♪ The Pause · Hear the song on the Music page →
RA · P06
The pause
Nothing on this page is going to ask you for anything.
Every novel is free, complete, and yours to keep. There is no account to make and nothing to sign.
And there is no hurry. Nothing here will start costing money. There is no countdown anywhere on this site, because a countdown is a way of removing your judgement from a decision, and this whole series is an argument against removing people’s judgement from decisions. The books will be here next month. They will be here the month after.
If you read one and stop
That is a real outcome, and an acceptable one. You will have read an opening chapter and decided the voice was not for you, which is a perfectly good use of six minutes and no loss to either of us.
I mention it because most pages like this one are built so that leaving feels like failing. This one is not. You can close the tab. Nothing follows you.
One last thing about the strawberry
Somewhere, in some system — an insurer, an employer, a bank, a state, something you have never heard of — you are being counted at a coarser grain than you exist at.
Not maliciously. Efficiently. Somebody built something that had to be fast, and being fast meant reading in chunks, and reading in chunks means a letter goes missing and nothing in the machine can tell that it has. The output looks complete. It is complete, at the grain it was built for.
These books will not fix that. Novels do not fix things.
But you are the third R. You are still there, whether or not the thing counting can see you.
That is what I have got. The novels are below. Take them or leave them — both are fine, and only one of them costs you anything at all: your time.
These essays sit beside the novels. Download any of our novels, free and in full.
Robert Anthony