I buried myself in books from a very early age. It was a way to escape complex social situations that made me uncomfortable. It let me hide when I didn’t want to be dragged into yet another day of my folks’ home repair or deep cleaning as a kid. It let me leave the bullies at school behind. I could drop into another planet and just walk away. I couldn’t ever really form deep friendships, couldn’t quite understand the girls’ logic, and couldn’t fit in with the boys.
Then I learned I could write. More like I had one brilliant teacher in 5th grade who made us write stories using our spelling words, and I’ve utilized that method to learn new words since. But, those stories were there for homework. I didn’t really expand from there until 7th grade when a boy let me see a book he was writing. I don’t even remember what it was about, but I wanted to do that too. I wanted to go on my own adventure.
I wrote my first book through middle and high school – a mashup of Cutthroat Island and Dune. I probably have that file still hanging around somewhere, and it would read like teen angst. But…I don’t think I’ve ever left that behind. My stories still read like YA angst, but with overt adult themes.
Polaris Skies was my second book. I started that in Sophomore year. I piddled around in that for another few years, before I crashed hard in college. There was no room in my brain for fantasy. It took quite a few years after to get to a point where I could think of writing again. Slowly I formed up a writing community on Twitter. There I finally broke through my writer’s block. I wrote The Fire in My Blood in six weeks and that was the turning point for The Legend of the Bai. I knew where I was going with it. I dropped Fyskar, Subject 15, finally found the conclusion to Polaris Skies that fit, and got Subgalaxia off my to do list. Some of it ended up being rushed though in 2020, not because of Covid, but because of a major health scare that made me have a 10 hr brain surgery session – and we were all worried I was going to die on the table. I didn’t want to leave those stories unfinished.
Thankfully, I woke up.
I played with the author community, contributing to several anthologies and editing a few. I had a business for a hot minute doing developmental and substantive editing – which I would love to go back to, but with AI and the economy the way it is…I doubt anyone is going to want to afford my services, so that’s more of a dying wish at this point.
My family and I left the states and settled in the Netherlands in 2025 to escape the Trump regime. I’m out of the closet, and have been out since 2020, as a transman online. A couple family members and friends back in the states know. I’m medically not allowed to transition – having had a stroke from the AVM rupture that ended with brain surgery, I’m not allowed to take HRT. It would increase my risk drastically of having another stroke and probably end me up in a casket. So, I have to deal with the body I’m stuck in. Leaving the US was a safety thing for me. I can pass as cis-fem, but seeing as I make it my personality on the internet and have my name and biography associated to multiple physical published media as a transman, it wasn’t worth finding out what the inside of a detention center looked like.
You’ll find my stories revolve around the lgbtq community. Some of my main characters are outright trans. Some are cis-men. Some are coping with weird structures. This is me navigating life and processing. I’m pan, and that comes through with quite a few of my characters.
I use my stories almost like therapy. It helps me process everything from imagined conversations, to social interactions, resolutions, or even internalized prejudices and toxic masculinity. I do write erotica or on-page sex. This comes from having raised myself on het-romance novels and developing a very bad type of expectation of how that whole thing was supposed to work, just to discover a lot of what makes up those kinds of mass market books aren’t exactly setting up healthy expectations for partners. Not everyone likes reading on-page. But I find it something that, if it’s going to be read, should be handled carefully and to the benefit of the reader. If an author’s book is a person’s first introduction to sex, it should help them develop a healthy understanding of everything from safety, boundaries, consent, etc. Those scenes are integral to my stories.
I do hope you enjoy the works.
Other Websites:
- Travel Blog: To Romanticize Travel
Chapel Orahamm 