The journey
Before the books, there was a promise.
Not to get trapped. Not to live by somebody else’s script.
01 · The first refusalLeaving the sensible road
Jeremy finished school determined not to disappear into the “system” or trade his identity for a respectable pay packet. Yet, like so many bright young people, he kept studying. Eventually he found himself deep into a PhD at the University of Melbourne, supported by a prestigious Australian Postgraduate Award—and moving further from the life he actually wanted.
In 2002 he did the thing almost nobody around him thought sensible: he walked away from the PhD and scholarship, boarded a plane and chose uncertainty instead.
02 · The world as classroomGoing far enough to hear himself again
The journey took him through Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India and Nepal. He backpacked through remote places, meditated, met old hippies and collected the kind of experiences no lecture theatre could provide. He wanted to live before he wrote about living.
Travel would eventually carry him through roughly twenty-five countries. Along the way he founded a Reiki and meditation centre and spent years teaching the inner practices that continue to shape his fiction: attention, intuition, courage and the search for a truer self.
03 · A million words laterBecoming a writer the long way
Jeremy had wanted to write since he was nineteen, but wanting and writing are different things. His first novel, Full Speed, took nine years and draft after draft to complete. The process taught him craft, persistence and one practical rule: never name a manuscript “final draft.”
Those hard-won pages opened the door to The Slob’s Guide to the Perfect Job, The Call of the Silver Cockatoo, his bestselling Reiki writing, children’s literacy books and fantasy fiction written as J.S. O’Carroll.
04 · The thread through every bookStories about the person underneath
Jeremy’s books move between comedy, romance, philosophy, spirituality and fantasy, but the central question rarely changes: what happens when the self we have built collides with the self we have buried?
His characters resist the nine-to-five treadmill, question inherited expectations and discover that freedom is not simply escape. It is the difficult, exhilarating work of becoming whole.