Why?

How did it start?

Honestly, it started with too much time alone. Too much time in my own head. I travel a lot for work, across the UK and around the world, and that means long stretches of motorway driving with only music for company, airport lounges that blur together, twelve-hour flights, and lonely hotel rooms far from my family.

Somewhere in all of that drifting, a seed took root. A story began to grow in my mind, tangled and shapeless, like a ball of wool with no clear beginning or end. Even before I understood it, I could feel that something important had moved in and refused to leave.

My early attempts at writing it were awful. Between time-zone aligned phone calls home, I would try to put words down just to think about anything other than the damp, beige hotel rooms I found myself in. But I had no idea how to write, not the physical act, but the structure, the craft. I thought you simply started at the beginning and the story would pour out, one neat chapter after another.

It didn’t.

I nearly gave up, until I came across a bit of wisdom from one of my favourite authors, Sir Terry Pratchett. He began his novels as scattered bullet points in no particular order, capturing the essence of the story in fragments. Every important idea was thrown into the pile, then organised, then expanded with more notes between the original ones, slowly building a framework.

It took me months to plot the journeys of the main characters. But once the backbone existed, all that remained was filling in the details.

I’ve come to think of writing a story the same way someone paints a picture. Most artists start with pencil outline of; a tree here, a lake there, the faint outline of a face, a smile. Only when the sketch is finished do they begin to paint. That’s exactly what I’ve done.

This may be a serial novel, but the ending is already written. The direction is set. And you’re welcome to follow the path as it unfolds.

The Essence of the Idea

Explaining the feeling that began this story is almost impossible. Trying to describe it in a linear way is like trying to explain what the colour green smells like. The format doesn’t quite fit the experience. But sometimes it’s all we have, so we use the tools available and hope the meaning reaches the reader.

The seed of the idea didn’t arrive as a thought. It wasn’t something I reasoned my way toward. It appeared as a kind of quiet certainty, a pull rather than a push . . . something I found myself gravitating toward, as if it had weight. I know it was sparked by several things coming together at the right (or wrong) time. My mind has never stopped asking questions or hunting for meaning in the spaces between things. That’s always been who I am.

At primary school, I was the classic daydreamer. Teachers and classmates would joke “off to Planet Luke” whenever I disappeared into my thoughts. The teasing faded as I grew older, but the daydreaming didn’t. It’s still with me now. My dreams have always been strange, too. People say dreams are just your brain organising the day . . . but then why do I visit places I’ve never been, meet people I’ve never seen, or hear songs I’ve never heard?

Puzzles became my way of quieting the noise. Anything that demanded absolute focus felt oddly calming. As a teenager, I remember lying on a bed at a friend’s house with a scrap of paper and a dying felt-tip pen. While the others argued over whose turn it was on a one-player Sega Mega Drive game, I ignored the whole battle. I just asked for the passwords they received each time they died. After gathering enough of them, I cracked the pattern. Suddenly I could generate new passwords that granted 99 lives, better items, even instant access to the final level. That was the sort of thing that fascinated me . . . sliding into the hidden logic of something until it revealed its structure.

But the final moment that sparked the seed was much simpler. It was nothing. True, complete nothing. For the first time in a long time, my constant travelling paused. The hotels, the motorways, the airports . . . it all went quiet. My mind stopped paddling against the current and drifted into the space I’d been too busy to enter. And in that silence came a thought: we spend so much of life wrapped in layers of belief handed to us rather than discovered by us.

Religion, politics, traditions, money, even the sports teams we’re expected to cheer for . . . they can all feel like boxes someone else ticked on our behalf. So what happens if you set all of that aside, even briefly, and look inward?

Let me detour with an analogy. In some Aboriginal cultures, there is the tradition of the walkabout: a rite where a boy is given survival knowledge . . . how to find water, how to track food, how to make tools . . . and then left far from home to survive alone for months. If he returns, he returns as a man. It’s a physical reminder that someone can be stripped of everything except what truly matters, and still have enough to survive.

But what if there is also a spiritual version of that journey? One we’re too busy, distracted, or comfortable to ever attempt. Instead of learning how to find our own water, we’re handed it. Instead of discovering our own tools, we’re issued them. What if, spiritually speaking, many of us never make the journey from boy to man at all? What if we simply live life after life still waiting to grow?

The point is this: if you peel away every belief system placed on you from birth, and imagine yourself on a kind of inner walkabout, you might find all the tools you need are already there. You just have to stop long enough to notice them.

Alongside any spiritual walkabout, there is the physical world we live in, and it’s remarkable in its own right. We often forget how extraordinary our circumstances are. We live on a planet that is exactly the right size and the right distance from the Sun to support life. It rotates at just the right speed. It has a moon large enough to create stable tides. Its magnetic poles shield us from deadly radiation. And it has liquid water, one of the rarest cosmic luxuries.

Even on this near-perfect world, life can only thrive within narrow boundaries. Wander toward the equator and the heat becomes unbearable; stray too close to the poles and the cold is lethal. Climb high enough up a mountain and the oxygen thins to nothing. Even here, in our ideal cosmic location, vast regions remain uninhabitable.

The larger planets in our solar system, particularly Jupiter, act as protective giants, using their gravity to catch or deflect countless meteors that might otherwise strike Earth. Our moon sits at exactly the right distance to appear the same size as the Sun during an eclipse . . . another astronomical coincidence that seems almost too precise.

And if those coincidences weren’t enough, there’s the matter of time. If you’re reading this on a phone or a laptop, the plastic in your device and the fuel that charged it are the remains of ancient life from millions of years ago. Without those forests and creatures . . . without fossil fuels . . . human civilisation might never have advanced beyond the medieval world.

Then there is evolution. The idea that life pushes itself forward from simple organisms into more complex ones through survival and adaptation. The fastest, strongest, or cleverest survive and pass on their traits. But not everything about us fits neatly into that model. Evolution is a blind push, not a guided one. It’s like trying to play snooker with a rope: you can push, but you can’t aim.

So how did we end up with abilities that don’t strictly help us survive? Perfect bilateral symmetry. Music. Complex language. Art. Belief systems. A brain capable of algebra, poetry, quantum physics and self-reflection. These skills don’t help us run faster or catch food better, yet here they are . . . fully formed and endlessly curious.

And the strangest part is this: if we hadn’t evolved to this level, we’d never be able to notice how strange it is. You can’t question the universe unless you first evolve the ability to question it.

Which brings me back to the snooker table. If evolution is pushing a rope, it makes no sense that, with a single “shot,” we’ve somehow cleared the entire table. It suggests that time might not behave the way we assume. What if we don’t move neatly from past to future? What if time ripples in both directions, and space forms around those ripples, taking shape to match the consciousness that appears within it . . . the way water rearranges itself when a stone is dropped?

What if everything that has ever happened, from the birth of the first cell to the rise of modern civilisation, unfolded precisely so that you could exist here, now, thinking the thoughts you’re thinking?

Some people feel this deeply . . . an unshakeable sense that I exist, I have always existed, and I need a place to exist. And perhaps the universe, in its strange and delicate balance, simply arranged itself to make room.

This idea was the seed, and from it grew a story.