In what feels like a former life as an academic, I wrote loads of journal papers. Proper dry stuff, read by about eleven people, three of them peer reviewers poking holes.
But thanks to my Mam, I’ve always loved a good story. I’ve had my nose in books since I was little: The Hardy Boys, Roald Dahl, and C. S. Lewis’s Narnia are still firm favourites. Over the years, that grew into a quiet urge to have a go at writing fiction myself. Not in a romantic, “sitting-in-a-Parisian-café-with-a-leather-notebook” kind of way, just a nagging itch that never really went away.
The Messy Middle
I had plenty of ideas and half-starts that went nowhere. Then, a couple of years ago, I sat down and wrote a short story about a teenager who finds a living seed inside a factory pump. It was only a few thousand words: a grey city, a weird object, and a character I liked.
I thought that was it, but it wasn’t.
The short story slowly morphed into a novella, then grew into a novel that I ended up abandoning more than a few times. The Word doc sat untouched on my computer for months at a time, then I’d get a second wind and dive back in. Eventually, the story got its hooks into me.
The novelist Frank Norris once said, “I don’t like to write, but like having written.” That’s definitely been the case for me. Writing this book has absolutely done my head in at times. Academic writing is nice and tidy; you know the rules and you’ve usually got a few co-authors to lean on. Fiction is far messier. You’re just bumbling around in the dark on your own until you find your way.
Well, all that bumbling eventually led to something I’m proud of: The Syntropist.
Living the Ideas
It’s a philosophical novel for teens and young adults, but hopefully anyone can get something out of it. I wanted to take the thoughts of some of my favourite syntropic thinkers and weave them into a story, where philosophy is something lived rather than explained.
You’ll find ideas inspired by people like Ray Peat, Iain McGilchrist, William Blake, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ernst Bloch showing up in the choices the characters make and the consequences they face.
Here’s the back cover blurb:
In a grey city run by a machine that has forgotten its own purpose, a seventeen-year-old tinkerer pulls a living seed from the guts of a dead pump.
It will lead her beyond the walls, into a hidden world the Grid tried to erase. It will connect her to people who remember what life tasted like before the suppression. It will show her a gift she shares with the mother who vanished when she was seven.
And it will ask her a question no one in Vithra has been allowed to ask for three hundred years:
What do you want to become?
Where the money goes
I didn’t write this to make a profit. All royalties from the book are going to Hospice at Home, a local charity that does incredible work supporting people at the end of life in their own homes.1 If this book can do some real-world good, that feels like syntropy to me: things becoming more than they started as.
Get it here
The Syntropist is out now on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle formats:
Also available in Germany, France, Japan, and other international stores.
Hospice at Home Carlisle and North Lakeland (Hospice at Home) is a brilliant charity set up in 1997. They provide free palliative care and support to people with life limiting illnesses and their families and carers. Their main service is a nursing team, made up of Registered Nurses and Healthcare Assistants who provide individualised care during the last year of life and at the end of life. They also have a range of support services that aim to help people live well with their conditions, such as complementary therapy and occupational therapy. Their services cover town and rural locations across 1,500 square miles of North and East Cumbria, UK.
I will definitely have to a get a copy next month!
Just bought on kindle so I can read over here in france. Looking fwd to it.