WORKING WITH ME

Consulting on your project

This one is not about the Hounds & Jackals house. It is about a person you can reach through it that will do “House Calls”… me. Hounds & Jackals makes its own things. This is separate: my own hands, for your work, if what you are making is something I can help with.

What this is

You are making something. A game, a book, a scenario, a show, a training simulation, a piece of television, an experience of some other kind. It is yours. You are deciding what it is and you will be deciding what it becomes.

I am available to work on it with you: to help strengthen what you are building, and to make sure it does not accidentally carry harmful stereotypes or stigma you never intended to put there.

Those are two different jobs and the second one is the rarer of them.

What I bring

Thirty years as a psychiatrist, which means three decades of sitting with people while the worst of it was happening and while they were finding their way out again. That is different from having read about it.

Game and simulation design, including the kind where the stakes are real: healthcare education, where a badly built simulation teaches a clinician something wrong and somebody eventually pays for it.

Theatrical magic, which I practise. Illusion shows at Stratford and Canadian Stage. Consulting to professional magicians, and building the props and devices their effects run on. Books on the theory and practice of the mystery arts. A trick is built backwards from the moment somebody feels something, and everything else in it serves that moment, including the parts nobody is meant to notice.

Experience consulting for television shows, films, plays, and books.

And enough of a lifetime spent loving comics, film, myth, kung fu cinema, kaiju, spy fiction and the rest of it to find the odd pairing that makes a thing sing. Two things that have no business being in the same room usually do it.

The combination is the offer.

And I like this work. I learn a great deal from the people I collaborate with, and most of what I know came from years alongside peers and from listening to people who taught me.

The particular thing I am good at

Making sure a work does not do harm it did not intend, while staying good.

Portrayals of mental illness that land as truth rather than as shorthand. Characters who are more than a diagnosis, and mechanics that model an experience rather than caricature it. The difference between a scene that emulates for the participant what an experience is actually like and one that hands them a stereotype to carry away in their memories.

That is a craft question rather than a compliance question, and it is usually solvable without losing anything the work wanted. Most of the time the fix makes the piece better, because the truer version is more interesting than the stereotype it replaces.

I have done this for television, for film, for theatre, for festivals, TTRPGs, and for a great many people making things with the best of intentions who could not see the fault from inside. Now I do it for games as well: tabletop roleplaying, board games, cards, and whatever else is being built.

That work has gone into Hollywood films, mainstream television, novels, plays and games. Assault on Precinct 13. Degrassi. And in games, Unseen Masters, a Call of Cthulhu supplement recognised by the games industry, the horror writers, and psychiatry, which are three fields that agree about very little. Those are examples rather than a full list.

What I am for

Work that is trying to leave people better than it found them, or at least not worse. Understanding, awareness, an experience somebody carries out with them. Something made with care for the people who will meet it.

I have helped with work raising awareness for autism, for addiction, for service dogs, and for a good many other things people were trying to do properly. If that is the shape of what you are making, we will get on.

And plainly, once: I do not help with work whose purpose is division, contempt, or cruelty for its own sake, and I do not take political work.

That is about my usefulness rather than anybody else’s morals. Plenty of good work is not work I would be any help with.

How it works

You describe what you are making and what you think you need. We find out whether I can actually help, because sometimes I cannot, and saying so early is worth more than being agreeable.

If I can, what it involves depends entirely on what it is. Reading something and giving you a considered response. Sitting in on the design conversations. Working alongside a team for a stretch. There is no standard package, because there is no standard project.

What it costs depends on the same thing. We agree it before anything starts, and the conversation comes first.

A note on what I am not doing

This is craft consultation on a piece of work. It is not clinical care, it is not therapy, and it is not supervision, for you or for anybody who will eventually meet what you are making.

If a project needs those things, that is a different professional and I will say so.

Getting in touch

Just reach out via the Contact page.

Where this document ends

Who I am, and how any of this happened, is in The Founder. What this house believes, and how it makes things, is set out in Who We Are and the Manifesto, and you are welcome to read those before deciding whether to write.