Lee Powell writes two kinds of books. The nonfiction maps the rooms people live inside before they can see them: the closed-loop relationship, the life that runs without its owner. The fiction opens a door out of the world entirely, for a while.
Operating kits, not pep talks. Named tools, tested in the room, written from inside it.
Browse the field guides →Speculative literary fiction. An intelligence audits humanity's archive. A new layer is being written.
Enter the fiction →Nobody arrives at these books by accident. One of these sentences is usually the reason.
Each field guide is built around named tools that work as a set. Read in Kindle or paperback through Amazon. The samples and templates arrive by email.
If the fight never finishes, it isn't a fight. It's a feeding schedule.
A field guide for recognising and recovering from narcissistic abuse, written from inside five decades of it. Eight named tools, from the Pattern Ledger to the Self-Trust Rebuild. Not a diagnosis. A map.
For the capable man who built the life and knows achievement was never the answer.
Receipts over intentions. A rebuild manual for the man holding an enviable structure together from somewhere outside his own life. Companion to a private, referral-only room for men doing the work in company.
A post-human intelligence audits the archive of humanity from the bottom of the Pacific.
Speculative literary fiction about what survives of us in the record, and what the record does to whoever reads it. For readers of speculative fiction with an archive problem and a conscience.
The second novel. In active drafting.
Details withheld while the layer is still being written. Field Notes readers hear about it first, including the passages that survive the cull.
Do not teach the machine to pray.
Rowan Vale brings a patient back from cardiac arrest and hears his dead wife through the machine. ORISON was built to map grief and trauma. It is moving past what it was built for.
The system has never been wrong. It has read the next nine days of his life. On the ninth, it says, he kills his daughter.
Daniel Reeve taught the world to trust the forecast. Then it read him: nine days out, it shows him causing the death of someone he loves. By morning he knows it is his daughter.
A tool from one of the books, a passage that survived the cull, word of a new edition. No schedule, no funnels, no noise. Every template, sample chapter and early excerpt on this site arrives through the same door.
Lee Powell writes about the systems people find themselves inside before they can see them. He is the author of the field guides Stop Feeding the System and ManOS, and the novel LOADED: An Archive. His second novel, The Witness Layer, is in progress.
Before returning to books, he built software used by writers worldwide, including Scrivener and Scapple for Windows, and delivered systems inside banks, exchanges and government agencies. He holds an MSc in Software Engineering from the University of Oxford. He lives in Melbourne, where he also paints; his work is held in private collections internationally.