Books

The writing

Some of the same questions. A completely different way of asking them.

The books sit alongside the training rather than underneath it.

Some of the subjects will feel familiar if you know the Nine Realms: consciousness, identity, memory, change, ageing, possibility, belief, uncertainty and the strange ways people construct a life and then forget how much of it they constructed. But a book lets me come at those questions from somewhere else.

Training usually has to be clear about where it is going. A novel does not. It can put an idea into an ordinary life, give it consequences, let people misunderstand it, laugh at it, fight with it and occasionally discover that the thing they were certain about at the beginning has become rather less certain by the end.

That is why the fiction is not simply Nine Realms teaching with characters added. The stories have their own worlds, their own problems and their own reasons for existing. They are allowed to wander into memory, history, absurdity, grief, relationships, death, miracles, bureaucracy, books, identity and whatever else the story happens to drag in with it.

Some are funny. Some are dark. Most are both at different points. I like books that can make you laugh on one page and leave you sitting quietly with the next one, because that feels rather closer to how life actually behaves.

The non-fiction comes at things more directly, but it still begins with the same instinct: take an idea seriously enough to examine it, without becoming so impressed by it that we stop asking awkward questions.

You do not need to have done any Nine Realms training to read any of them. There is no hidden prerequisite and no expectation that you arrive already agreeing with me. The books stand on their own.

Every book has a free preview, so you can spend some time with the actual writing before deciding whether you want the rest.