30 January 2024
FREE on February 1st as a Kindle! Click here!
Middlestead is just a quiet, suburban English town, but when some residents form a local science fiction group, they discover they can manipulate their neighbours in ways they never realised. Soon plans are in place and something is brewing that will lead to disaster… and none of this is science fiction – it could actually happen… couldn’t it?
Have you ever just gone too far? Do you believe everything you are told?
Humanity – Out Now
To celebrate my reissue of Humanity I’m giving away Kindle versions of the novel on Thursday 1st February.
You can buy either a paperback (£8.99) or download for your Kindle (£2.75 or see above), or read as part of Kindle Unlimited. Click here.
‘That’s the point,’ said Tony. ‘We do all believe what we’re told by the radio, just as we’ve been talking about with weather reports. Each time they get it wrong, we complain as if it’s the first time it’s happened.’
‘Yeah, but,’ interrupted Allan, ‘the weather is different to an alien invasion. We don’t know how to predict the weather, the Met Office do. We also know that aliens are not about to invade.’
The 1990s are my decade, and so this is a book set during an era l love, it’s about science-fiction, a subject I love. I’m really proud of this novel and if you want to read something fun, dark and just that bit different, read Humanity!
As posted in my last blog, I’ve decided to re-edit my work as I believe I can improve on the content in various ways. If I’m going to ask for money for these things, they had better be as good as I can make them. One of the benefits of self-publishing is I can do this. What’s more, as a writer you never finish writing your stories. There’s always points that you think in hindsight could be changed, from small details no one else will notice to bits of continuity I missed.
Writing a whole novel is hard work and so at the beginning, during my first novel, Humanity, I had to learn a lot! And I’m still learning. However, during the process of doing this project at the end of last year and the beginning of this one, I was really pleased with the improvements.
I was able to run the whole text through better spell-checkers and it found things which, although I’ve read the thing so many times, I’d completely missed! As a writer as good as you may be with English grammar and spelling, being so close to the text means your brain will tell you what you assume it says rather than what it does. I can’t afford an editor, and beta reading can be hard to organise, so it was up to me to do the whole lot, well me and the program I used.
It did make me smile when it decided it didn’t like turns of phrase I stubbornly refuse to amend, for example when a character “dashed hurriedly”, I love that even though half of it is redundant, it just sounds good to my eyes along with “cacophony of sound” (and reminds me of a Doctor Who story from the 1970s – The Deadly Assassin).
I’ve also redone the cover image and I’m so much more pleased with it than my first attempt at designing my own book covers. This is a book that even though it’s been over 20 years since I first wrote it, still has a lot to say about life today… in fact, I’d say it’s more relevant than ever. Happy reading.
‘What if a real scientific person calls up and says it’s all ridiculous?’ asked Allan.
‘Then another scientist will call and confirm everything we’ve just said,’ offered Scott. ‘They tend to do that.’
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Arthur Hofn - Literature 