Introducing: The Grey Corner

FIELD NOTE · NOTE 01

I have several projects in progress at the moment. Joining Substack this year, and finally taking the plunge this week to use it to talk about what fills me with excitement, has been its own horror to overcome.

This is my first Field Note, a place to talk about what I’m doing, interesting bits of research, and what is currently in my notebook. Today, I created a new page on my Substack to lay out all my books. Below is the working blurb for my newest novel, The Grey Corner, which is currently going through editing.

Synopsis: Set in Melbourne, this novel follows Elise, a PhD candidate in developmental psychology. She works with children and has begun unmasking a deeper coping mechanism, something foundational, evolved, and inseparable from the human condition.

What Elise doesn’t know is that we evolved not to see for a reason.

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Current Blurb

In editing. Release forthcoming.

I study childhood fear.

Not ghosts, not monsters, real fear. What lies behind the stories adults think children invent because their imagination and childishness fabricate cleanly.

I study the ordinary refusals. The child who will not sleep facing the wardrobe. The one who crosses a room the long way. The one who looks at a corner, stops, and tells me it feels wrong.

I thought fear was useful. A warning system. A body trying to keep itself alive before the mind had language.

Then Hannah looked where the rest of us stopped looking.

She was my friend before she was anything else. Funny, kind, clever, usually late, usually high, always arriving with some small beautiful disaster in her hands. At the party, we laughed. I made the thing into a game. Hannah kept looking after the rest of us stopped.

Afterward, everyone had words for what happened.

Bad reaction. Panic. Breakdown. Accident. Grief.

The words were kind, but wrong.

Because Hannah was not confused. She was afraid.

Now I see it in the lamps we leave on, the seats we choose, the jokes that arrive too quickly, the tables nobody takes, the way our eyes stop before they reach certain parts of a room.

We are not imagining something.

We are surviving it.

The Grey Corner is the second novel in the Continuity Constellation, set in the same century as The Continuity Protocol but telling a separate story. Available later in 2026.