One man’s last stand against the slop machines.

I wrote Last Writer Sitting in 2023. My copywriting business was already on the wane, following the launch of Cheat GPT the previous November (it stands for Generic Pilfered Trash, right?).

Even then, it felt like the writing was on the wall for writers, not on the page or screen where we’d prefer it. I’d seen a demo of the tech, and although the output was sloppy, it was quick slop that would be good enough for many.

This book is a fictional rendering of the moment in time when this tech had just arrived and people were trying to predict its impact. Some of my characters embrace it, others reluctantly surrender to it. But the un-named hero of the book fights against it. How does he get on? If I told you, I wouldn’t be doing my job as a self-publisher who has to work hard to self-promote his work.

If you do fancy giving Last Writer Sitting a read, you’ll see that in my efforts to foresee how this tech would spread to other areas of life, I managed to pre-empt the emergence of The Enhanced Games. Unfortunately.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CFDG8W7Y

One man’s last stand against the slop machines.

I wrote Last Writer Sitting in 2023. My copywriting business was already on the wane, following the launch of Cheat GPT the previous November (it stands for Generic Pilfered Trash, right?).

Even then, it felt like the writing was on the wall for writers, not on the page or screen where we’d prefer it. I’d seen a demo of the tech, and although the output was sloppy, it was quick slop that would be good enough for many.

This book is a fictional rendering of the moment in time when this tech had just arrived and people were trying to predict its impact. Some of my characters embrace it, others reluctantly surrender to it. But the un-named hero of the book fights against it. How does he get on? If I told you, I wouldn’t be doing my job as a self-publisher who has to work hard to self-promote his work.

If you do fancy giving Last Writer Sitting a read, you’ll see that in my efforts to foresee how this tech would spread to other areas of life, I managed to pre-empt the emergence of The Enhanced Games. Unfortunately.

TROPES

Resistance

Loss of individualism

Machine power

 

TRIGGERS

Zero employment

Depression

Machine Power

 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CFDG8W7Y

I wouldn’t have dreamt of attending a pub quiz in my 20s and 30s when I was too cool for school-like environments in which you had to answer questions.

But now I’m older, wiser? All over them. And it’s good to see competitors aged 20-80 taking part in the one in my local boozer in South Croydon, London.

Phones away. Engage the brain. A bit of healthy competition. Bring it on.

It took the team I quiz with about ten thrashings and a few close calls before we won. There was no prize. Just a sense of shared achievement. In a machine-free world.

I can’t remember when I first thought that quizzing could form the basis of a dystopian novel. Some may say they wish I hadn’t. Too late now. Dead Headz is out there.

About Dead Headz

In the book, the youth-led government that’s so sold on letting the all-powerful computer it's developed - The Platform - control the world, makes a series of strange decisions, including banning the asking of questions - and therefore all forms of quizzing.

The hero of the story, Kent Sanderson, is disgusted by how supposed grown adults can be so sold on being dictated to by a machine. He’s also disgusted by how many people are content to delegate their thinking and doing to The Platform.

Such is the government's determination to stamp out questioning that pub quizzes are forced underground, Quiz Masters are neutralised and Prime Minister's Question Time in Parliament ceases to exist. That's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to bad things happening in the dystopian world of The Powers - which is what the government calls itself.

I wrote Dead Headz to entertain first, but also as a warning of what might be around the corner if we continue down a path in which machines are seen as saviours, and sources of intelligence beyond human comprehension.

The book's hero tries to get others to question everything, form their own opinions. To never accept that there is no alternative. "By not embracing the bots, you are not getting left behind," he argues. "You are choosing a better path, in which humanity remains the priority, and in which the slop generated by machine lovers is met with the disdain it deserves."

Dead Headz Tropes

Reluctant hero

Dystopian society

Morally grey characters

Herds of sheeple

Intelligent resistance

Dead Headz Trigger Warnings

Surveillance

Oppression

Strong anti-tech sentiment

Discover More About Dead Headz

https://www.jonlymonauthor.com/dead-headz

Hello! I rarely make this book free, as it’s one of my favourites.

I wrote it back in 2013, and despite attracting plenty of readers, it’s yet to get a single review or rating. Who knows why?

Anyway, it’s about Gloria, a goldfish who lives in the sea and wakes up one morning to discover that all the gold has been stolen from her scales.

She then sets out on an underwater journey of self-discovery to find her gold, making new friends and facing new dangers along the way.

It’s a chapter book for children aged 5 to 7. You can download it for free on 11 and 12 August.

 

USA

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00D3M6O5W

 

UK:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00D3M6O5W

 

AUS:

https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B00D3M6O5W

 

CAN:

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00D3M6O5W

Miles, the travel app, is off on his summer vacation. But as usual, he’s in a rush to get there, and in a hurry to see as much as he can when he gets there. Can chilled Jill who’s staying in the holiday rental next door, get Miles to slow down and relax?

Miles Discovers Another World is an illustrated children’s book about holidays, friendships and how taking your time can help you enjoy more of the world.

TROPES

Hero in a hurry

Power of friendship

Learning to share

There’s only one thing Claudia, the Weather App, likes better than surfing clouds or singing in the rain. And that’s spending time with her friends.

So when three of those friends ask her if the weather is going to spoil their plans, each time, she consults her maps and tells them that the weather is going to be great, and they can all be together.

However, each time, the weather ruins her friends’ plans, leading them to question Claudia’s honesty, and leaving Claudia wondering what she can do to win back their trust.

CLAUDIA WEATHERS A STORM is an easy-to-read illustrated Appventurers tale that shows children the importance of honesty and friendship.

A Big Bluff and Some Green Stuff

A cosy police drama is rudely interrupted by the zombie apocalypse and an alien invasion.

Features zombies, pirates, aliens, zombie pirates, zombie aliens, but not zombie pirate aliens. That would be silly.

It’s fair to say the book has divided opinion:

“Couldn’t put it down.” 5-stars.

“Just awful.” 1-star

If you liked watching Shaun of the Dead back in the day, you might enjoy reading A Big Bluff and Some Green Stuff.

Might.

USA: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079PB8LJF

CAN: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B079PB8LJF

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B079PB8LJF

What’s Christmassy about July? Sprucey is about to find out.

When Sprucey the Christmas tree discovers he’s the last tree left in the forest in December, he worries about missing out on Christmas, so he ups sticks and searches for all the fun of the festive season.

His year-long quest takes him to places and events that a Christmas tree has never seen before – such as a beach in the height of summer.

Along the way, Sprucey discovers that if you look hard enough, you can find signs of Christmas and the festive spirit in every month of the year.

SPRUCEY SEARCHES FOR CHRISTMAS is a fun and festive story that can be enjoyed any time between January and December, and will help children learn about the Christmas spirit as well as the months of the year.

Lloyd awoke in his bedroom, a boyish box room dominated by a single bed draped in a mauve duvet which featured illustrations of World War II aircraft, Allied and Nazi vessels flying peacefully alongside each other. Stukas next to Spitfires. Messerschmitts beside Mustangs.

Lloyd’s shoes were beside each other too, still on his sweating feet – a common post piss-up phenomenon. His eyes explored their black leather which was already showing signs of scuffing to grey around the toecaps. A sharp pain on the bridge of his left foot then announced itself, forcing him to reach down and rub through his shoe.

Where was Sophia? Why hadn’t she come home to bed with him and let him do a bit of whatever he was capable of doing?

His attention turned to the window through which he could see nothing but darkness. Confusing. The clarity he felt in his head suggested enough time had passed to dull the worst of the thumping in his brain and dilute his hangover. He must have slept the whole of Saturday.

An overwhelming fear and dread then struck him, accompanied by a flash of a pretty girl with dark hair and heavy mascara. She was rapidly replaced by Sophia scowling, Will shouting, glass shattering, someone else yelling ‘move back, move back,’ then the snap of what sounded like bone.

He checked his bedside table for the glass of water and biscuit his mother faithfully left for him when she knew he’d be hanging. Neither was there. Only the wooden bedside table lamp into which were carved the snarling heads of jackals. Maybe his mother was showing her disappointment in him for failing to obey the curfew.

He sat up on his bed, a move which prompted a surge of what felt like an oil slick to flow to the front of his brain, causing a build up of intense pressure behind his forehead he hoped his skull could hold in. The pain prompted another flashback, Will standing at a silver blue bar telling him he was going home, then buying a rare round of lagers and a pair of even more rare shots, the sweet aniseed hell that was sambuca, dispatched in seconds, followed by who knows how many more.

Lloyd’s head was crying out for him to lay back down, to spread the oil slick evenly about his brain again. His lungs were crying out for him to sneak a smoke out of the window. Lloyd considered it, looking at the butts he’d crammed into a crack between the window ledge and wall. But his father was strictly anti, always leaving the room when his mother lit up. He’d long given up, but knew he was always only a bad day away from his next cigarette. And Lloyd knew there were burned bridges downstairs in dire need of rebuilding. He dreaded hearing the stomp of footsteps up the stairs, seeing the accusatory wagging finger, the menace in the eye, the spittle at the sides of his father’s mouth that would shoot in his face from angry words spat with venom, against which he had no defence.

His father was a strict nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday man, who drank in moderation and expected nothing from life except debt. Not for him any ambition beyond his capabilities as a moderately successful civil engineer. He’d told Lloyd how he’d seen his own father destroyed by disappointment and drink, a showman with nothing to show for years of office toil which he endured while waiting for the leading roles in his evening and weekend amateur dramatics to turn into something professional.

For sure, he would make sure that both Nick and Lloyd did not follow in those doomed family footsteps. They would not tread hollow boards riddled with trapdoors on his watch. Lloyd’s father vowed to instil into his sons the importance of a settled life and the need to set sights low.

Although only three years his elder, Nick was already well versed in the disappointments of the real world. He’d left school at sixteen, shunning the idea of college in favour of work as a decorator. As a result, he was now in a position to afford his own flat, his own girlfriend, his own debts and recently, his own daughter.

Lloyd had more of his grandfather about him and that spelt trouble. The gene that skipped his father’s generation had landed slap bang entangled in his DNA. Lloyd’s parents had discussed their son’s predilection for unnecessary risk-taking on numerous occasions, propped up by puffed-up pillows in the matrimonial bed after busy days, heads bowed into tepid hardback fiction that transported them to impossibly exciting worlds that still reflected their middle-class morals.

‘Life is much harder for youngsters these days,’ his mother would reason, and his father would look up, stare at nothing in particular and wonder if anything about that statement was true. He didn’t remember having anything easy and tried to recall if his father had ever berated him for lazing around in bed all day, jobless and directionless.

‘I’m not saying it’s easy,’ he’d tell his wife. ‘But slouching around isn’t the answer. He needs to get out there and do something with his life. We’ve supported him for eighteen years, and he needs to know we’re not going to do it for another eighteen.’

Despite this hard-line attitude, he was conscious that Lloyd’s was still a life he was responsible for creating, nurturing and, ultimately, financing. So he tolerated Lloyd occasionally milking him for money for nights out, even loaning him a generous thirty pounds for his eighteenth birthday which his mother secretly supplemented with another twenty.

As he lay in his bed, Lloyd checked his pockets for any change that he could return to his parents, but found only a scrunched-up yellow raffle ticket. He unfolded it. Number thirty-two. He had no idea where it had come from. He put it back in his pocket and tried to work out where all his money had gone. He was pretty sure he hadn’t been mugged in the underpass or at any other stage on his way home. So that meant he’d spent it all on drink and cigarettes. On his own birthday. He sat up and sighed, disappointed by the costliness of his own generosity.

Right. Enough hanging around, delaying the inevitable.

Quietly, he descended the stairs, preparing himself for his father’s verbal onslaught, suspecting he’d be spoiling for a confrontation. Lloyd knew he’d have to take whatever was coming his way, shoe gaze and carpet explore and nod and mumble and agree to buck up his ideas. He’d have to negotiate himself a few more weeks and hope for brighter economic news or a clearer picture of how he saw his own future.

The lounge door was still ajar. Looking through the gap, Lloyd frowned. The television was on but the picture was wider and more vibrant than he remembered. His mother sat alone and asleep in a chair slightly lower and noticeably less floral than the one he’d left her in the night before. There were pictures on the wall he’d not seen before too. Christ on a cross. An oil painting of a basket of flowers, one of them wilting. Another of a dog that looked like it had been painted by a child. As he edged further into the room he saw on the Seventies-style sideboard a silver framed shot of him and Nick when they were kids. Next to it was another picture of an uncle or someone with typical Parker facial features (the arched eyebrows, the square jaw, the slightly over-sized teeth) standing next to a smiling young blonde child no older than six, who was sitting on a bike with stabilisers.

‘Sorry, Mum,’ Lloyd whispered, kneeling beside her chair, being careful not to wake her while still keeping an eye out for his father. ‘Sorry for getting home late. Lost track of time, didn’t I? Lost track of where I was, if I’m honest. But I’ll make it up to you and Dad. Promise.’

Last Night at The Stairways is available to buy at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0091JGJLA

DEAD HEADZ - Dystopian fiction

Brains are failing, skulls collapsing. So why is Kent Sanderson quizzing?

It’s 2035 and a General Election is due. But the extremist youth-led government of the First World refuses to call it, or answer any more questions.

Bots have been installed in homes to control every aspect of people’s lives, and after several years of delegating doing and thinking to these machines, the populace is showing signs of brain degradation.

Not Kent Sanderson, however.

He’s one of a few rebels who refuse to surrender to the machines, showing his defiance by attending illegal quiz nights where people celebrate the beauty of thinking for themselves.

But when one such event is violently raided by the police, Kent and his fellow rebels discover how serious the government is about controlling the population, and how big a task they face to bring back hope to the millions living under this nightmare regime.

 

TROPES

Reluctant hero

Dystopian society

Morally grey characters

Herds of sheeple

Intelligent resistance

 

TRIGGER WARNINGS

Surveillance

Oppression

Strong anti-tech sentiment

 

200 years after The Gold Rush, another valuable discovery sends the world into a frenzy

The Diamond Rush is an offbeat space adventure following one man’s thrilling quest to get his hands on the biggest dangling carat (sic) in history.

Simon Remnant is not your average hero. Oh no. As far as heroes go, he’s way below average. Absent father, absent-minded lover, unskilled and untrustworthy. None of them do his uselessness justice. 

So there are no expectations other than failure when he joins the mid-21st Century’s equivalent of The Gold Rush – a race to get-rich-quick through plundering the dazzling fortunes offered by an asteroid brimming with diamond deposits.

Remnant provides the brawn in a dubiously talented and totally incompatible crew of three aboard a ship that’s not expected to make it higher than the treetops. 

Can he overcome his underdog status? And can he beat the mighty NASA to the asteroid belt and return home with a life-changing cut of the loot? 

Miles, the travel app, is off on his summer vacation. But as usual, he’s in a rush to get there, and in a hurry to see as much as he can when he gets there. Can chilled Jill who’s staying in the holiday rental next door, get Miles to slow down and relax?

Miles Discovers Another World is a children’s picture book about holidays, friendships and how taking your time can help you enjoy more of the world.

TROPES

Hero in a hurry

Power of friendship

Learning to share

USA:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DNTJC29L

 

UK:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DNTJC29L

 

CANADA:

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0DNTJC29L