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Costly Words
The Walking Wounded traces the lives of two boys whose childhood bond follows them into adulthood, where—now police officers—they find themselves working a murder investigation tied to the haunting disappearance of two missing children. What first drew you to this story—was it the investigation, the characters, or the themes of trauma?
This book started life as a stage musical way back in 1992/93. I stopped writing for a very long time. The basic story of trauma and its effects has always been there. The romance of our leading men was added in recent years, after consultation with a movie producer.
Phil and Li’s relationship unfolds slowly and carries a lot of history. Why did you choose that long-burn dynamic?
I was trying to drive home the concept of toxic masculinity and the fear that goes along with self-acceptance for LGBTIQ+ people. ‘I’m gay’ can still be very costly words.
The novel questions whether justice is ever “enough.” How do you define justice in this story, and how do institutional failures shape the narrative?
It was always about system failure. People need to take responsibility for their abusive actions. Current conditions prove that justice remains beyond reach.
Despite its darkness, the book leaves room for connection and care. Why was that important?
Many of the characters live with abuse. It affects them all in different ways. Phil hides it under a cover of denial, and Davina uses it to remain strong while she helps Levi and Noah through it. Ian/Iceman has been destroyed by his past and believes the world owes him a favour. His dark anger boils below the surface.
Four stories, four outcomes.
The fact that there can be healing is an important concept for any abuse survivor who may pick up my book. The fact that Noah makes it through the darkness to adulthood and fatherhood, despite the losses along the way, is important.
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The Walking Wounded is a gripping narrative that intricately weaves together the journeys of four characters, resulting in a deeply engaging reading experience. Immerse yourself in the gripping and dark tale of two seasoned detectives as they navigate the twisted maze of a child prostitution ring, entangled with the powerful and influential members of Newcastle society. The atmosphere is charged with tension as they step off into the mystery surrounding two separate homicides, apparently connected to two missing boys. Each step adds to the growing urgency, as the faint scent of desperation lingers in the air. Their determined hearts beat in sync as they manoeuvre through the complex maze of deceit, the pulsating rhythm propelling them forward. In their determined pursuit to locate the two missing boys, their hands quiver with a blend of eagerness and anxiety, their touch inadvertently tracing the sharp contours of their own haunting memories. With each body discovered, the truth shines brighter, piercing through the shadows like a beacon of hope.
The Holy Link of the God-Human-Animal Bond: Reimagining Our Stories to Include Animals
Ashley Cooper’s The Holy Link of the God–Human–Animal Bond argues that our relationships with animals are not incidental, sentimental side notes to spiritual life, but part of a living triad in which God, human beings, and animals meet one another in creation, care, grief, and hope. The book moves through a series of “shared” chapters on connection, land, place, experience, spirit, story, wound, distance, and hope, folding biblical interpretation into memoir and pastoral reflection. Cooper returns again and again to concrete scenes, Winston the therapy donkey softening a room full of mourners, Clover teaching the hard limits of loving care, a sparrow in a grocery store parking lot, a service dog on a restaurant patio, even Harry the mouse in Kuwait, to insist that animals are not scenery in Christian theology but neighbors in it.
Cooper writes with the kind of attention that feels earned rather than performed, and that matters because this is a book that could easily have drifted into abstraction or piety. Instead, its best passages have weight and warmth. I kept responding to the way she lets theology rise out of lived encounters rather than pinning it on top of them. Winston is not reduced to a symbol, even when he becomes one. Beau’s slow, hard-won companionship carries real emotional force. The pages on grief, presence, and animal-assisted care have a genuine ache in them, and I found that ache persuasive. Even when I wasn’t fully convinced by every theological extension, I trusted the heart behind it, because Cooper is clearly writing from love, loss, practice, and long attention.
I also found the book intellectually interesting. Its central idea, that Christian thought has often cast too narrow a net and left animals outside its field of concern, is compelling, and the recurring image of refining that “net” gives the argument a useful shape. I liked the book most when it stayed close to that humane, searching pressure. The acronym GHAB, the phrase “Holy Link,” and some of the theological framing are repeated often. There were moments when I wanted a little less restatement. Still, even there, the book’s sincerity kept me engaged, and its moral imagination is hard to dismiss. It asks readers to become more attentive, less domineering, and more answerable to the vulnerable life around them. That’s an argument with real moral and spiritual beauty.
The Holy Link of the God–Human–Animal Bond is an earnest, moving and deeply felt book that enlarges the emotional and theological field it enters. It’s strongest when Cooper trusts the texture of her own stories and lets a donkey’s breath, a dog’s loyalty, or a tiny shared moment of creaturely need carry the meaning. I’d recommend it especially to Christian readers interested in theology, pastoral care, animals, ecology, and the spiritual meaning of ordinary companionship, but also to thoughtful animal lovers who want language for why those bonds can feel so mysteriously significant. It left me feeling gentler, more alert, and a little less willing to treat the living world as background.
Pages: 220 | ASIN : B0GQXF669D
Formative Experiences
Actually Invisible centers around a gay high school teacher struggling with grief, marriage, and infertility as she faces public scrutiny following homophobic remarks from a student. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
The idea for this novel came from many of my lived experiences as a human, but particularly as a queer public school teacher. We make headlines, but our fears and daily lives are so rarely described anywhere. I wrote the book I had always wanted to read.
The novel moves between past and present in a way that lets memory actively shape the story. How did you structure that timeline?
I structured the timeline by thinking about what kinds of formative experiences could have informed Josie’s present mindset. This took quite a bit of outlining, but I wanted to make sure I highlighted that she is—as we all are—a culmination of every experience we’ve ever had. I think it also humanizes her even more for the reader.
How did you approach the school storyline and the dynamics of public scrutiny?
I took some stories I had heard about in the news and on social media and essentially combined them with the fears that sometimes kept me up at night.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from Actually Invisible?
I hope readers take away the idea that all anyone wants is to feel seen, understood, and valued. We are all on this Earth searching for those things. Queer teachers are in a unique, complicated position where that experience can be dangerous, but it’s also worthwhile to take the risk, not only for ourselves and our mental health but also for representation for our students—queer and otherwise.
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…until a student comes out to her in a writing assignment, and she is thrust into a small-town spotlight. As the target of the student’s angry parents and a slew of anonymous threats, Josie must decide if it’s finally time to speak up for herself and risk her job, her family, and her ambivalence.
And It Only Took 100 Years…
And It Only Took 100 Years… is, on its face, a show business memoir, but it’s really the story of a life slowly claimed from fear, class anxiety, secrecy, ambition, and time itself. Alan Shayne begins with a lonely, yearning boy in Falmouth, watching the world through shop windows and trying to understand his own desire, then carries us through acting, television, Broadway, casting, production, Hollywood power corridors, and finally into the long, durable companionship of his life with Norman. The book moves from furtive early encounters and humiliations to rooms full of stars, from the sting of his grandmother telling him his nose is too big to the strange dignity of growing old enough to look back and say, with some hard-earned calm, that work and love were the real architecture of his life.
What I admired most is how unvarnished Shayne is about loneliness. That early material has a bruised, searching quality I found very affecting. The scenes with Dudley, Lenny, Roger, and the antique dealer Dave Garland aren’t presented as neat awakenings or tidy milestones. They’re confusing, charged, half-understood, and often sad. That felt true. So did the social texture around them, the bad meals, the grandmother’s cluttered shop, the humiliating hunger to be seen, the way a beautiful room or a handsome stranger can seem to promise an entire future.
Later, when the memoir opens into theater and Hollywood, the book never loses that earlier ache, and I think that’s why the celebrity material lands. The stars are there, yes, but they don’t swallow the man telling the story. Even when he’s writing about Bette Davis, Helen Hayes, Barbra Streisand, or the mechanics of Warner Brothers, the deeper subject remains the same: what it costs to make a self, and what it costs even more to keep one.
I also found myself responding to the book’s ideas, which are wiser and less glib than the title might lead you to expect. Shayne is not peddling a “life lessons at 100” pose. In fact, one of the book’s strengths is its resistance to easy wisdom. He keeps circling back to effort, luck, erotic secrecy, professional endurance, and the odd mystery of survival. I liked that he can describe casting Cicely Tyson, watching blacklisted actors slip back into work almost by accident, or helping shape television careers, and still end up talking not about triumph in some grandiose sense, but about responsibility, taste, loyalty, and stamina. His prose isn’t always polished in a high literary way, but it is vivid, direct, and alive with remembered detail. When it works best, it has the crispness of someone who spent a lifetime noticing entrances, voices, rooms, and timing. There are stretches where the pace becomes brisk and episodic, especially once career anecdotes begin to stack up, but even then I felt the pulse of a real consciousness behind it, amused, wounded, vain, observant, generous, and finally very tender.
What stayed with me wasn’t any single famous name, though there are plenty, but the through-line from the frightened boy who sensed “some mystery” in the world to the old man who can finally name the cornerstones as work, love, and the mystery that carries them. I found that moving and unexpectedly grounding. I’d recommend And It Only Took 100 Years to readers who like memoirs with both cultural history and emotional candor, especially anyone interested in queer lives across the twentieth century, old Hollywood, television, and the slow making of a shared life.
Pages: 328 | ASIN : B0GCVCMSWC
Identity
Identity opens as a missing-person mystery on the California coast and then keeps slipping its skin. Author A.J. Thibault begins with two teenage boys vanishing after a brutal confrontation on the beach, then widens the story to include Lakeland, a girl with blackouts and a disquieting sense of estrangement from her own life, and Detectives Esposito and Shangri-La, who investigate the town’s accumulating oddities. What follows is part murder investigation, part transformation tale, part meditation on gender, selfhood, and the unnerving possibility that the body may not be the final authority on who a person is.
I admired the book most when it refused to behave like a tidy procedural. It has the scaffolding of a thriller, but its real engine is yearning: Tommy’s anguish, Lakeland’s dissociation, Shangri-La’s precision, even the town’s uneasy performance of tolerance. I felt, while reading, that Thibault was less interested in merely solving a crime than in asking what happens when identity becomes porous, when desire, shame, memory, and metamorphosis begin to trade clothes in the dark. That ambition gives the novel an electric strangeness. The prose is almost fever-dreamed, but that volatility suits a story about people who are not stable in the ways the world demands.
Some scenes are blunt where they might have been sharper, and some thematic material is delivered with a hammer rather than a scalpel. But I never felt the novel was timid. It courts melodrama and occasionally earns it. More importantly, it has a genuine pulse of obsession running through it, and I would rather read a novel that overreaches than one that glides by on polish alone. Identity is messy, but it is a mess in the old Gothic sense, charged, moonlit, and full of psychic weather.
I would hand this book to readers of queer fiction, supernatural mystery, psychological thriller, metamorphosis horror, and dark coming-of-age stories, especially those who like their genre boundaries blurred rather than fenced. Readers who gravitate toward the uncanny earnestness of Alice Hoffman or the body-and-self unease found in some of Caitlín R. Kiernan’s work may find something here to savor, though Thibault is more raw than either. This feels best suited to adventurous readers willing to follow a strange book into stranger woods.
Pages: 430 | ASIN : B0GLL6S61C
The Sanctuary of Tomorrow
The Sanctuary of Tomorrow, by Lyntara Choi, drops readers into a 1930s London where secrecy is a daily muscle: Maxine Ocampo-Weber, chemist, part-time detective, keeps a careful household with her spouse Jodi and their two adopted children, until a hunted telepath, Martino Griffiths, collides with their lives and refuses to stay “someone else’s problem.” He’s been running since childhood, since the war years in Italy when telepathy turned from rarity to criminality, and his reappearance draws the same vindictive coppers who once tried to cage him. When those officers escalate to abducting Max’s daughter as leverage, the story pivots into a rescue that drags the family toward a notorious factory and, ultimately, toward the idea the title promises: a place where gifted people can exist without apology.
I admired how the novella treats “difference” as layered rather than ornamental. Martino’s telepathy isn’t just a cool trick; it’s a pressure chamber that has warped his sleep, his trust, and his sense of deserving anything tender. The domestic scenes matter because they aren’t mere breathing space; they’re proof of stakes. The Ocampo-Weber home feels authentic (art supplies, sibling squabbles, a dog with opinions), so when the outside world intrudes, it feels like a boot on the threshold, not a plot coupon. And I appreciated the quiet insistence that chosen family can be both sanctuary and risk: loving someone doesn’t stop the law from noticing, you just decide they’re worth being noticed for.
The book runs on momentum and moral clarity, which makes it exhilarating. Frank, especially, is a grim engine of obsession, effective, yes, though sometimes so single-minded he feels less like a person than a blunt instrument. Still, the payoff is emotionally satisfying because the “sanctuary” isn’t presented as a glittery utopia; it’s a practical refuge, hidden, imperfect, fiercely guarded, where Josephine can discover frightening new parts of herself (the first small levitations are written like a held breath finally released).
The Sanctuary of Tomorrow is for readers who like historical fantasy, paranormal suspense, found family, and queer historical fiction with a streak of ethical urgency, people who want their magic braided tightly with social peril, not floating above it. If you loved the warm-hearted refuge vibes (with teeth) of TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea, this feels like its shadowed cousin: less seaside whimsy, more alleyway breath and improvised courage.
Pages: 82 | ISBN : 978-1300127765
A Love Letter
Ancilla centers around a bisexual woman in the 80s and 90s in Ohio as she finds herself unraveling her own Catholic upbringing when she enters into a relationship with a magus who becomes her mentor, dom, and soulmate. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I took my inspiration from a number of different sources.
Some of it came from my own memories of growing up. I, too, was raised in Ohio, at roughly the same time my protagonist grew up. People have asked me just how autobiographical the book is, to which I would have to say, not much, except for the protagonist’s sexual orientation (I, too, am bi/pan and kinked – more on this later) and the book’s setting.
Putting the story in the time I remembered, in places where I had lived, allowed me to do my background descriptions more or less on autopilot so that I could focus on other things. I didn’t want to think too hard about whether or not I was describing a college campus, or downtown library, or city park accurately. It felt like a distraction. I wanted to use familiar material when writing. I prefer to pour my energy into other things: word choice, sentence structure, philosophy, foreshadowing, character development, and style.
Some of it came from a desire to fill a void – to fill multiple voids, actually. Bisexual people, for instance, are rare in literature. They’re rare in general. When we are portrayed, it’s usually in a villainous context (we’re depraved! Remember Basic Instinct?) or a pitiable one (just Google “hot mess bisexual” and “disaster bisexual” and see what you get – it’s an unfortunate trope). When we manage to be the main characters rather than just side characters, we’re still usually villains or “messy.” Or we’re hypersexualized! The bisexual literature category, commercially, is well-stocked with smut. This is not necessarily a bad thing if you are looking for validation or for one-handed reading material, but I think we deserve something serious, as well.
So I wrote something that was sort of like The Bell Jar, only its protagonist is a young bisexual woman. (Also, it takes the historical figures of Heloise and Abelard as its inspiration, and the main characters are vampires who can bend elements when adequately fed or otherwise sufficiently powered, because magical realism. I assume my readers are bright enough to figure that one out for themselves).
I worked in depictions of BDSM that centered informed, enthusiastic consent, because there’s a lot of material out there that romanticizes captivity, “dubious consent” with or without “betraying body syndrome” (news flash: “blurred lines” are just rape), and other abusive dynamics, and that’s not what BDSM is all about. Let’s have some good representation.
And I created characters who were different from what might be otherwise expected in more mainstream love stories. How often have you encountered a story about a couple of academic nerd types falling head over heels in love with each other, despite what was originally meant to be a purely tutorial relationship? And how often have those nerds been obviously neurodivergent? Although I don’t say so explicitly (there’s not a lot I say explicitly in Ancilla, ironically enough for a novel that is explicit enough when it comes to matters of sexuality) I coded “ancilla” and “Magister” as autistic. I am on the spectrum, so this is another way in which Ancilla is own-voice literature written for a demographic that, at least from what I have seen, seldom gets good representation. The autistic characters I’ve seen in books are often caricatures, or at least, our autism is treated as our entire personality, rather than as just part of what makes us who we are and ought to be taken for granted as such. Normalized.
I especially thought about breaking convention when crafting “Magister,” because I wanted to create a male character who didn’t fit at all into the “man box,” but who was nevertheless unquestionably masculine. Whereas most men in romance novels are alphas, even when they aren’t alphaholes, “Magister” is shy and reserved, and he is more than content to let other people take the lead when BDSM is not involved. He’s not a billionaire CEO or sports figure or firefighter or cowboy or spy or in some other hyper-masculinized, unrealistically romanticized line of work – he’s a librarian. He’s middle class, and that only barely. Hobbies? He cooks and bakes, listens to opera, reads, and plays tabletop role-playing games. Is he “ripped?” No, he’s actually rather slender, and his muscles are not prominent (although he is strong enough to carry “ancilla” in his arms without struggling – let the readers assume what they like about whether or not vampiric power factored into that one). He’s comfortable with showing his feelings and being vulnerable, too, although introvert that he is, he’s usually rather subtle about it… He is masculine, though. Very obviously. You wouldn’t have accused people like Bob Ross and Fred Rogers of not being men just because they didn’t fit into the prescribed masculine mold when they were alive, and I don’t think anybody could accuse “Magister” of not being a man, either. He is a wrecking ball to toxic masculinity.
I put these people into a setting I knew, and knew intimately, so that I could focus on them rather than on the setting. I wanted them to shine.
On another level, Ancilla is a love letter. The people I wrote it for know who they are. They might not see themselves in the characters – in fact, I sincerely hope they don’t, because my characters are distinct people in their own right, and were never meant to be based closely on anybody in particular, even in instances where I ransacked my memories, took things out of context that I thought would read well if fictionalized, and embroidered like mad – but they know who they are.
One of them was my first beta reader. She lost internet access soon after I completed the rough draft and sent her the final chapter in its raw form, and I hope she finds the final product on Amazon or in a library somewhere, reads it, and approves of it. And if she ever sees this interview, I hope she reads far enough to see that I say I miss her.
What drew you to frame your narrative in this particular setting?
Why northeast Ohio in the early 1990s, of all times?
Partly because, again, I wanted to rely on memory for descriptions of the setting. Nearly all the places described in the book are real, whether I’m describing a mansion in Cincinnati within walking distance of a posh private school, a small college on the edge of northeast Ohio’s Amish country, Severance Hall, or the neighborhoods and metroparks of Akron and Cleveland. The only made-up place in the entire book is “Magister’s” apartment, which I nevertheless set at the end of a real street. I didn’t want to interrupt my creative processes by researching locales. I just wanted to write my story and let the setting more or less take care of itself. I trusted my memory when thinking about how to describe places.
I also decided on northeast Ohio because it was generic. A colourful setting – say, Manhattan – would have become almost a character in itself. I wanted a setting that felt real, but not one that would steal the focus from my characters and from the book’s esoteric themes.
If I’d set the story too early, it would have been historical fiction, which would have required extra research. If I’d set it later, it would eventually become science fiction, because this is going to be part of a trilogy, and the third book covers “ancilla’s” later years. She’s writing her memoirs, and at the time of her writing, she’s either a centenarian or a late nonagenarian. That’s still going to put the final chapters of the last book in the future, but not very far. I don’t want the focus to pivot to science fiction scenarios… So the time is set where it is.
The eighties and nineties were not a good time to be queer in any way, unless you were maybe living in a haven like San Francisco. While I didn’t want to make that hostility to sexual divergence the most central part of the plot, it is nevertheless part of the background. It was all too common for kids to get disowned by their parents after coming out, or to be packed off to “deprogramming.” Coming out was terrifying if you lived in a conservative part of the country, which was most of the country at the time.
It was also difficult to be kinked back then. There wasn’t much support for it unless, again, you had the good fortune to live in a large city where there was an active subculture. Today, “ancilla” and “Magister” could have booked sessions with a kink-friendly, polyamory-friendly couples counselor to work on the challenges they faced (okay, that I set up for them). That option did not exist for them in their time and place.
The chapters are structured around the Tree of Life and its sephiroth, turning the novel into a kind of spiritual ladder. Why did you decide to organize the book this way?
It came to me.
It demanded to be written that way.
I still don’t know if I was up to the task that seemed to have been set before me. Only time will tell.
What do you hope readers ultimately take away from your protagonist’s journey through belief, identity, and desire?
Enlightenment.
Failing that, I hope I created something so beautiful that it felt like a dream, and so immersive that it felt like a pleasant form of drowning.
And for the readers on the margins of our heteronormative, neurotypical society, I hope they see themselves represented and know that they are not alone, and that they are valid.
We exist. We have a right to exist. We have a right to be visible.
Author Links: Reedsy Discovery | BookBub | GoodReads | Bluesky | Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest | YouTube | Website | Amazon
Disability Representation in Fiction
A Life in Too Many Margins follows a man looking back on his life from childhood to now, exploring how forced gender roles, neurodivergent masking, disability, and medical trauma have shaped him into the person he is today. Why was this an important book for you to write?
I found myself feeling sad quite often about the lack of disability representation in fiction, especially contemporary literary fiction by queer and neurodivergent folks and/or other intersectional groups. It’s gotten better in recent years as we’ve moved away from disabled characters being villains or “inspiration pornography,” but my dream world would have an entire section in every bookstore!
This story explores many kinds of labels. Which ones felt hardest to untangle?
The one I try hardest to help readers understand is the medical trauma. It’s hard to explain to anyone who isn’t trans or a woman the extent to which doctors will gaslight us when we don’t have the more obvious symptoms. The hardest emotionally was being neurodivergent. I am in my 40s and still working on unmasking behaviours.
Humor plays a central role in the book. How do you balance humor with emotional weight?
This didn’t really feel like a job or anything I had to balance, honestly. My humor is what’s gotten me through my worst times; I used it as a coping mechanism, then a grounding technique, and now it’s just a part of how I present myself and my stories.
Did writing this book feel like an act of advocacy?
Absolutely. I wanted to write about what it feels like to grow up learning how to adapt constantly, often without realizing you’re doing it. Also, because enough people told me I had to write a book, I eventually gave in. It’s almost completely a memoir, so it’s rooted in my lived experience, but it’s shaped intentionally with the occasional note of fiction. I wasn’t interested in documenting everything that happened so much as capturing how it felt. It took time to have the language and distance to write it clearly, but I always meant to share it to help others going through similar situations.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | BlueSky | Instagram | Amazon
A Life in Too Many Margins is the story of a man looking backward while time keeps nudging him forward. From childhood misunderstandings to medical disasters, David is collecting the fragments of a life shaped by truths he didn’t discover until far too late: that he’s neurodivergent, that his body will never play by the rules. That gender was never the box people insisted it had to be.
If you’ve ever felt like the world wasn’t built with you in mind, or if you just enjoy a dark laugh in the middle of disaster, David’s story will remind you that sometimes real life only happens… in the margins.
