A blow-by-blow, first-hand account of writing and publishing the travel and philosophy book, The Jolly Pilgrim, is now live on this website.

The sales documents used to represent the book to agents and publishers are also online, as a free PDF download (both here and on page six, linked below). Writers and aspiring writers should feel free to use these documents for ideas, inspiration, or as an example of how to sell work. Read more »

The Jolly Pilgrim, Part 1, musings 6

This is an excerpt from the book, to add content for the ‘Religious Architecture’ section. The excerpt was mainly written in the Croatain infection hospital, in Zagred, where I read the second half of the Bible, a bit before starting the Qur’an. 

To claim that a book was directly, deliberately and uniquely inspired by God, that God is perfect and can do anything and that the book in question contains His complete and eternal message for humanity is a very big set of claims. One would expect such a book to be – at the very least – comprehensively spectacular and overflowing with transcendent wisdom. Read more »

In writing a travel and philosophy book dealing with humanity’s cultural and political evolution, in addition to physically exploring the world, it was necessary to do a lot of reading.

For those interested in world history, global society, cultural and technological evolution, the wider human project or the worldview expounded in The Jolly Pilgrim, below are a list of my key intellectual influences, in rough order of importance. Read more »

SUMMATION

The often-accepted narrative of a world in decline is inconsistent with the facts. Judging the state of humanity from first principles – that of a species of evolved, fallible apes on a rock with no rule book, making it up on the fly – is not only the most realistic way to think about human civilisation, but lends itself to a profoundly optimistic, big-picture reinterpretation of today’s social, economic and geopolitical realities. Read more »

Afternoon!

Middlesbrough Literary Festival

Doing a talk at the Middlesbrough Literary Festival, next Tuesday 19th June. Among other things, they want a reading. I was thinking ‘Wide-Angle Lens’ (starting at the bottom of page 66). Any other suggestions?

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