‘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.

My web-site went from a business calling card, to a place to put my technical posts, and now I am semi-retired (yes the lights are still on!) a place I can just advertise my novels and my occasional ramblings; A place where old friends can find me, and new people can reach out to me. I look at the page view counter at 330,000 views and think wow. Then I look at my book downloads at 180 and see the reality of life, that almost all of my visitors are probably just bots, scraping the web for all the crap that’s left now the AI companies have taken all the low-hanging fruit.

I used to think if I wrote a couple of good novels, that somehow magically everyone would see them, read them, and the world would become my oyster, but my total earnings from writing is sub $100, every cent of that from the downloads off my website, and the Buy Me A Coffee link. I still haven’t received a cent off Amazon or any of the other sellers, and my strategy of giving books away free to anyone who asks nicely does not really help here. But a few have enjoyed them enough to email and ask when my next book is..

Sigh! I do love writing, but I am also a bit of a perfectionist on the story; the last book almost wrote itself because I loved the characters and the story. Not so much luck at the moment though, I have probably wrote 150,000 words and tore up 130,000 of those, I don’t even know if it will be fantasy or sci-fi, but it will happen, I can feel I’m getting there; Not because I have too little story, but because I have too much! Basically I am happy at the moment to just keep tapping away and making it something I can be proud of.

The incentive to write however, is certainly not financial, as nobody is stumbling upon this site by accident, and bots don’t buy books. Most sites I used to frequent are now over-moderated or becoming a bit toxic, which for someone whose humour level is still stuck in the 1980’s is not good. The old twitter, now X, is the only real site where you can still self-promote yourself and your work (and as a bonus the crowd their usually does not mind 80’s humour), so I now have an account there. It is really just another channel to try and get recognition, though I expect, like this site, it will be forever lost in the noise. I have however, spent the last few weeks doom-scrolling, following and un-following people and I can see where the addition comes from. It seems weird un-following someone, but just because I like their technical post, does not mean I want to hear everything going on in their life or their political rants, and some people are really prolific. Like hackernews and hackaday however, I do however like replying to interesting subjects, and I now realise why I should never download it onto my phone. So yes @boz_brown is live, but don’t expect anything sensible on it.

Update 7 July 2026

My experiment with social media has failed after 2 months as I cannot get onto the site anymore as I cannot prove I am a human – Maybe it’s for the better

Prepers to me just don’t see the end game, a storeroom full of tinned SPAM and tuna, and a bunch of weapons is not going to restart society, it just means you will live longer in misery, expecting every stranger to be an enemy, and of course make you the next target for said biker boss. Even if you go the billionaire route and have your super high-tech bunker getaway in the South Island of New Zealand with its lifetime guaranteed power supply, food, concubines, and offline entertainment, you’re still just postponing the inevitable. Ten years down the line when lifetime-guaranteed crucial system inevitable fails, and the spare part is a hundred-years of technological progress away, you will be in the same boat.

Likewise, I have always avoided the ‘end of the world’ dystopian genre in books, shows, and movies; You know the ones, those where a bunch of misfit survivors struggle, almost always unsuccessfully, to keep alive, doing it in the most miserable and unlikable ways imaginable, and carrying on the same tired plot line into the next show/chapter/series. You just know that is all there is going to be; it’s a plot line with a complexity one above porn!

If dystopia is going to be part of the plot, I want the rest of the plot to show human problem solving and ingenuity at its best, and the survivors to be in a much better position than they started from, otherwise what really is the point!

Of course I grew up on shows like Star Trek, Mission Impossible, Thunderbird’s, and the likes, generally optimistic shows that put humans in impossible situations and let them solve them using their superior skills, technology and intelligence, usually leading to a satisfactory ending where something was achieved. Likewise movies, there were always goodies and baddies and the baddies generally got their comeuppance at the end, usually with a witty quip from the protagonist. Even with books, the most gritty novel generally had an upbeat ending, with mankind triumphing against the alien invaders or fixing the world-ending problem; Even if the plots are rubbish, I don’t come away from them feeling depressed.

Today, even supposedly utopian shows like Star Trek have gotten miserable to the point of unwatchable, where the only challenges are the various ‘feelings’ each character has and the problem solving is the same tired one repeated from a hundred other episodes. I like my hero’s intelligent, and not to do stupid or clinically certifiable dumb moves, which they then get out of using equally stupid, unlikely, or downright impossible means. A good example of one of these certifiably dumb moves is where the protagonist confronts the antagonist, both have guns, but the antagonist is holding a hostage with his gun pointed at her head (yes it is always a man holding a woman) and he asks the protagonist to drop their weapon or he will kill her. The protagonist then drops his weapon! It beggars belief that this would ever be done in reality by anyone with an ounce of sense, yet almost every time it is done, and the good guys somehow survive – Oh yes, did I forget, the bad guy has got to be just as stupid as the good guy!

“The struggle” will forever be a genre, but come on guys, make the outcome at least optimistic!

Making an avid military/sci-fi fan, the unintended audience for your romantic novel about a space marine and a green-skinned alien woman, will not end well. Yes, technically both could be classed as military/sci-fi, if you squint hard enough; And if you’re keen to get your book published you could easily see this category before sci-fi/romance (or romance/sci-fi) and think, hey that fits nicely!

So now you have accidentally written a romance novel with a sci-fi theme, how do you drum up interest in it? Well, dear-reader, despite my insignificant viewpoint that there are some genres, as a writer, you should never cross, I do know a lot of women who would lap up a book with a cover like the above. What I don’t know, however, are any men; and certainly no reader of the sci-fi genre who would touch it; So unwritten rule-one of writing is cross genres at your peril.

It should be easy to avoid mis-categorisation, right? Well yes, if the book is as blatantly obvious as the above then most definitely, but generally it is not this obvious. Putting a bit of love-action into your hard sci-fi novel has been done by many famous writers, (though I doubt any sci-fi fan will ever remember which novel or which part) but put in too much, and you have crossed a line in the sand. Same with a romantic novel, adding the odd laser gun, or flying saucer, will likely register little with the readers pretty little minds, but adding an explanation of the quantum-impulse-star-drive, and the technical parameters it needs to achieve faster-than-light travel, will at minimum fall of deaf-ears, and at worst get you a 1-star review.

It is easy to accidentally fall into this trap if you are writing a little outside your normal genre, and you may think that a little sprinkling here or there will be received favourably, or even broaden the readers mind. In some alternate universes it might, but in this one, unless you have accidentally written a masterpiece, it probably wont!

I of course am a total hypocrite, when it comes to taking my own advice, and I have made this mistake a few times (though not as blatantly obvious as above). Case in point, and the reason for the actual blog post, the latest novel I am writing; I just re-read it, and threw away more than half the story, and eliminated two characters. Yes my sci-fi/fantasy drifted too far into soppy. The good news is I caught it early, the bad news is I will most certainly do it again!