Question One: Tell us a little bit about yourself! Where are you from, what’s your favorite color, anything that you want to!
I’m from Louisville, Kentucky. I once spent 2 weeks floating down the Mississippi on a log raft. Lavender as a color and as a flower encapsulates how I aspire to embody gender. Hardy enough to survive the winter, eager to share beauty and fragrance with all passersby.
Question Two: What inspired your debut novel?
Hollow Road was inspired by my frustration with my D&D group. Certain players always want to kill kill kill, without caring that the orc they’re slaying is little different from them. In many TTRPG games, certain nonhuman races are considered inherently evil and others innately good. You get how that’s racist, right? And so I invented the Maer, hairy humanoids who populate my debut Maer Cycle fantasy trilogy and my romantic high fantasy Time Before series. They’re even referenced in most of the Weirdwater books, which take place in the same universe and on the same continent!
Question Three: What was the first book to make you cry? And if tears have never been shed then what was the first book that gave you an emotional reaction?
Fuck Where the Red Fern Grows and the horse it rode in on. My first written story in grade school was a fic where the dog lived.
Question Four: Do you have any pets? Bonus points for pictures!
Happy and Overlord are littermates, dilute tortoiseshells I believe, with about three brain cells between them. They are super sweet with the kids and often paw at their door to be let in for petting. Happy begs for cheek and ear scritches nonstop; Overlord is all about the food.
Question Five: What is your goal as a writer?
I used to aspire to traditional publishing, but now I aspire to write and publish as many trans stories as I can with the level of professionalism I expect from myself (a high bar in terms of the words in the book). I want readers to feel seen, have their eyes opened to new things, to smile, laugh, roll their eyes. I want to explode gender and reconstruct it in ever more beautiful ways.
Also I would like to not have to work once I retire from the classroom, so making a few bucks would be nice.
Question Six: Do you believe in “kill your darlings”? Did you have to kill a darling you really didn’t want to?
I rarely delete passages I really like. I’d rather make room in a book for a great bit than cut it. Sometimes it just doesn’t work and I recycle it somehow in another work.
And since people sometimes wonder if I kill off darling characters, very rarely. I did in some of my older books—notably The Archive (multiple main characters) and in the Time Before books (a variety of side characters and also several civilizations are forced into diaspora). These days I don’t have the stomach for it.
As I write these words, the US has just started bombing Iran again. Untold thousands are being tortured and killed in ICE concentration camps. Thousands of children are dying because Trump let Musk eviscerate USAID. So yeah. My books are gonna be a safe space for now.
Question Seven: Have you ever googled yourself?
Not recently, except to find a link or cover or something lol. Also I use DuckDuckGo because fuck fascist Google.
Question Eight: Was there someone in your life that inspired you to write/self publish? Either good or bad.
I’ve always written. I only started getting serious about it in my mid-30s. I went down a long road writing crime novels that were unpublishable (long story but trust me) before I rediscovered fantasy, and quickly, fantasy romance. A lot of people inspired me to try writing fantasy romance, some of whom I’m now mutual blocks with! But the person who’s helped me the most is May Peterson.
May’s Sacred Dark trilogy, and The Calyx Charm in particular, opened my eyes to a world queerer than I could have imagined, at a time when I was trying to understand why my life as a presumed man felt hollow. We became friends, and she helped give me the courage to write my first book with a trans main character, The World Within. She also did sensitivity editing on that and Grey Angel.
I’ve had a number of people tell me my books inspired them to write their own, just as May’s did for me. There’s no greater pleasure than reading such a book and seeing a new writer soar.
Question Nine: What are the best and worst things about being an indie author?
Best: control over your content.
Worst: every company and website hates trans people.
Question Ten: What advice would you give aspiring writers?
General: Write the fucked-up story that’s burning its way through your veins, even if you think no one wants to read it. The thing is, people love to read stories that burned their way through authors’ veins. And even if they didn’t? That story needed to get out. Just fucking write it.
Specific: If you can possibly help it, don’t publish the first book of a long planned series as your debut. If your debut doesn’t do super well, you could find yourself chained to writing a series with diminishing audience (and returns). Do a standalone or a duology or even a trilogy. Better yet, a standalone that’s linked to a larger body of planned work like the Star Trek universe. This gives you flexibility to learn what you write best, what readers like about your work, and lean into that.
Hard truth: Your first book won’t be your best. It won’t be in the same league as your best if you keep writing. Make it as good as you can with the budget you have—even if that budget is zero—then publish it and keep going.
Final note: Don’t touch AI with a 49 ½ foot pole. Learn to recognize it in book covers and in images you might want to use in your own covers. Learn cover design early, as you’re drafting, so you can suck at it for a while before it’s time to publish, by which time hopefully you’re getting better. Hiring cover artists is great, but becoming proficient in design is very useful as an author.
