About

For as long as he’s been alive, Samuel F Hughes has always made stuff. It started with music in his childhood when he taught himself to play the guitar, then progressed to drawing and acting, and in more recent years he’s discovered a love for painting, and began making mushroom-themed jewellery too. Various bits and bobs from this list are sure to make it into this blog in the future, but if you’re curious and impatient, you can find his music on Spotify, or you can watch the improvised feature film Boogaloo The Movie that he starred in and co-produced.
And, to make things easy, there are paintings here, and jewels here.
If you like a painting and want to buy a t-shirt or a mug (or pretty much anything else) with it printed on, you can click here.

In 2018, aged 38, Sam took a fresh trajectory and began training as a counsellor. He’s always been predisposed to helping people, and having received counselling before (during a tricky little breakup with a girl) this felt like the natural thing to do.
And do you know what? He’s discovered that therapy can be just as creative a process as writing a song, or painting a naked woman, or writing a film. Some of the things he’s learnt along the way are astonishing. He’s learnt new ways to look at himself, and to work out why he is who he is. And from that he’s learnt to deal with the shitty parts of himself. It’s an amazing psychological journey, which he suspects will never truly end, but which brings growth every day, and a newfound sense of one-ness with his life experience. Having been through some severe depression in the past, this has all come to Sam as a Very Nice Thing Indeed.
Now, in 2021, he’s only a few months away from receiving his qualification and taking on clients of his own. With everything that he’s learnt, he’s been gifted with a vast array of knowledge that he can use with clients, helping them to make extraordinary changes for themselves. And he knows with certainty too that each client he meets will somehow help him to grow even more. Isn’t that brilliant?
This blog is sure to end up filled with nuggets of counselling-type stuff every so often. Sam hopes you find it inspirational or helpful or at the very least, interesting. Yeah, he hopes it’s interesting. It’s a bit daunting starting a blog. That’s why he’s writing in the third person.

Hello. I am here.

Anyway, In January of 2021, during the UK’s third coronavirus lockdown, Sam started writing a novel, and boy oh boy, he started writing it really fast. The story was an idea that had been floating around in his head for a couple of years, but which had never quite felt like enough to fill a whole book. It’s a story that features an intimate and mysterious relationship with nature, and expands into an exploration of consciousness, sexuality, drugs, and human behaviour. But it felt bitty, and a little threatening – he wasn’t sure how to write a novel. He’d tried sixteen years before, and produced possibly the worst seventy-thousand words anyone’s ever written, so at least he knew how not to write a novel, but this knowledge didn’t seem to be of much use.
But then, when this dark cold winter lockdown began, Sam realised that this would be the perfect time to begin writing. He was feeling inspired, he had a head full of counselling theory, and there was a lot on his mind regarding the situation with the world too, so he had the idea: Why not write about lockdown, and include my story in that? This made good sense. It meant he could document the facts of COVID while they were fresh in his mind. The clapping for the NHS, the conspiracy theories, and the often chilling paranoia that bred in the enforced isolation – it could all go in the book, alongside these ideas that had been forming for the past twenty-four months. And hey, what if the central character, Jon, was in therapy?

So there it all slotted together. It made perfect sense to write a book about everything. In fact, it felt like a call of duty almost; what better way to honour the craziness, the unpredictability, and the sacrifices of the last nine months than by keeping his head down, hiding away from the winter weather, doing his bit to keep this bastard virus from spreading, and writing it all down?

This is where this blog starts. In the last forty-one days, Sam has written half of his book. And he’s fairly sure that it’s pretty fucking good. Join him now as he writes the rest of it, shares some ideas, and welcomes you into his happy little world.