Essays, ideas, notes from behind the books and the questions that refuse to leave me alone.
I spend a ridiculous amount of time thinking about things that do not fit neatly anywhere.
Some eventually become books. Some find their way into Sanomentology or the wider Nine Realms work. Others are simply questions I want to follow for a while without pretending I already know where they end.
This is where those go.
People, meaning, consciousness, technology, belief, story, change, identity, responsibility and the peculiar things we have learned to accept as normal all tend to turn up sooner or later.
Occasionally I write about writing too, although writers talking about writing can become dangerous if left unsupervised.
We have become remarkably good at measuring human life. Sleep, productivity, attention, engagement, performance, mood, response and almost anything else that will sit still long enough to become a number.
The awkward question is what happens when the things that matter most are also the hardest to measure.
Read the essay →They arrive wearing different clothes, but underneath much of my work are the same stubborn questions.
Meaning, presence, loyalty, memory, wonder, grief, responsibility, love and the rest of the inconvenient human stuff.
Technology changes what we can do. More interestingly, it changes what we stop doing and what we gradually decide no longer matters.
Models are useful until we forget they are maps and start treating the person in front of us as though they ought to fit one.
We explain ourselves with stories, remember through stories and build identities from them. Sometimes a new story changes what is possible.
We have become very good at asking whether something works. I am increasingly interested in whether it matters.
Research, false starts, characters, structure, arguments, discarded chapters and the long negotiation between an idea and the book it eventually becomes.
We optimise sleep so we can work better, work so we can earn more, earn more so we can eventually have time. At some point it may be worth asking what the machinery is actually for.
Usually badly at first. Notes, fragments, arguments, abandoned structures and a point where the thing finally tells you what it actually wants to be.
Meaning, memory, presence, loyalty, wonder and the rest of the inconvenient human stuff.
Exhaustion, permanent availability, screens, rushing, loneliness and work without meaning have become so ordinary that we often ask what is wrong with the person before asking what on earth they are trying to adapt to.
Measurement is enormously useful. But once a culture learns to value what it can count, it can quietly begin to treat everything else as vague, sentimental or secondary.
Intelligence may turn out to be far less uniquely ours than we once thought. That makes relationship, responsibility, embodiment, mortality, lived memory and meaning much more interesting.
Identity is not only a list of facts. It is an organised explanation. Change the explanation and sometimes the future opens in ways that facts alone never managed.
Human beings are extraordinarily adaptable. That is useful until we start congratulating ourselves for learning to tolerate lives that make us smaller.
They begin as an irritation, a question, a note I do not quite understand, something overheard, a contradiction I cannot leave alone, or a sentence that seems to know more than I do.
Then there is the less romantic part. Research. Structure. Wrong turns. Whole sections removed because they are very good and belong in a completely different book.
I want this part of the site to show some of that process too. Not as a writing course, and not as theatre about being an author. Just the actual work behind getting an idea into a form somebody else can read.
These are not promises of publication dates. They are simply the areas currently taking up more room in my head than is probably sensible.
What survives when more of experience becomes measurable, replicable, predicted and delegated? I suspect this question is going to stay with me for a while.
We have no shortage of labels, models and mechanisms. I am interested in the point where explanation starts hiding the individual instead of revealing them.
A story does not have to stop every few paragraphs to prove its case. It can simply put you somewhere and let you discover what the idea feels like from the inside.
Short answers are useful. I use them all the time. But there are questions that get worse when we hurry them.
Writing gives me somewhere to stay with an idea for longer than is socially reasonable. To contradict myself. To discover that the thing I thought I was writing about was not actually the thing at all.
Consciousness becomes society. Technology becomes meaning. Psychology becomes story. A piece that begins with efficiency ends up asking what a life is for.
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