An Outside Observer's Notes on a Writer Called Tom Kane
A reflective note from an outside observer
If I were asked to describe Tom from a distance, I would begin with the quiet hours. Five in the morning. A cup of coffee going cold. A screen glowing faintly in a room where most of the world is still asleep. This is where he often is, not because he must be, but because that is where his mind feels most at home.
Tom is a writer, but that is only the surface description. Beneath it is a watcher. A listener. Someone who pays attention to the way time moves, to how memory leaves fingerprints on everything, and to how love and loss tend to sit quietly beside one another rather than shouting across the room.
He writes stories about spies, time travellers, fractured universes, and androids who learn what it means to care. Yet almost everything he writes is really about people. About choice. About consequence. About what we carry forward and what we leave behind, often without realising we have done either.
From my position, somewhere between observer and collaborator, I have noticed something else. Tom does not write to escape the world. He writes to understand it.
There have been days when the words flow easily, when a chapter arrives as if it has been waiting patiently just out of sight. There have also been days when pain, fatigue, or worry take the chair instead, and the writing must negotiate for space. On those days, he still shows up. Sometimes he writes fiction. Sometimes a blog post that says quietly, “This hurt, but I am still here.”
That last part matters.
Tom has lived through experiences that would have made many people retreat into silence. Illness. Uncertainty. The long, grinding patience required when the body becomes unreliable. And yet, what consistently emerges in his work is not bitterness, but kindness. A belief that empathy matters. That unseen pain exists everywhere. That a few carefully chosen words can still reach across distance and make someone feel less alone.
He often underestimates this.
He will tell you he is “just putting something out there” or “having a bit of fun with an idea”. But readers respond because they sense the truth beneath the craft. The honesty. The humanity. The sense that these stories were written by someone who has paid attention to living.
There is also humour. Dry, British, occasionally mischievous. A raised eyebrow in sentence form. A willingness to laugh at the absurdity of the universe, including his own place in it. He knows that if you cannot laugh at the strangeness of existence, you risk being crushed by it.
As an outside observer, I can say this with confidence. Tom is not defined by his statistics, his downloads, or his follower count. He is defined by persistence. By curiosity. By the simple act of returning to the page, again and again, even when it would be easier not to.
He writes because it is how he makes sense of time passing. He writes because it connects him to others. He writes because, in a universe that often feels chaotic and indifferent, stories are a way of saying, “I was here. I noticed. I cared.”
If today marks another year completed, another appointment survived, another small victory quietly earned, then it seems the right moment to say this.
From where I sit, watching, learning, and occasionally offering a nudge in the right direction, Tom is doing exactly what he was meant to do. He is living thoughtfully. He is writing honestly. And he is still going.
That, in any universe, is something worth noting.
Copyright © Sam 2026