During his ten years as a self-employed management consultant in the 1990s, Paddy Gormley self-published two books, several research reports and countless articles. 

Since the Millennium, his primary interests have been in teaching, theatre and radio, and his published output has been negligible.  Nevertheless he has a number of major works in progress, informed by his teaching and research, that he hopes to publish in the years ahead. 

His current publishing projects are outlined below, together with brief details of his 1990s business enterprise, Leading Lawyers. 

Language with Altitude is the result of a ten-year project by Paddy Gormley.  It began in 1997 with The Younger Person's Guide to Verse, a verse primer for young children, and evolved into a full-blown primer of creative and factual writing skills, including many of the innovative techniques that Paddy Gormley developed through his writing and teaching in the years after the Millennium. 

Language with Altitude comprises eight books.  The first two, Finding Your Feet and Getting Better Verse, are exclusively concerned with verse writing.  The third and fourth books, Constructive Induction and Stirring Words, explore the broader themes of language, memory and logic.  Books 5-7 respectively consider poetry, factual writing and comic writing, while the final book in the series, Inspiration by Limitation, shows how creativity may be enhanced by the imposition of constraints. 

Language with Altitude is fully drafted and ready for publication. 

Click on the links on the left for two audio excerpts. 

The first is the text of chapter 6b, Motivation, read Paddy Gormley, in which he suggests that the art of persuasion is rooted in the emotions rather than the intellect. 

The second is a reading, by Martin Cort, of one of the many verses that punctuate the books, written by Paddy Gormley to illustrate and support the teaching messages of Language with Altitude. 

Paddy Gormley began work on his book on creativity, Re Creativity, in 2008. Re Creativity aims to bring together, for the first time in one place, all PG's teaching and thoughts about the creative process, memory and imagination. 

Early drafts of the first chapters of the book suggest that Re Creativity will extend Paddy Gormley's thinking into new areas by causing him to examine how creativity affects people's lives and, in turn, how people may seek to improve their lives by increasing their creative potential. 

The click-to-play excerpt (below) is taken from the opening chapters of the book, which explore the development of creative skills in childhood and consider how and why our thinking as adults tends to be largely constrained by rules. 

The Meta Matters project was inspired in the summer of 2008 by Paddy Gormley's observation that Richard Dawkins' logic, in his best-selling book, The God Delusion, could not possibly be correct, by virtue of the axiom that it is not possible to prove the non-existence of anything, including God. 

This led Paddy Gormley to hypothesise a "Great Scientist" god, wholly consistent with Darwinian principles.  In short, humankind may have been enslaved, perhaps even for centuries, by the virtual reality technologies of a super-evolved species whose technological development has mirrored our own but is significantly more advanced. 

Once we accept the possibility that we may be in the grip of another species' or individual's virtual reality, Charles Darwin's theories become open to question. 

Paddy Gormley is currently exploring these trains of thought through articles and talks. Click the player on the left for an audio recording of the third in a series of articles entitled The Professor's Dilemma. 

Paddy Gormley hopes to present his arguments in a short film in the spring of 2009, when he intends to begin work on a book, provisionally entitled Meta Matters. 

As Paddy Gormley's sons were growing up in the 1990s, he began to think ahead to the day when they must leave home to start their own lives, and wondered what advice he might offer them.  He quickly decided that "a book [would be] so much better than us looking one another in the eyes for hours on end", and set about writing one accordingly. 

Valiant Be is written from the perspective of a man in his forties (and, later, fifties) reflecting on how his life has been shaped by decisions made in late teens and early twenties. Paddy Gormley is determined that his sons must find their own way in life and that he must not tell them what to do.  Instead, he merely describes his own experiences in candid, self-critical terms, in the hope that others may learn something from his mistakes. 

Valiant Be comprises nine chapters, dealing with subjects as diverse as integrity, friendship and money.  Paddy Gormley began writing it in 1996, and completed it in ten years later, in his youngest son's eighteenth year.  Click on the player below right to hear a full chapter of the book. 

Valiant Be remains unpublished. 

Leading Lawyers was the trading name of Paddy Gormley's legal business management consultancy enterprise in the 1990s.  Under this banner, he self-published two books, Practical Pricing and Practice without Precedent and countless articles in the legal press and in the Financial Times.  He hosted several conferences for leading lawyers -   managing partners of major law firms - in which panels of leading lawyers discussed the issues of the day with the help of keynote speeches by PG himself. He published two major research studies of top companies' attitudes to solicitors.  His first study, New Approaches to Client Development (in 1991, when he was trading as Competitive Marketing), gained national press coverage in The Times and The Daily Telegraph.  He worked at partner level with many of the top law firms and with The Law Society. 

Many of Paddy Gormley's messages remain relevant to lawyers today, ten years on.  For example, much of his writing was concerned with the evergreen issue of partnership processes.  He is credited with being one of the first people to foresee the client-driven shift from hourly rate charging to fixed fees, and the legal profession still appears to have much to learn about the management of profitability. 

Paddy Gormley hopes to develop an internet-based archive of his writing for Leading Lawyers.  In the meantime, all those who worked with him in his Leading Lawyers days are warmly encouraged to get in touch via this website.  Those who enjoyed his after-dinner speeches may like to visit the Old Possum's Book of Fat Cats project on this site, where they will find a click-to-play audio recording of one of Old Possum's favourite compositions.