, FTL), some love interests for the girls, etc. I also rounded out the story nicely in the last book with a big climatic space opera ending. So, job done, wrote the sequels, ticked it off the bucket list! But, in a certifiable act of madness, I thought to myself why not actually put the books together; basically ignore all the sensible advice out there and combine them into a single complete novel. My main/only reason for this was that it sort of annoys me when I finish a book only to find out it hasn’t actually finished. I have to buy the sequel, then another, then wait, or in some cases wait forever and hope the author, or I, don’t die before finishing it! So the new book trilogy was big, Game of Thrones big, or 29 hours reading, however, I was happy as it was a complete work, no prequels, no sequels, safe enough for my daughter to read and a plot that progresses like the singularity slowly at first and then exponentially to its climax.

So, to the novel. A bit preachy? maybe. Too girly? maybe. Not girly enough? maybe. No graphic sex or violence, definitely. Rubbish science? Most certainly! In fact, I may have nailed the perfect Venn diagram where women (thinking of my daughter especially here) don’t like it neither do Sci-Fi fans. Funnily enough after several re-reads it still hits all the tropes for me, but I’m weird!

In 2025 we are now back to three separate paperbacks, and a compendium 370,000 word e-book, with the eBook being totally free to download. I have also re-categorised them, changed the covers and simplified the blurb. Hopefully I have now fixed past mistakes and can carry on with writing.

Click here for more on the writing journey and tips for new authors.