Michael Reed's Blog: Michael Reed Freelance Writer and Author

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email: mike@unmusic.co.uk

phone: 07910059908

Just a quick videoblog overview of the Spring 2016 cover redesign.

Click here to watch it (and sub to my channel!).

I’ve given the Sexual Compass a cover redesign for the spring.

The book received a nice review on Mrs Giggles, a review blog. 4/5 Oogies – can’t complain about that.

“John’s story isn’t as much about gender as it is about the desperation borne of loneliness in someone who just happens to be really bad at interacting with other people. His story can be darkly comedic and heartbreaking at the same time, especially since the author gives John a strong narrative voice that makes me feel like I can relate to his every frustration and resentment.”

This goes along with the reviews on Goodreads and the ones on Amazon. If you’ve read the book, feel free to put a review or a rating up on either of those sites, it really helps me if you can.

Goodreads Page

UK Amazon Page

US Amazon Page

The book is now available. It’s a self-published short novel that touches on some sexuality and gender issues that I’m interested in. In the story, a discovery is made that sexual orientation is determined by chemicals in the body, and a few people start playing around with it. I’m rolling out the promotion side of things bit by bit. When I have more feedback and reviews, I’ll give the book a dedicated page on the site.



Amazon UK link

Amazon US link

CreateSpace link

Goodreads page

YouTube review

edit: 28 March 2015 Facebook page

edit: 08 April 2015 Check the Amazon pages and Goodreads for reviews. Also, review posted on Hot Sauce Reviews. Thanks for all kind feedback privately and on the review sites. It really makes writing the thing worthwhile!

If you are a reviewer and you would like a free copy of the book, just let me know. So far, I’ve been giving out copies left, right and centre! Hopefully, this will result in some reviews and some feedback. If a copy of the book suddenly turned up at your house, courtesy of Amazon, it probably means that I thought you’d like it.

From the back of the book:

“Careful, John. Suddenly laughing in Tesco is breaking the rules…”

“The story was that some scientists in Edinburgh had carried out experiments on mice. When the scientists gave a large dose of insulin to the mice in their food, a number of the mice began to engage in same-sex sexual activity.”

“I might be giving out some gay vibes now, but until recently, I was a sexually interested heterosexual man…”

Gay to straight or straight to gay? Would you change your sexual orientation if you could? How does sexuality and sexual orientation actually work?

These are the questions facing a group of young people living in the North of England. Along the way, they confront issues of sexual role, family breakdown, social isolation and what’s going on in John’s fridge – you name it.

Genre: social issues/science fiction

138 pages. Self-published short novel. The book was published at the beginning of 2015.

From the eBay page:

I’ve put this in the General Fiction category, and I prefer to label it speculative fiction rather than science fiction as it concentrates on relationships and characters in an urban setting.

Although I’ve touched on concepts such as gender roles and sexuality, I’ve tried to make it a quick read. It’s only 33,000 words or so, and most people are finding that they can go through it in a weekend or during the spare moments in a week.

Haven’t posted for a quite a while. I need to update the site itself with a new theme when I have time. I’ve moved house and changed towns, and I’m gradually making a new life for myself here. Work-wise, I’ve been doing the usual stuff for the past year or more.

Month in, month out, I’ve been contributing to Linux User and Developer, a British computer magazine. They have serialised the last feature I did for the mag and put it on the website for free (part 1 and part 2). All in all, I must have done about 40 articles for that magazine, ranging from single page reviews up to 8 page features. I enjoyed my time with them, but I’m taking a break from that at the moment. I look forward to working with the editor, Russell Barnes, again in the future, and I may even return to the mag, one day.

The other big writing news from me at the moment is the novella (short novel) I’ve been working on called The Sexual Compass. At time of writing, I have finished the first draft. I was determined not to let the project drag on and on, so I took some time off and worked on it for 21 days, producing 32,000 words. It is written in the first person with one head jump at the half way point. The premise is that a discovery is made by some scientists that sexual orientation is controlled by chemicals in the body. Most of the story focusses on a guy who takes some chemicals and goes from being straight to being gay. Sexuality is the main focus of the story, but as you can imagine, as it’s me, issues of gender make their way into it too. I’ve been working on some other writing while I let the first draft sit for a while, but later this week, I’ll get back to it for the rewrite and edit. I’ll probably be self publishing it, and I hope to have it finished in the next month or two, paid work and life permitting.

I need to get some more stuff onto A Voice For Men, the top (IMHO) men’s rights site on the Internet. The last two things I did for them were back in 2013, but I may have forgotten to mention them on the site. One is about a government backed scheme that would see women being spared prison. The other was a look at the gender politics of breast fetishism. Obviously, I’m still working on the gender politics book. It’ll be finished one day!

Den of Geek is a great website, but I’ve only got one thing onto that site recently. It’s a James Bond article about some of the turning points of the franchise. Funnily enough, Simon Brew used to be the editor of Micro Mart the first print publication I ever worked for. I badly need to get something else onto Den of Geek sometime soon, and I’ve got a few ideas stored up. My older articles for that site where Top 10 Screen Computer Geeks and a retrospective of The Postman (1997) (that even got a mention by the author of the source novel on Facebook).

Somewhere in there, I managed to fit in ten or so pages for an Imagine Publishing bookazine called Raspberry Pi For Beginners, which you can find in WH Smiths. I even built some hardware for it (sort of). I’ve been doing a bit of Java programming of late, just to refresh my skills. Perhaps you’ll see something from me on the Android platform in the future? I’m trying to improve my photography, so go to my Flikr page (see sidebar) and see what you think.

My main publishing announcements for this month are Linux User Developer 117 and Micro Mart 1125. Expect to see quite a lot from me in Linux User and Developer over the next couple of months. For now, issue 117 contains another four page step-by-step tutorial on the subject of self publishing a book using an excellent piece of software called LyX. LyX is the main “word processor” that I use for all my writing, and I seem to end up doing a feature on it every 18 months or so.

I also managed to get in a review of Oracle Linux 6.3. That was a tough one to rate as it’s practically a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and it’s difficult to know how to rate it.

I also did a review of the Nikon L310 bridge camera for Micro Mart. I hadn’t done much work for them of late, and it was nice to get back in touch.

As for moving house… It is proceeding, but rather slowly. Being in limbo in this respect is impacting my ability to work, but I’ve still got some stuff in the pipeline. I’m still not sure if I’m going to Replay in Manchester this year. I’d like to, but it’s beginning to look like it could coincide with the moving date.

Check out issue #116 of Linux User & Developer (August 2012) to see two of my tutorials. Both are step by step features, a format that I’m starting to get the hang of now.

The first four page tutorial deals with with customising the GNOME Shell. Personally, I haven’t been won over by the GNOME 3.0 interface, but to be fair to the developers, they have inserted a considerable framework for customisation by end users.

The second tutorial has a selection of tips for system rescue. Many of these tips can be carried out from standard Linux distributions, and others rely on SystemRescueCD, a live distro with an emphasis on system repair and maintenance.

Both tutorials were tough to write, but enjoyable, and I even learnt the odd new trick as I went along. I’ve got some more stuff coming up in later issues of the mag. In addition, I did a post for the website about the open sourcing of CDE. I got the inside scoop from a guy I met in RISC OS IRC channel. It’s a seedy world that I inhabit.

Anyway, back to the grindstone and another step-by-step.