Current projects
Nathan Morgan is drawn into an underworld where art and obsession collide. With the murder of his cousin a conspiracy is exposed in the art world and the Care system. Will Nathan make a stand, or will he become the next victim?
A structured life
Greg's long history of being on the wrong side of arguments began in 1993 when, at the tender age of 11, he accused God of being a "fugging bastard" for not letting him win a computer game. God clearly did not see eye to eye with Greg and demonstrated his displeasure by running his mother off the road the next day and sending a car into his brother on the day after that. But in all due fairness, his mother survived, so Greg only had to go to one funeral.
With Alex's death, Greg became the hope of his family and the one who would support his other brother, Ross, who had Asperger Syndrome. Greg did not take this new responsibility well and, after a year of refusing to cry over Alex, became a blubbering wreck overnight. His teenage years passed in a haze of pain and insecurity, to which he responded by building a nifty little Messiah complex, fuelled by Milton's Satan and Shakespeare's Hamlet, his role models of rebellion. He studied Politics at Nottingham University with the naïve but respectable view to becoming Prime Minister or possibly Emperor of the World, whereby he could fix the earth's age-old problems and usher in a new age of peace and enlightenment.
However, he soon learned on this course that, like God, politicians were not the charitable fellows that he had pictured them to be. The paradoxes and compromises of civilian leadership quickly demoralised Greg, and upon graduating he made the choice to join the army, hoping that military leadership would be somehow nobler in deed and intention. He spent the next three years as a Lieutenant in the Royal Logistics Corps, but by that time Greg was already coming into his own as a writer and was beginning to appreciate that nothing in life would match his overblown passions. The only world of peace and enlightenment would be in his own fantasies. So, although Greg excelled in writing orders briefings for the knuckle-dragging trigger-monkeys under his command, he often failed when it came to the manlier tenets of macho camaraderie and brute ignorance. In particular, he had trouble with yelling last minute changes of plan on the battlefield, given that his soft and delicate writer's voice could not be heard over the roar of blank rounds and amateur dramatics. Greg's sergeant major quickly developed a picture of him as a "softy writer-ponce" and had it in for Lieutenant Corcoran for the rest of the three years. Things came to a head in 2005 when Greg, faced with a couple of POWs who had decided to stage a prison break and give away his position, promptly turned and unloaded a full cartridge of blank rounds into their faces. The actors were, needless to say, surprised, whilst the sergeant major was appalled by this fake war atrocity and the thoughtcrime it involved. An argument broke out in the middle of the exercise, and Greg left the army soon afterwards.
Two things had arisen from Greg's army experience – one that he realised and one that he did not. What he did not realise was that his propensity for idealistic arguments against authority had, as with his idols Hamlet and Satan, a tendency to get him thrown out of places. However, what he was aware of at the time was that the purpose and clarity he had sought in these previous ventures was instead something he had to forge in his own hands. So it was that Greg started his long career of caring for people with Autism, partly as a means to preparing himself for caring for his own brother, and partly to spare other poor fellows the pain and uncertainty that he had gone through himself as a child.
To this end, Greg took a job in an IT consultancy that worked towards the supported employment of high-functioning Autistics. It was here that Greg was shown a proof of divinity far more satisfying than Alex's ironic slaughter. The people at the consultancy were, in the true sense of the word, geniuses, possessing photographic memories, multiple languages and an eye for detail that put most to shame. Greg worked as the spokesman for these people, writing press releases, making presentations and giving interviews for radio and television, being the voice of those who had none. He visited the Autism Research Centre, spoke with Temple Grandin, Jane Asher, Simon Baron-Cohen – big hitters in the world of autism who all convinced him that Asperger Syndrome was the key to a fresh age of talent and new thinking. In short, Greg became passionate and made some good friends amongst the autistic adults he supported, one of whom tried to teach Greg to speak Russian.
But once again Greg was on the wrong side of the argument. Without the money to demonstrate Asperger skills, he could not impress those with the money to support Asperger skills, and in this vicious circle the funding ran out. Greg lost his job and had to watch those same friends return to lives of unemployment and benefit support. All of Greg's promises to them had fallen through and, as before, Greg became a little disillusioned – so disillusioned in fact that he moved to Cornwall. It was a place (Greg was told) where people go to die or hide from something, so it seemed fitting.
Realising (as writers often do in the more casual moments), that money was needed to purchase food and services, Greg returned to care work with the theory that early intervention was the key to 'saving' people with autism. After all, Alex's death had proved instrumental in his own youth, and Greg reasoned that with his presence in the formative years of autistic children he could prove just as effective as God had been.
This newest delusion was shattered on his fourth day of work when, in a somewhat ironic twist, Greg received a boxed set of the Lord of the Rings to the spine and was brought down to earth by every page of that prolific corpse's masterpiece. For it was in this new job that Greg saw the other side of the Autistic Spectrum: those who were not geniuses or gentle victims; those who came at you with knives and chairs and fantasy trilogies. These were the leftovers of the glorious evolution of the Asperger skills, the kids with real problems. Whilst he had watched his friends at the consultancy fall apart within months, Greg had to watch the kids in Cornwall fall apart within weeks, plunging deeper into their neuroses, their violence, every day a loss or at best a reset of behaviour. Greg's idealism was once more under threat, his brother's face set in every child, his life replayed in their every self-destruction.
In a fictional story, this would have been the "all-is-lost" moment, where the protagonist loses every fundamental premise and has to start again from scratch. But life is rarely like that, and Greg plausibly grabbed out as he often did. Transferring to a new unit, he became the keyworker for a promising seventeen year old with high functioning Asperger Syndrome, on the verge of leaving care. Greg did everything to help that boy conquer his violent urges, taking small steps each day, the progress agonising. And just when things seemed to be improving, the boy fell apart as his eighteenth birthday neared.
An Aries and a writer, schooled by Satan and Hamlet, embittered by the past and passionate for the future, Greg could not stay silent as he saw a boy with such huge potential about to crack. He moved outside of protocols, trying different approaches, using the boy's foul language against him, calling his violent bluffs – anything that might get through to him. And, in a strange replay of his argument with the sergeant major, the last day came when Greg and his prodigy had a blazing public argument in a local Spar Shop and scared more than a few old ladies. The boy backed down, and his behaviour improved, but Greg was collared for abuse (as the teen was still technically a child) and was promptly dismissed.
And so we reach the present day, and Greg has now returned with a new theory, one that goes back beyond adolescence and beyond childhood. It is a theory of stories and their power to give a voice, to change people with inspiration where life cannot change without tragedy. He has written a book about an innocent, a genius, a boy of beauty twisted by the world into the greatest darkness. And he has called this boy Alex.
From a world of rules and authority, Greg now enters the lawless realm of publishing. His story continues…
List of publications
The Chimera Path, a thriller about one man's quest to save an Autistic artist from the obsessive underworld that surrounds him...