About Neil Woodliffe
I‘m a British writer who was diagnosed with AuDHD in my mid-forties. For most of my life I knew I thought and felt differently, but I did not have the words for why and reading was one of the first places that made sense to me.
Stories gave my brain something to hold onto when real life felt confusing, and they carried me through some very dark years. I started writing the Inheritance of Shadows series during one of the hardest periods of my life, when everything I thought I knew about myself and the world had been shaken. Putting words on the page began as a coping mechanism. Worldbuilding became a way to survive long nights, to give my mind something safe to obsess over instead of replaying the same events. That same tendency to fixate, analyse patterns and drill into detail is now what lets me build a nine-book universe that feels real in my head long before it hits the page.
As I learned I was autistic and ADHD, I also learned how poorly people like me are represented. Much of the media still uses autism or ADHD as a plot device or comic relief, focusing only on the most visible traits and ignoring the quieter reality of high masking adults who are struggling out of sight. Around 15–20% of the population is estimated to be neurodivergent, yet many remain undiagnosed and misunderstood. Research suggests autistic adults are around nine times more likely to die by suicide than non autistic adults, which makes those misconceptions far from harmless.