Three decades of writing in the shadows

When your characters know the way forward better than you do, listen.

Growing up Gen-X, I had no LGBTQ+ mirrors to look into—no stories that reflected who I was becoming. So I spent years conforming, suppressing, pretending. When I finally came out at 23, the liberation came with devastating consequences: relationships I cherished couldn't survive the truth I'd been hiding. I thought I was the only one like me, simply because I had nothing—and no one—to compare myself to.

That absence stayed with me. As a lifelong creative and storyteller drawn to historical settings, I knew I wanted to write the LGBTQ+ historical fiction I'd never had. In 1995, I wrote Patches on my first computer, finished it in early 1996, and promptly stuck it in a drawer. A few years later, I started The Bachelor Sage—a novel about secrets, power, and survival set in Boston 1912—but hit a wall in 2003. I couldn't crack a crucial plot point, so I shelved it. Then I shelved writing altogether, frustrated and creatively spent.

Twenty years passed.

Then one night, I had a dream. My characters showed me the way through. It was a revelation: when you build characters with depth and soul, they practically write themselves. Edward, Julian, Maggie, and Harrison guided me through the final third of the novel—and in doing so, revealed even more story to tell. Now I'm not just finishing The Bachelor Sage; I'm planning a prequel about Harrison, the tyrannical patriarch whose buried secrets shaped everything.

Turns out, the stories we need to tell don't stay buried forever. They just wait until we're ready to listen.