Author, creator of Sanomentology, and still trying to work out what makes a human being tick.
I did not set out to spend my life writing books. I did not particularly set out to spend nearly four decades studying people either. One seems to have led rather neatly to the other.
I grew up in the foster system. By sixteen I had had enough of being told what life was supposed to look like, so I left England and hitchhiked to Rhodes. I came back on my twenty-first birthday with more questions than answers, which, in retrospect, was probably useful.
Since then I have studied psychology, counselling, hypnotherapy, philosophy, theology, science, metaphysics, consciousness and a fair number of things that sit awkwardly between them.
I have never been especially interested in joining a school of thought and defending it. I wanted to know what was useful. What actually helped. What explained something real. And, just as importantly, what stopped making sense once you put an actual human being in front of it.
That search became practical work with people. Eventually it became Sanomentology. Later it became the Nine Realms. Somewhere along the way, quite a lot of it became books.
I have spent years around models. Useful things, models. Until we forget they are maps and start treating them as the person.
A diagnosis can describe something. A score can compare something. A scan can reveal something. None of them can tell you what it is like to be the person sitting there, what something means to them, what they are protecting, what they are afraid to lose, or what they might become if the story changes.
That is the part I keep coming back to. Meaning. Story. Relationship. Presence. Choice. Responsibility. Memory. Imagination. All the things that are easy to flatten when we become too impressed with measurement.
Most of the books sit beside nearly four decades of practical work with change, identity, consciousness and the stories people live inside.
I needed help. It was not there in the form I needed it. Years of studying methods, watching what worked, watching what did not, changing my mind and getting increasingly impatient with therapeutic dogma eventually became Sanomentology. The point was never another badge or technique. It was to look properly at the person in front of me.
The Nine Realms grew out of the need for a wider map. Not nine mystical worlds, and not nine products. Nine ways of looking at the same human being. The Nine Realms Institute later became the home for that wider body of work and for practitioner training.
I have always used story because people rarely live as bullet points. We live through memory, expectation, metaphor, identity and the explanations we keep repeating to ourselves. Sometimes a story can get somewhere an explanation cannot.
I have changed my mind too many times to worship certainty. I would rather follow a difficult question until it becomes clearer than force it into an answer because the answer looks tidier. “I do not know yet” remains one of the more useful sentences I know.
I tend to write whatever the subject seems to require. Sometimes that becomes nonfiction. Sometimes the idea refuses to behave itself and turns into a story.
So there are books here about consciousness, society, the body, meaning, change and the strange systems people build around themselves. There is fiction too. Some of it wandered far enough to become a series.
The connection is not genre. It is the questions underneath. Why do we believe what we believe? What happens when a system becomes more important than the people inside it? What does technology give us, and what does it quietly remove? What makes a life matter? Why does story sometimes reach somewhere fact cannot?
I am still working on those. Writing is one of the ways I do it.
Browse the booksI keep that work separate from this site deliberately. If you are looking for Sanomentology, practitioner training or the wider Nine Realms work, that lives at the Nine Realms Institute. This site is for the books, the writing and whatever I end up wondering about next.
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