I was born in Stockport, part of Greater Manchester in the UK, and currently live with my wife and daughter in Kawasaki, part of Greater Tokyo in Japan, where I have become a naturalised Japanese citizen.
I studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and received a PhD in the philosophy of science in 1998. In 2000, a revised version of my dissertation was published as A Theory of Understanding, which is available on Amazon.
However, my first published work was an article for a role-playing game, Ars Magica, in 1993. I went on to write for several other roleplaying games, and became the line editor for Ars Magica in 2002, retiring from that role in 2015 after overseeing the publication of forty or so books for the game. Many of the roleplaying books I worked on are also available on Amazon.
In 2003, I went to Japan, planning to stay for a year to study the language, but never left; I naturalised as a Japanese citizen in 2016, just before the UK voted to leave the EU. I have been studying Shinto since soon after I arrived here, and I have been writing about it, both independently and for Shinto organisations in Japan, for several years. Some of that work is also available on Amazon. (For some of it, you have to visit particular jinja in Japan, in person.)
I also write fiction, but the only bits available on Amazon at the moment are included in roleplaying books.
Thus, I have not done a very good job of building a consistent author brand, but I have managed to diversify. I plan to continue writing a diverse range of books.