Black holes came first.

And why pirates finally found my book, and what I'm going to do about it.

In my upcoming novel, THE STEPHANIE GLITCH, I write about a psychic teenager who discovers her Synaesthesia has turned her into a clairvoyant.

Synaesthesia is a neurological condition which essentially translates, or swaps, one sensory experience for another. For me, sharp noises turn into physically tangible flashes of light, blues and yellows and whites and reds that shake the jelly in my eyes. Most notably, fire alarms turn the entire world into a pulsating black and white mess, and were once responsible for me walking into a wall at university.

So whilst synaesthesia allows me to hear flowers and to see music, it isn’t always pleasant, and it’s why I’ve recently started advocating for autistic people and sound-sensitive people on instagram, who are very rarely considered when new Arts spaces are developed.

But that’s a story for another time.

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This is a minor spoiler. Stephanie’s synaesthesia unscrambles the scrambled information raining down onto her world from a higher world. What she sees of the Artifice, its crew, and the black hole they are headed toward, is information that was shredded across what they presume is an event horizon.

Stephanie’s brain, like a telephone, somehow knows how to reassemble what looks to everyone else like random noise.

The cosmic background radiation carries with it a message that only she can read.

But how is this possible?

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What many of you won’t know about my universes, from WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? to THE EARTHLOOP TRILOGY, then back again through WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? (crowdfundr open now, link below) is that all of these universes share a common origin, a common physics.

And that physics goes against some of what scientists in this universe think is possible.

Mainly, black holes came first.

BLACK HOLES CAME FIRST.

It is an obvious, intuitive thing to my stories. Most galaxies come with a supermassive black hole at their center, and they have become a science fiction staple, being the last truly unexplorable regions in the universe.

Black holes were there in the beginning. They were the beginning.

What did you think the ‘big bang’ was?

If you could get into a black hole, you wouldn’t be able to get back out, or send a signal out either. So their interior is perhaps forever hidden away.

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Obviously, as a science fiction author, I found a workaround for this.

As the Artifice hurtles toward its destination, a recently discovered black hole in the outer reaches of the solar system, it is being pursued relentlessly by patient Virtualists, members of a simulation-based cult who want to ‘liberate’ Stephanie’s reality from the starship they imagine created it. They hate Dreamscreen technology, believing it to be a human-made hell. They believe their own reality is in fact a far-future incarnation of Dreamscreen tech, and that the only way to break out of their simulation is to overload it. They want the Artifice so that they can toy with Stephanie’s reality, seeing what conditions are needed to let its contents spill into higher dimensions such as their own.

It’s a deranged idea, but they’re sticking to it.

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Black holes exist right at the start of the universes in all my books. In fact, it is black holes which existed before some universes, and these become the primary method of hopping between them.

The best way to explain it is to give you a quote.

“Black holes are the bullet holes. Intersect pathways are the cracks they leave behind in space and time.”

Spacetime, in my stories, used to be a fluid thing. As it is right now, it is more solid, liable to stretching and cracking.

Of course it’s not that simple, but the analogy works. The time-travelling astronaut known as LP is trying to lure Stephanie up through the worlds so that they can pool their strange abilities together. On its surface, the book is a journey of parallel-self discovery. It’s exploring the ideas of time travel and interdimensional travel, asking if there is truly a perfect place in life to stop and settle down, or if you have to make that place yourself.

It’s also a story about bringing weird people together to make them more powerful.

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Black holes in my stories have been around longer than universes. The first universe was born from one, and black holes become the eggs which are in turn fertilised by raw information from the universes around them. If the conditions are right, a new universe will be born or printed which has the right physics to create more black holes, and so a fertile universe will be full of them.

This is similar to a concept in physics known as black hole cosmology, in which our entire universe is within the interior of a black hole. Essentially, each black hole in the universe might host another universe within itself.

This is a central plot point in THE STEPHANIE GLITCH, and in the book it relies on the idea that black holes came first, and that we may one day be able to traverse them.

And if we can’t get back out to report our findings?

Well, we might just have to walk the long way round…

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THE STEPHANIE GLITCH

SO GOOD THEY’LL STEAL IT

I found out recently that on Christmas day 2023, a fairly big scam website had stolen the introductory novella of THE STEPHANIE GLITCH (KILLING A UNIVERSE) from Amazon. That means they took it within three hours of its upload. In fact, they were probably one of the four people who ordered it.

Yes, only four people pre-ordered it. I’m bad at online marketing, but we’ll return to that point later.

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So TSG was stolen. Those important first chapters, all their worldbuilding and storytelling and weird ideas, were now made available freely to anyone who was fine with malware being ported onto their computer.

And I hope it’s a lot of malware.

I hope it leaks out of their computer like jam.

Obviously, I’ve initiated contact with the company as Halfplanet Press and I’m looking into what little legal action I can take. But I must be honest, when I found out, I wanted nothing more than to find their head offices and break someone’s nose in front of his coworkers. That seemed like a fair solution.

Or perhaps, constructing some elaborate machine with branches and rope that could fling them into a far-away wall.

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How to be safer.

What I’m missing, as an author, is representation. There’s a hard balance to strike. Writers as weird as me can spend upwards of nine years finding agents, only for it to not change their careers in any meaningful way. Publishing companies want the thing that looks like the thing that sold well last week, but I don’t care what sold well last week. I care about writing interesting stories.

A publisher might limit my weirdness, but they’d have legal teams who might care if my books got stolen. They also might not care.

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Freedom vs Time

I enjoy the creative freedom that being self-pub grants me, but I don’t have much time to write these days because I’m doing all the marketing myself.

And now, all the fighting with book theives.

It’s a hard balance.

I’ve already been told by more than a handful of people in the traditional pulishing industry that the industry itself is ‘risk-averse’. Even when I presented my most boring, front-of-store discount rack pitch for Stephanie (“A psychic teenager discovers the universe is ending”) I was met with the same fearful attitude towards anything interesting.

“I’m not sure where a bookstore would place it, on the shelf”

To which I replied by miming how a bookstore employee might pick up the book and place it on a shelf.

They didn’t find it as funny as I did.

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AI won’t kill writing. Boring people will.

And I refuse to be boring.

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Supporting myself some other way

But, having STEPHANIE stolen from under my fingertips has taken the energy out of me. Writing takes a lot of time. In fact, in September 2023 I realised I wouldn’t have time to write any more with my newfound job in a law company, who specialised in dealing with cases where employees were wrongly fired or mistreated for things beyond their control.

Luckily, that same company fired me for having an asthma attack and not calling their sick line in time to explain (I was busy having the aforementioned asthma attack, for which I refused to apologise), so I’m back onto the writing.

No more smelly Manchester mornings for me. Just smelly Manchester evenings when I occassionally scrape together the cash to go outside and tell jokes about alien abductions in bars.

I have since managed to get to the final stage of job interviews for a civil service job here in the UK, only for them to completely lose my application. Naturally, I’ve already written some standup about this. I was meant to get a job solving precisely this sort of problem…

Over half of all autistic adults aren’t in regular employment. And I wonder, had I known more about myself earlier in life, would I have found my path earlier?

(My path is telling rude jokes on stage. It doesn’t pay well)

All jokes aside I’d love to be a catsitter. Unfortunately 85% of the people reading this are an ocean away from me. I can do a zoom call with your cat, maybe?

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What’s next?

Truly I am not sure where to go next with my writing. I’ve got an account on Querytracker and I’ll have a go at it for EARTHLOOP for a while, but for my own self-published books, I think I need to shy away from publishing eBooks altogether. I need to protect my property.

Because no pirate has the motivation to sit down and scan a 350 page paperback.

Because eBooks are easy to steal, and certain companies have a nasty history of punishing authors for violating their exclusivity agreement even if they find someone else has stolen that book.

Because I always wanted my books to feel vintage anyway.

Because the future is physical.

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A paperback only approach

The quickest way to protect myself now is to make my bigger books less accessible, make them paperback only.

And to balance this out for you, I’m making some of my short stories permanently free, so if you’ve not got much of an income, you can still read at least some of my stuff.

I don’t want you to miss out.

So even if I go back on the paperback idea, I’ll keep those stories free for you.

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If you want to help support me as an author and defeat the book theives, please consider dropping a review on a story you’ve already read, such as WHO BUILT THE HUMANS, or perhaps HOLOGRAM KEBAB or THE CERTAIN UNIVERSE (both of which are currently free on most retailers)

or by buying one of my other books, such as THE COSMIC COMEDY COLLECTION. You could even join my Minecraft livestreams, where I design new machines inside the game Minecraft, tell jokes, tell stories, and work on worldbuilding in an unconventional way (which I’ll go over in a future post).

Or, if you have wanted to buy my books but can’t afford to, just send me a message telling me about it. I got one of those last night from a friend on instagram, and whilst I can’t send her a PDF in case it’s sniped out of the air in transit by some drooling parasite, I can at least sit at my desk right now knowing that one more person does want the books. Wanting them is enough.

Thanks for wanting them.

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You can also get a signed copy of WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? from the button up there. I’ve got 34 left, and I won’t be restocking them. If they don’t sell soon, I’m going to deep fry them and eat them on a tiktok livestream.

Or maybe do something more sensible with them.

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My goals for 2024

I’m trying to raise £3000 to work with a PR firm who have a decent track record for getting weird authors on the television. They’ve already said no to WBTH and TSG, and would prefer to work with EARTHLOOP because it’s a three book series, and those make better returns on investment for authors. It also has a more human element, with the time travel being used by regretful travellers who are trying to undo things in the past.

I like that they didn’t immediately say yes to every book I suggested, unlike every other company I contacted. They read the pitches, checked out samples, and went with what they thought would be good.

I also know an author who has done okay with them, and I think I have an edge.

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Using performance to move books

As a comedian and performer, I know from experience I am better at in-person sales. I bought 100 copies of WBTH for ComicCon back in 2022 and vanished 50 of them in that weekend alone. I also almost got EARTHLOOP all the way funded, before the convention ended and I realised that (at the time) my audience online was 17 friends. I didn’t inject the rest of the money in myself because that would be cheating, and I am glad I gave EARTHLOOP that extra time to grow in my mind, as I had a weird year ahead of me that hindered my writing progress.

I am pleased to announce EARTHLOOP 1 is now almost ready to go.

I also loved being on Channel 4’s Lego Masters, even if I didn’t always enjoy the company of the other, more vociferous contestants. I’m not the type to feel like I need the camera on me all the time, but I’m comfortable when it’s there, so my approach in the show was to just get on with it and build stuff, when perhaps I should have been more ‘showy’ instead. Interestingly, my team (my sister and I) won the speed build, but it was edited to look like one of the other teams (who got further in the show) did. Looking back, I should have known that’s how TV works. It’s fiction. All of it.

I’ll remember that for next time. Less bricks. More drama.

And there will be a next time.

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And I don’t mind being on stage presenting events, or doing my own sci-fi comedy hour at the Fringe. In fact, I was more relaxed doing that than talking on the phone or having job interviews, even when both microphones broke and they double booked a wedding who seemed to think I was a jazz musician before I told them dark jokes about alien abductions and religion…

…Which I don’t think they enjoyed.

They did like the foil hats though…

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So I’m okay at performing.

I do however, feel a profound sense of dread when I open my Amazon ads dashboard.

And that’s why I’m angling for this PR firm.

They get me on the camera. I tell joke. People buy book. I pay mum’s mortgage. We live happy life. I feed cat expensive food. Cat purrs. Life good.

That’s the plan.

Most of my career choices are motivated by the need to feed this beastie, and the other beastie, who has an aversion to being photographed.

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So, black holes came first.

But what comes after?

There’s a bigger story to be told, through and above all my books.

You’ll see some of it here if you stick around.

THE NEXT BOOKS

EARTHLOOP 1: THE FURUKAWA PARADOX

EARTHLOOP 2: THE SWAMPHENGE INCIDENT

EARTHLOOP 3: THE PLANET THEIVES

THE STEPHANIE GLITCH (ALL NOVELLAS AS ONE NOVEL)

WHO KILLED THE HUMANS

BRANCH DENSITY PAPERBACK POETRY

FALSE VACUUM PAPERBACK POETRY

SEVERAL OTHER POETRY BOOKS

A COMEDY POETRY BOOK

THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE

SEVERAL CREATIVE WRITING HANDBOOKS

SOME OTHER STUFF

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So I’m not giving up. I’m going to keep writing, but I don’t know how I’m going to go about getting the writing out into the world. The world feels cold and cruel to writers right now, and at present, I feel at a crossroads.

But you can expect more fiction here, at least.

More Stephanie chapters are still on the way, and I seem to have a decent following of people on tiktok who are interested in where the writing is going.

I’m going to keep selling my old things until I get to that £3000, and then I’ll see how I feel about spending it. By then, Earthloop might already be pretty popular.

And like Stephanie, perhaps I am overdue a reincarnation.

“A fantastic array of short stories ranging, as the cover says, from soaring science fiction to searing satire. I laughed, I cried, I questioned reality and died a bit on the inside, then came back again because that's how it works, obviously. A must read for sci-fi fans of all sorts (I mean seriously, whether you're into Douglas Adams or Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein, there's something in here for you). Check it out!”

- John Zevenbergen, fellow Sci-Fi author, reviewing WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?