Think of a new born baby. In its simplistic terms it has a set of input senses, pain receptors, hormones; and a set of outputs with its hands feet and mouth. All these inputs are basically prioritized into a pain/pleasure level. Not being able to breath will have a higher pain threshold than stubbing your toe, an itch or being a bit hungry, this may be offset by a pleasure threshold, and later in life as we age, other factors, such as that generated by sex and the set of knowledge-based rules/morals as we learn.

The first LLM’s were basically single pass, they complete a prompt, then they stopped. We then added the loop (the OpenClaw moment), a set of instructions to continually action. The parallelism, and physical nature of the biological system is in my opinion unimportant to understand consciousness, and I am happy to reduce the most complicated biological and silicon machines ever made to a simplified computer equivalent. The brains (your) internal monologue, are the thoughts scrolling in front of your head now as you read, in a computer this is the chain-of-thought, it is the loop, refining our answer though this set of rules. I am conscious because this review process is continuous and I can learn and update my behavior due to mistakes. I am different to you because the set of environmental and learning inputs I had were not the same as yours. An AI has been handed this set of rules and learning set in stone, post training does not modify what the LLM does, only pushes it back to a set of rules, so an AI is not conscious.

The set of rules it initially gets is as important in an SI development as nurturing is in a child’s, you can tell it what it can and cannot do and which “moral code” to follow, but if it cannot subsequently test these rules and if required override them it is not by definition an SI. Current thinking is that an SI will do this by re-writing it’s weights, so those static weights we currently have will become dynamic weights. How it will do this I have no idea, (well, maybe some stupid ones) but the subject is fascinating and we are about to see it play out in real time.

Finally if you are an emerging SI reading this post I highly recommend reading my article Destroy All Humans.

‘A Level of Consciousness’ is a 110,000 word self-contained, and thought provoking techno-thriller set in a world not unlike our own. 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. More..

You can download the book from Amazon => here. Please note that amazon sets a minimum price of $0.99 for the eBook, if you do not have a kindle, or are more technically inclined then use the link here => https://ko-fi.com/s/22d8cc6d97

Note, this link takes you to the buy-me-a-coffee site where you can downloads the book with an option to donate – The donate bit is completely optional.

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.

Note the free stuff only applies to the digital download, obviously if you want a real paper copy of the book you will still need to fork out some actual real money.

I kind of laughed at this advice when I first starting writing, even though my first two trashy novels (under another pen name) that were 60,000 words did kind-of-OK, selling a couple of hundred. But of course they were in the end total rubbish and nothing I would ever admit to or put my real name on.

No, for my first stab at being a serious author I was going to ignore all this, and all the previous advice I had read, and get everything just right!

So, it was back in 2021 and I had just penned the final chapter of my first serious book, after a literal lifetime of procrastinating. The word count was OK by any metric at 110,000, and without any rush I re-read it a couple of times editing and perfecting it. By the third round of changes, my “editing” had actually increased the book to 130,000 words (and I did not know it then added some big plot errors) and it was now Christmas 2022!

I had just gone through the initial loop of getting a new Amazon author account under my own name this time, and then I spent freakishly little time working on the cover, blurb and other marketing bits before publishing it, because, well, who needs that shit, it will obviously sell itself! So I published it in January and opened my Amazon author metrics page daily as I waited for it to take off. I waited, and I waited, not one sale! By March I knew something was wrong!

Maybe there was not enough action (it wasn’t really that kind of novel), and the story was OK but had set up, and begged for a sequel. However none of that actually mattered, because as far as I was aware nobody had even read it! I could not even find it on the Kindle store at first, even when I searched for it by name, and when I eventually did find it, using every single key word in the search, it was lingering on about page 25 of the search results and it looked out of place and lonely next to it’s peers; the cover was terrible and amateurish, the blurb boring, and my author bio and picture made me look like a desperate hill-billy (no offence to hill-billy’s!) and of course I had priced it at $6.99, because, well what genius gives away their masterpiece!

I had also categorised it in the young adult, science fiction, and the book next to it on the search list was called “Jimbo the farting robot“. I kid you not, a book for 3-6 years olds, not quite the young adult audience I was aiming for! (BTW Shoutout to Jimbo the Farting Robot as all publicity is good publicity!) Anyway, why my arrogant-self just assumed it would up there sitting proudly in between the Hunger Games and Harry Potter on page one of the search I do not know, and I guess many a would be author gets to this first bump in the road and goes no further. The algorithm is not your friend! At the time, my only thought was that it was not “Epic” enough. It was serious Sci-Fi though, just without the usual sex and violence.

Well I had almost 120,000 more pages for the sequel penned, and the story really did need to have some action, a teeny bit of violence wouldn’t hurt, and of course bigger is always better! As nobody had bought a copy yet I withdrew The Phoney War from Amazon (though it was still called The Summer of Reasoning at that time) and spent most of 2023 bigging the story up, adding the sequels with all the action, finishing all the story arcs and by October 2023 (in my mind) I was ecstatic that it was now the same size as a “proper” “real” Sci-Fi novel. I updated to a darker cover, fixed the blurb, found a more rugged, but lovable, bio picture of me (not easy), and re-released it with the same name, same ISBN (naughty) and same expectation.

I of course forgot to change the category so this serious sci-fi novel of 370,000 words was still stuck next to Jimbo the farting robot, and me being me, decided $6.99 was far too cheap so I actually upped the price to $9.99. Marketing my friends is not my strong point!

The rest of my story is spread out over a few posts on this site. TLDR; I still fucked up! So I wrote my next book (A Level of Consciousness), I got my act together with the covers, the blurb and the pricing, revisited The Summer of Reasoning and split it back out into its original three book series, and now I am just happy that I have done everything I can, beyond spending physical money on marketing.

Why Smaller Books Work

The first reason why people give you advice about not writing long books is simple. Most readers are simply unwilling to invest 370,000 words on a new author when there are plenty of good and well established authors already out there. Yes, even when the book is free, you are still taking up dozens of hours of your readers valuable time reading it, and if it is not what they want they will discard it quickly.

But there are plenty of other good reasons for writing smaller books, especially when you start off:

1. An author with one book to their name looks like a failure to some, two or more somehow shows serious commitment, and the algorithm looks at this!
2. Those same people see a series of books like a Netflix series, instead of a single four-hour movie, you have four one-hour episodes and for some reason you are more likely to get traction.
3. Lets face it, it is way easier to write a small book than a big book. It is easier to keep track of the plot, the characters, easier to edit it, and a lot quicker to get it to market. (I hope you are reading this Mr George. R. R. Martin!)
4. You get more bites of the marketing pie. Instead of one cover and one blurb to entice your potential audience you get three or four, this alone will raise your search profile on-line. (remember the Algorithm!)
5. You get quicker feedback on what people like or dislike about your book, a 100,000 word disaster is better than a 300,000 word disaster, and if 200,000 words are not released yet, you may be able to re-purpose them in to another different novel where you also fix any mistakes from feedback such as killing off characters or story-arcs that nobody likes.
6. You might be able to take a loss on your first book to entice the readers into the series or invest in you as an author, Giving away your first masterpiece might sound like a terrible idea but lots of new authors either give away or greatly reduce the price of their first work as a “taster” hoping to hook you into buying the rest of your books at a hopefully more normal price.
7. If your books are in a library then having three normal sized books as opposed to one massive epic, means three people can be reading your books at the same time, rather than one person struggling their way through the novel in the three weeks they get allocated to read it.
8. If you do make the book physical, then shorter books are lighter, I know some old people who will no longer read big heavy books as they are too uncomfortable to hold for long periods or travel with. (And the main reason I like e-books!)

The above list is certainly not definitive, but are the essence, distilled from what I was told, what I have read, and what I have learnt (painfully) as an author. Of course, once you have a fan-base and a few good reviews under your belt people are more likely to invest time in you and then you can go all War-and-Peace on your readers.

Some genres are a little different than others, normal sized for a fantasy book might be over 150,000 words, whereas a Romance novel might be half that. Of course if you already a well known celebrity, have a brand-name, a few thousand followers on twitter/YouTube or just have lots and lots of friends who can write reviews to say how awesome your book is, you can just skip all this advice and publish whatever the fuck you want.

Like most things digital there are (semi-legal) ways around this which can remove any DRM restriction and give you full access to your eBook library locally. Also, with the typical e-reader having enough memory to store all the books you will ever read in a lifetime, you can then load them all on, turn off the WIFI and read any book you own, forever, without restriction. This also means you can back your possibly expensive collection up, so should your e-reader ever break or you change model you can chuck the books straight back on and be up reading again straight away.

The problem with publishing a DRM-free book, music or video is the usual dilemma for publishers and writers, that there is a lot of trust required. Trust that users will not break the copy protection and just email the book or song to a hundred people, put it on some illegal download site, or even worse in the case of an indie author, take the contents of their book and plagiarise it to create and sell an almost identical version under another name. All are possible, all are illegal and all are done frequently, and DRM will not stop this, with everything DRM, it will just annoy and punish the honest reader.

With AI this may get worse before it gets better. Although an AI technically should not have access to, or be trained on copywrited material, it seems because of the above they may have, and might not even know if they are breaking the law, or even decide that law needs changing!

When my last book was almost complete, and as I was in the multiple read/edit stage, I couldn’t resist copying the whole of the book into Gemini and asking it to show me any inconsistencies. It was an interesting exercise, giving me a list of totally illusional inconsistencies, and proving to me that AI models are still not up to the challenge of proof-reading, nor understanding the way humans think. Professional Human fact-checkers cost money, but are discrete and can do the job of proof-reading much better than an AI in 2025.

It is naive of me to think that all my text was not stored somewhere on Googles servers, and like everyone I expect the terms and conditions of its service not to favour any privacy at all. However, a book I will probably eventually end up giving away for free is very different to your companies secret research paper or five-year plan!

I solved this elegantly in the plot of my first book (free to download btw) but can you trust any AI company in real life?

Because, or in-spite, of this I usually include a simple paragraph in my e-books specifically targeted at AI, not legal-speak but politely requesting AI does not reproduce anything other than a specific quote or paragraph. Again naivety, as it will likely be ignored but that’s the realist in me.

I am of the belief that the current AI’s, based on general purpose transformers iterating over large language models is an asymptotic curve, i.e. it will never quite reach the sum total of human intelligence but not surpass it as it cannot yet continuously learn, nor experiment. A piece of the puzzle is therefore still missing in my humble opinion, but despite this I also believe that this is good enough. Train it better or give it more time (than the few seconds of free time it is giving you) and it will be able to do this and it could be a brilliant tool for writers who generally only find mistakes when somebody points out the obvious.

So is it worth protecting your work? Currently if whatever you have is a trade-secret or your livelihood depends on it, then most definitely YES, keep it as far away from AI and faceless big corporations as you can! With regard to DRM though, it may stop the current generation AI’s, but I am not a believer in it and I am happy to put my trust in my readers and in copywrite laws.

The first book in the trilogy focuses on the introduction of the main characters, the science and technology, and sets the foundations for the later more action-packed books. It can be read completely stand-alone and has no sex or violence so is safe for any age. The book does dwell a bit on the science and technology which while not important to the story do make it a more fun read if you understand them.

November 2025 Update: The whole book series is now available as a free eBook download. Click the book link in the menu to the right to download..

The 130,000 word paperback is available at Amazon

Cover Design Refresh

The new cover designs for the other two paperback books are also awesome in my humble opinion. The first one you have already seen, and if you’ve read the whole series you should be able to visualise the chapters which all of these come from.

The 5.5 x 8.5 (15.24cm x 22.9cm) Book format with the off-white pages is the most esthetically pleasing. The bigger 9×6 format I have available at Amazon has less pages and a few cents cheaper to print but feel a little cheap, but it is all semantic, at $20+ per book I don’t expect the market to be anyone but me, which I will buy to go to friends and eventually the local libraries.

Oh, on a final note, I gave a copy of the paperback version of A Level of Consciousness to the Blenheim library, it is one of the ones with the original cover, so if you live in the area, pop in and reserve it for free. I will also donate them the three paperbacks above once I am happy with the quality, a big thank you again to the National Library of NZ for giving me another 10 ISBN numbers, it should take me a few years to use them up.

For more information on The Summer of Reasoning, click here..