Blog Archives
Stories are Told by the Storyteller
Reel Around the Fountain follows a boy from a working-class family navigating his growing awareness about his own sexuality as he searches for answers about his family’s past. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The core of the book’s genesis wasn’t so much about family history as it was about examining how queer kids are often targeted by predators. Queer kids tend to be good at keeping secrets — at blending into the background, into the walls — and I wanted to explore and expose that. The intersection of queerness and working-class, paycheck-to-paycheck life creates conditions predators can take advantage of. That intersection wasn’t something I saw represented growing up, and it’s still not something I find often, but I wanted to portray it with fairness and affection. It’s a world I know well, and I wanted to honor it.
But I was equally interested in family dynamics, and how those dynamics create room for people like priests to exploit queer kids. As I structured and wrote the book, though, the family itself started to take over. I felt it was important to show that kids from poor backgrounds aren’t exploited because of some lack of love or parenting — it’s that society creates the conditions that marginalize working-class families in the first place, and predators find the cracks in those conditions.
The story captures working-class life with remarkable specificity. How important was it to portray that community with both honesty and affection?
This was extremely important to me. I didn’t want to pander, stereotype, or romanticize working-class life and people. It was key to me to examine how we pull the levers we have access to in this life — and sometimes that may not be many levers at all. In addition to this, I wanted to explore gender roles, and how working-class life is often misunderstood to be rigidly gendered when, in fact, that isn’t always the case. With the grandparents in particular, I wanted to examine masculinity and femininity as a spectrum, not a binary norm. The grandfather and grandmother expose how circumstance often dictates what gender expression in family caregiving actually looks like.
Working-class life also often starts earlier than other facets of life do. White-collar, wealthier kids get a different kind of upbringing — more protected, more cushioned. Working-class kids shoulder different burdens, and shoulder them sooner. Through JP and his family, I wanted to explore that. I also wanted to highlight how the institutions that are supposed to protect people — police, social services, hospitals — often aren’t trustworthy, or aren’t there for people like JP’s family when it counts.
JP slowly learns that every family member remembers the past differently. What does the novel suggest about the relationship between memory and truth?
In any love circle — the one you’re born into or the one you build — stories are told by the storyteller, not recorded by some neutral archivist. As a storyteller myself, I can’t count how many times I’ve sat across from someone I love and found we remember the same event completely differently. I like that. And I know my version isn’t absolute truth. Instead, it’s a form of characterization. So while JP is trying to piece together the story of his birth, that search is also a way for him — and for the reader — to understand each family member through how they tell it. Every version of the story reveals as much about the teller as it does about the event.
I also think it’s important that truth, for the individual, is shaped by survival, not accuracy. What we remember is what we can handle remembering — what lets us survive the day, and the times, we’re living through. JP’s quest for the truth of his birth shows that we can never fully know it. Memory is fluid and fleeting. That’s part of the human condition. I hope that by the end, the reader is still left without the full truth of his birth story — but with the understanding that each storyteller’s memory reveals something about them, not about the events themselves.
What do you hope readers take away about family, forgiveness, and the stories we inherit?
We inherit stories, but since stories are fluid with memory, and truth is subjective, how we choose to shoulder and carry the burden of those stories matters. The truth of a story changes and evolves as we change and evolve as human beings. That’s key to this novel. We inherit family burdens, and those burdens are carried differently as we move through — and change within — this world. I want to be deliberate here with the word change instead of grow. Shouldering the burden of stories isn’t a progressive climb toward growth; it’s up and down, like every other facet of life. Where we are — reacting to outside circumstances — shapes our truth and our memory in that moment.
Forgiveness is a big part of this story, but for me as a writer, what mattered most was that JP needs to forgive himself — for the blame he’s chosen to inherit, both for the weight of his family’s beginning and for the abuse by the priest. If we can’t first forgive ourselves for things — even things that were never our fault, but that we assume blame for anyway — we can’t truly forgive the people closest to us.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Facebook | Website
Daywalker: Hybrid Vampire
Daywalker: Hybrid Vampire by Len Handeland is a supernatural horror novel that blends vampire fiction, historical horror, queer romance, and paranormal adventure. The story begins in postwar Norway, where Anna Beck becomes involved with Wolfgang Von Pritzker, a former German officer hiding a deadly identity. Their son, Christian, is born a dhampir, half human and half vampire, with a thirst for blood and the rare ability to survive in daylight. By letting Anna, Christian, and Christian’s lover Kjell narrate different parts of the story, Handeland gives the novel the feel of a collection of intimate confessions.
Christian’s journey gives this vampire horror story its emotional center. Abandoned as an infant and adopted as a child, he grows up trying to understand his unusual body, control his bloodlust, and find a place where he belongs. Music becomes both an escape and a clever disguise when Christian fronts a vampire-themed rock band called The Vamps. The irony is fun: the audience sees a theatrical gimmick while Christian is quietly revealing his real nature onstage. His rise through the European rock scene also adds an unexpected show-business angle to the paranormal fiction.
The novel’s relationships are as important as its supernatural confrontations. Christian and Kjell’s romance develops from friendship and attraction into a loyal partnership, while Christian’s reunion with Anna forces both of them to face the pain of his abandonment. Wolfgang brings a colder energy to the family story, representing the predatory side of vampirism that Christian fears inheriting. These connections turn the book into more than a vampire hunter adventure. It’s also a dark family drama about identity, inherited violence, forgiveness, and the choices people make when love and survival pull them in different directions.
Handeland writes in a direct, dramatic style, with plenty of blood, sensuality, emotional declarations, and classic vampire lore. The later chapters move firmly into paranormal action as Christian discovers the full range of his powers and battles the vampires created by his father. Readers who enjoy LGBTQ+ horror, dhampir stories, gothic vampire fiction, supernatural romance, and fast-moving battles between vampires and vampire hunters will find plenty to dig into here. Daywalker: Hybrid Vampire is a bold, personal take on the genre, combining family secrets, rock-and-roll ambition, romance, and monster-hunting in one expansive story.
Pages: 223 | ASIN : B0GXMX8DM6
It Wanted To Become A Novel Instead
Before Closure follows a family whose lives are turned upside down when the matriarch of the family leaves her almost forty-year marriage. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The story has been in various stages of development for more than fifteen years. Frankie’s storyline was originally inspired by my own heartbreak. I drove past the house I had once shared with my ex, saw that it was for sale, and was overwhelmed by the memories it stirred. By the time I got home, the rough outline of the story was already in my head, and the first draft came together remarkably quickly. It began as a screenplay because I wanted to showcase Central Iowa in a way rarely seen on film, building the story around locations I thought deserved to be on screen. I also have an estranged relationship with my own father, so I wanted to write an idealized father figure who was loving without being perfect. During the pandemic, while caring for my mother through the final year of her life, I needed somewhere to escape at the end of difficult days. I pulled the screenplay out of a drawer and discovered it wanted to become a novel instead.
The rotating viewpoints allow readers to understand each character’s private struggles. Why was it important to tell the story through multiple voices?
The rotating viewpoints came about because it started as a screenplay, and I was writing with an ensemble in mind rather than just one main character. When I started working on the novel, I saw this as a way to explore love, fear, pain, family, betrayal, and unexpected connection through a kaleidoscope rather than a single lens.
What did you want readers to understand about the difference between loving someone and being able to let them go?
I wanted readers to understand that love and holding on are not the same thing. We often mistake sacrifice, rescue, or hope for love, when sometimes the most loving act is accepting that another person’s journey belongs to them, not to us. Letting someone go isn’t an act of indifference. It’s often the hardest expression of love because it requires us to surrender the illusion that we can change someone through our own persistence. We can offer compassion, forgiveness, and an open door, but we can’t live another person’s life or make their choices for them. In many ways, Before Closure asks whether closure is something another person gives us, or something we choose for ourselves.
What do you hope readers who have experienced family fractures or unanswered questions take away from the novel?
I’ve often said that I’m a storyteller with one goal: to make people feel less alone. If someone finds themselves in these pages, feels that tingle of recognition, and realizes how weirdly, wonderfully, beautifully complicated life and love can be while also believing, even for a moment, that maybe it’s going to be okay, then I’ve done my job. We don’t always get the answers we’re looking for, but that doesn’t mean the journey isn’t worth it.
Author Links: Amazon | Goodreads
In three days, Clayton is convinced his wife will return. It will be their fortieth wedding anniversary, and he believes she’ll come back to celebrate and rebuild what’s been broken.
Frankie and Jules aren’t so sure. Frankie has gone numb in the wake of his own relationship’s collapse, and Jules is barely holding a fragile marriage together. As one Iowa summer weekend unfolds, each of them must face an invitation to rethink the future they were expecting.
Told with sharp insight and quiet compassion, Before Closure is a tender portrait of love stretched thin, the burden of unspoken truths, and the messy grace of daring to live.
Reel Around the Fountain
Roy Edward Jackson’s Reel Around the Fountain is a coming-of-age novel about JP, a gay boy growing up in a working-class Michigan town amid illness, alcoholism, Catholic guilt, and a family that expresses love through caretaking, teasing, sacrifice, and the occasional hustle. The novel begins with JP learning that his birth coincided with several family upheavals, including the accident after which his father, already living with multiple sclerosis, never walked again. From there, JP tries to assemble the truth from relatives whose stories are shaped by grief, guilt, exaggeration, and self-protection. His questions about the past run alongside his growing awareness of his sexuality and his understanding that, in his world, becoming an adult often means knowing what must remain hidden.
The book’s most striking choice is its second-person narration. Calling JP “you” gives the story the intimacy of someone revisiting a younger self, sometimes compassionately and sometimes with exasperation. It also suits a novel preoccupied with memory. Scenes don’t unfold as a clean historical record but as stories retold, revised, and connected through songs, objects, hospital rooms, bars, Catholic rituals, and family sayings. Records are especially important. Music gives JP and his father a shared language, while scratched vinyl, skipping songs, cassette tapes, and 45 adapters become ways of thinking about damaged memories and lives that keep circling back to the same moments.
Jackson handles painful material with an earthy, observant sense of humor. JP’s attention can land on a dirty carpet, a strange phrase, a record label, or the social rules of a funeral home even when something devastating is happening nearby. That voice keeps the novel grounded in the physical details of working life and poverty. It’s also where the book finds much of its emotional force. JP’s family members are vivid because their care is practical and imperfect. GG manipulates systems, Paw Paw gives up trucking to become a caregiver, Anna turns pain into blunt jokes, and JP learns to work, write obituaries, take photographs, and tell stories. Even after abuse leaves him tangled in shame, the narrative stays attentive to the difference between what was done to him and what he’s been taught to blame himself for.
The novel is episodic and deliberately repetitive, shaped more like an album of connected tracks than a tightly plotted drama. Its recurring phrases and memories occasionally slow the pace, but they also create the feeling of a mind worrying at old wounds until their meaning changes. By the end, JP’s writing, music, and move to Chicago offer him a future built from the people he’s lost rather than an escape from them. The record-adapter tattoo he receives becomes a fitting symbol of that inheritance, something small that connects the music to the person carrying it. I’d recommend Reel Around the Fountain most strongly to readers who appreciate queer coming-of-age fiction, complicated family portraits, working-class settings, and novels in which pop music carries as much emotional history as dialogue does.
Pages: 324 | ISBN : 978-1590218013
Trials of a Legal Junkie
Rich Merritt’s Trials of a Legal Junkie is an ambitious, deeply personal novel about addiction in its many disguises. Rob Marion, a lawyer, author, former Marine, and recovering addict, begins the story riding the publicity rush surrounding his explosive memoir. He believes he’s finally gaining control of his own narrative, especially the painful history he shares with a fundamentalist Christian institution that taught him to fear his sexuality. But attention becomes another intoxicant, and Rob’s hunger for vindication, fame, sex, money, and professional status starts pulling him toward the same destruction he thought he’d escaped. Adapted from real experiences, the novel has the intimate immediacy of a memoir while giving Merritt room to shape a broad, eventful story about a man whose greatest talent is also his most dangerous habit: turning every part of life into a trial he has to win.
Rob is difficult, funny, perceptive, infuriating, and painfully recognizable. His intelligence lets him expose hypocrisy with precision, but it also gives him an endless supply of arguments for ignoring the people trying to help him. Merritt doesn’t flatten that contradiction. He lets Rob be generous one moment and ruthlessly self-involved the next, capable of defending society’s discarded people while treating those closest to him as supporting characters in his personal drama. The result is a protagonist whose gradual collapse feels convincing because it happens through dozens of choices that seem manageable in isolation. Rob’s sharp, frequently profane narration keeps the book conversational even as it moves through grief, relapse, homelessness, criminal courts, rehabilitation, spirituality, and the failures of powerful institutions.
The novel’s large cast gives the story much of its warmth. Friends, sponsors, lawyers, clients, fellow residents, family members, and beloved dogs repeatedly offer Rob forms of connection he’s too restless or wounded to accept. The late Gary, Rob’s Marine friend, becomes a particularly affecting presence, appearing in memory and imagined conversation as both conscience and companion. The legal storyline also grows richer as Rob begins using his training on behalf of people the system has decided are expendable. Courtroom maneuvering, appellate research, recovery meetings, service work, and meditation might seem like separate threads, but Merritt steadily binds them together through the idea of surrender. For Rob, surrender comes to mean neither defeat nor passivity. It means giving up the fantasy that brilliance, outrage, or relentless achievement can substitute for community.
Trials of a Legal Junkie has the generous, unruly scope of a life being reconsidered in full. Its length allows recovery to emerge as an uneven practice rather than a tidy transformation, built through daily work, painful amends, unexpected responsibility, and the willingness to keep loving what can’t be kept forever. Merritt writes candidly about sexuality, religious trauma, substance use, ambition, grief, and justice, but the book’s deepest concern is service: what we owe one another after our defenses have failed and our carefully constructed identities have fallen apart. By the final pages, Rob’s trials have become less about proving his worth than learning how to use his life, his losses, and even his contradictions for someone else. Raw, searching, and fiercely humane, Trials of a Legal Junkie shows that redemption begins when winning matters less than refusing to throw anyone away.
A World Of Possibilities
6060 Vision is centered around a biomechanical Golem who was built soley to observe, record, adapt, and learn, but begins to form connections. What first inspired the idea for 6060 Vision and its far-future Earth?
6060 Vision began with a single idea, playing with the word warehouse during a road trip from Salt Lake City to Anchorage. With so much time to daydream, warehouse became “werehouse,” akin to “werewolf.” The notion spiraled into a living conscious plant structure, that is, Anther’s Root in the story. 6060 felt like a fitting year for such a being to exist, given some imagination, sci-fi potential, and larger plans for the series. A world of possibilities unfolded, where the development of life was accelerated and less bound by time. I created our protagonist, Sam, to explore this land and meet its New People.
The Baast, Sen, Sagoin, Kalak, Mimicats, and Slik all feel distinct. Which species was the most enjoyable to create?
Of all the species and People I created, I absolutely love the Kalak. They’re based off of South America’s Maned Wolves, the real creatures are without peers and they look like they are full of secrets. I actually created the Slik first, the scene with them is one of the first I wrote, but imagining them was far from pleasant.
How did you decide when Sam would stop simply recording events and begin actively shaping them?
I’m not sure I ever knew when Sam would start actively shaping the events around them; my macro plans for the story are distinct and rigid, but, in micro, the writing process itself is haphazard and organic. One could argue that observation is interaction- much of Sam’s journey is similar to a field anthropologist losing objectivity. I knew I wanted Sam to mature, similar to a coming-of-age narrative, so their presence becomes less passive and their actions more decisive with each conflict. I love hearing from readers when they think the pivotal moment is.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
6060 Vision is the first novel in a nine book series, a trilogy of trilogies! 6070 Vision is already in the works, set ten years after the first novel, with plans to publish in the Spring of 2027. I have the whole series and each character arc mapped out on a large paper graph. I’m very excited to share more.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram
Only To Be Completely Consumed
Freedom Boulevard follows two people looking for reinvention but instead find a city that tests their insecurities and vulnerabilities at every turn. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I’ve been a creative seeking the right avenues—and at times, reinvention—for much of my life. Andy and Sakeenah’s stories are a culmination of firsthand and secondhand experiences. They represent those moments when a creative type bets big on a metropolitan area as their new base, only to be completely consumed by the local culture, poverty, and politics.
Andy and Sakeenah have very different inner lives but parallel struggles—what made you decide to structure the novel in alternating first-person voices?
In the literary realm, I’d be daft not to credit the Urban Fiction writers who mastered the dual-perspective novel decades ago—people like K’Wan and Sister Souljah. I wanted to bring that fast-paced, modern structural style to a narrative that otherwise might have existed in the eras of Jack Kerouac or Charles Bukowski—assuming they stayed sober enough to actually go outside.
The book engages heavily with themes of exploitation, intimacy, and transactional relationships. What conversations were you hoping to open about those dynamics?
Exploitation, intimacy, and transaction are much bigger parts of the modern LGBT experience than most within the community would publicly admit. Grids on location apps dominate the hookup scene, making monogamous dating look more like a corporate PR stunt or a suburban rarity than the norm. The book forces the reader to confront these harsh realities. For example, Andy’s foray into escorting is what ultimately keeps him fed and sheltered, even if his surroundings are rapidly dilapidating. On the flip side, Sakeenah’s Islam keeps her head on straight, but it also births a world of hypocrisy and unrealistic expectations that she has to grapple with daily until she nearly loses her mind. Glimpses of characters like Tony Vee, Clyde, or Janice aren’t just setups for future installments; they’re raw slices of life pulled straight from those environments.
What do you hope readers carry with them after leaving the world of Freedom Boulevard?
Ultimately, I hope readers walk away with an authentic literary experience. This is not the type of “LGBT Fiction” designed to make you feel cozy or encourage you to buy a rainbow “Ally” pin. This is a cold glimpse of real-life problems hitting a real-life community in real-life cities. The series only expands from here, highlighting a myriad of characters across this diaspora.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website
Andy Blackwell is a bisexual hip-hop artist who burned every bridge in Maryland to chase the neon lights of the West. But in Cordova, exposure isn’t free. Desperate to keep a roof over his head, Andy finds himself entangled in the brutal web of Tony Vee, a nightlife kingpin who treats human beings like expendable assets. Traded between seedy club promoters, lonely sugar daddies, and the criminal underworld, Andy is sprinting headfirst toward a dead end.
Sakeenah Bailey is a bipolar, trans Muslima writer fleeing the suffocating judgment of conservative Connecticut. She arrives in the desert seeking a creative awakening, but quickly drowns in the legalized, soul-numbing haze of the city’s medical marijuana industry. Trapped in a roach-infested motel and tangled in a violently toxic romance, Sakeenah trades her spiritual compass for a paycheck in a corporate weed factory.
They are two sides of the same counterfeit coin—strangers bleeding out in the same dystopian city. One will find a ladder out of the pit. The other will become a ghost in the machine.
Written with unapologetic, razor-sharp prose, Freedom Boulevard is a visceral, neon-noir descent into the American underbelly. Yusuf Blanton delivers an agonizing, authentic masterpiece about addiction, the dark side of the cannabis boom, queer survival, and the brutal cost of chasing a dream in a godless city.
Perfect for fans of gritty urban fiction, LGBTQ+ psychological dramas, and raw stories of addiction and redemption.
During a Shared Psychedelic Experience
a three body solution centers around three lovers who become unlikely leaders trying to save the Earth from global collapse. What inspired you to write a three body solution?
If I can be completely honest, the idea was “downloaded” during a shared psychedelic experience with two other people. Like much of the best science fiction, the novel exaggerates reality just enough to help us see it more clearly. My queer reply is that the book edges reality just enough to make readers blush, laugh, and hopefully think.
One of my closest friends is Thai and fascinated by aliens, so TaDoo was born. My partner of eighteen years is Vietnamese, deeply logical, and yet somehow equally devoted to RuPaul’s Drag Race, so Tâm emerged. And then there is me—an empathic, slightly overwhelmed middle-aged human trying to make sense of a world that often feels like it is unraveling.
One night, squeezed together on an all-too-small bed, dreaming about a larger Murphy bed, struggling with an Alexa that refused to play the right music, something unexpected happened. We shared a vision of a future that felt more hopeful, more connected, and more playful than the one currently being offered to us.
By morning, we realized we had all experienced something remarkably similar. QuBit and the advanced tech MMMurphyBed were envisioned, the characters followed, and eventually a three body solution emerged.
At its heart, the book asks a simple question: What if we could bottle our best moments of mortality and connection and share them with humanity?
Which came first: the relationship between Chip, Tâm, and TaDoo, or the larger vision of a world in crisis?
The world crisis came first. I’ve been wrestling with existential distress far longer than I’ve been imagining alternative relationship structures.
As Lily Tomlin famously said, “Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.” That line has haunted and inspired me for years.
The more I looked at our political divisions, ecological challenges, and collective loneliness, the more I found myself imagining leaders who approached power differently. What might happen if tenderness, honesty, vulnerability, and cooperation were treated as strengths rather than weaknesses?
The thruple became my laboratory for exploring that question.
The three protagonists are imperfect, messy, occasionally ridiculous, and often in over their heads. Yet they keep choosing each other. In a world increasingly organized around fear, I wanted to imagine people organizing themselves around connection.
Maybe that’s what I mean by “pink magic.” Not perfection. Not ideology. Just the radical belief that love, creativity, humor, and community might still have a role to play in shaping our future. I write with the following mottos in my heart:
#BooksNotBombs
#DreamMoreDreadLess
Were there particular science fiction authors who influenced your work?
Not all of my influences are strictly science fiction, but the writers who stayed with me are the ones who cracked open reality in some way. They each affirmed something that influences how and why I write.
Cixin Lui gets a big gay hug for his daring The Three Body Problem series and for acknowledging character development was not his primary interest.
C. S. Lewis gave me portals to a land with talking animals and a way to observe grief.
Stephen King gave me permission to be strange, sprawling, and a little haunted. Daniel
Quinn’s Ishmael helped me think differently about humans, animals, and culture. Octavia
Butler showed me how speculative fiction can be prophetic, political, and deeply embodied.
Ocean Vuong may not be sci-fi, but his prose reminds me that language can wash over you without having to comprehend every word. And David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas* helped me appreciate stories that move across time, bodies, and identities.
Also, full confession: I may be one of the rare unicorns who loved the Wachowskis’ film adaptation of Cloud Atlas even more than the book. Queer cinematic heresy, perhaps, but I stand by it.
What was the most challenging aspect of writing such an ambitious and genre-blending novel?
Believing I had permission to write it.
The book blends queer romance, science fiction, grief work, neuroscience, primatology, psychedelics, spirituality, and political commentary. Conventional publishing wisdom would probably suggest picking one lane. Instead, I decided to create a traffic jam.
I also relied on a great deal of support along the way: the encouragement of my partner, insights from psychedelic experiences, and AI tools that occasionally helped untangle my famously long-winded sentences.
The deeper challenge wasn’t writing 600-plus pages. It was trusting that the story deserved to exist.
I know some readers may use the book as a bedtime companion, while others may discover it works equally well as a yoga block or doorstop. I’m genuinely okay with either outcome.
At some point, every creator faces the same question: “Just because I can, should I?” For this book, my answer was yes.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Instagram | LinkedIn
Runner-Up – Alternative Future
Honorable Mention – Unconventional Romance
Welcome to the world of a three body solution-a daringly subversive and juicy tale that reimagines what it means to save humanity.
At its heart is Chip, Tâm, and TaDoo-a queer thruple-turned-global leaders united by love and an uncanny knack for tackling the impossible. In a world teetering on the edge of collapse, these unlikely heroes rise to power as the self-proclaimed MMMperors: Men of Mind and Magic. With humor as sharp as their strategies and compassion as boundless as their dreams, they embark on humanity’s most daunting challenge yet: saving Earth herself.
Chip, the globe-trotting empathic healer, struggles to reconcile kin’s enlightened wisdom with the absurdities of leadership. Tâm, the silver fox scientist and reluctant leader, balances their razor-sharp mind with an unexpected flair for drag, channeling their alter-ego, Dr. Phở-nomenal, to inspire a world hungry for hope. And then there’s TaDoo, the dreamer and cosmic envoy who believes salvation might just arrive aboard a celestial mothership. Together, they weave through a chaotic mosaic of love, resilience, and otherworldly ambition.
This is a story of resilience, connection, and the beauty of trying-even when the outcome seems uncertain. A wild ride that will make you laugh, cry, and reconsider the very fabric of what it means to be human.
