'Nathan Burgoine's Blog, page 18

Feeling a little “Hope Echoes” today.

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Art by Micah.

WROTE Podcast — Ooh, Nerd hot!

Hey all! Despite a week of migraines here—seriously, Mother Nature has every right to be angry and this is humanity’s fault, but I am so done with having a barometer for a brain—I’ve got something awesome today. I and my fellow contributors to Three Left Turns to Nowhere got to chat with the lovely folk at WROTE Podcast again. If you don’t know WROTE Podcast yet, then allow me to be the first to tell you about Vance Bastian and SA “Baz” Collins, who do weekly chats with queer content creators from across the creative spectrum. They rock. It rocks. There’s a lot of, well, rock, is what I’m saying. Only rock here is a metaphor for coolness. Or nerd hot, to get back on target for our characters in the book. I’ve been on WROTE Podcast a few times now (click here to check that out) and it’s always a blast. My fellow co-contributors and I chat about grilled cheese, collaboration, and even survive the rapid-fire questions that Baz aims our way as the closeout.

You can check WROTE Podcast out at Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Patreon, and YouTube.

Bold Strokes, Bookathon, and Bag of Giving (oh my!)

Some authors are really, really good at making appearances and taking part in events, making an ongoing dialog available on a regular basis. Others end up booking four things in one extended weekend. Guess which I am? Go on, guess. I’ll wait.

BSB Bookathon, April 8-10, 2022; register here.The Bold Strokes Books Bookathon

It’s time for the April BSB Bookathon! This awesomeness is a full schedule of author panels, chats, and readings and is available free online, though you do need to register (which you can do here). If you click that link, you’ll see the full schedule of events and notice yours truly is taking part in a few things, which include:

To Plot or Not to Plot—7pm EDT, Friday April 8th, 2022—I get to moderate Erin Dutton, Genevieve McCluer, Felice Picano, VK Powell, and Jane Walsh in a discussion of one of the oldest (and most heated) debate among writers: plotters vs. pantsers!

BYO Pets!—7pm EDT, Saturday April 9th, 2022—Join Georgia Beers, myself, Meredith Doench, Ursula Klein, Krystina Rivers, and Lauren Emily Whalen as we introduce you to the real stars of the show: our pets! (And we authors will read from our books, too.) That’s right. The legend, the husky… MAX! Surely this will go off without the slightest hitch because he is such a good boy who obeys all the time.

Three Left Turns to Nowhere—3pm EDT, Sunday April 10th, 2022—Join Jeffrey Ricker, J. Marshall Freeman and myself as we discuss—you guessed it—our trio of linked queer YA novellas, Three Left Turns to Nowhere. Grilled cheese. Ghosts. A small Ontario town with a dash of magic. Cherry red Mustangs. Did I mention grilled cheese?

Kids These Days—5pm EDT, Sunday April 10th, 2022—Aurora Rey moderates myself, Lauren Melissa Ellzey, J. Marshall Freeman, Jeffrey Ricker, and Lauren Emily Whalen as we discuss writing YA fiction, including how some of us—*cough* me *cough*—are no longer among said target demographic by, y’know, decades.

Bag of Giving; April 11th, 7:00 pm EDT; Twitch.tv/ArvanEleronBag of Giving

But wait, there’s more! As readers may know from my fantastic time on Tales from the Loop, I’ve been taking part in Bag of Giving, where a bunch of creatives get together to play games and do some good. I had a brilliant time as a player, but now I’m putting on my narrator hat and leading Mike Chen, Brandon Crilly, Darcie Little Badger, Premee Mohamed, and Alex White as they boldly go in a Star Trek Adventures session. Am I freaking out with impostor syndrome? Yes. Will it be amusing? Also yes, and you can witness me trying to tribble my way through it on Arvan Eleron’s twitch, Monday, April 11th, 2022, at 7 pm EST.

Not only that, but you can win a tonne of great prizes (I know, it’s like the Bag keeps on Giving, eh?) And if you glance at the “Magic is Complicated” Book Bundle, you’ll notice a familiar name (and also some famous awesome names), as said bundle includes copies of Exit Plans for Teenage Freaks by yours truly (signed), Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey (signed), Strange California, edited by J. Daniel Batt and Jaym Gates (signed by Jaym), Three Left Turns to Nowhere by myself, J. Marshall Freeman, Jeffrey Ricker (also signed by me), and When We Were Magic by Sarah Gailey (signed)!

How do you enter? A donation to charity. Hop on over to Bag of Giving for the full scoop and your choice of charities, but this month Bag of Giving is spotlighting two charities in particular:

Based in Canada’s capital, Max Ottawa focuses on improving “health outcomes of guys into guys” through a variety of ongoing initiatives. This includes health and wellness support groups, harm reduction programs, youth leadership initatives, and focused programs for Black queer males and individuals over 40. Their strategic plan is available here, and you can donate here.

Our second spotlight is TENT (Transgender Education Network of Texas), based out of Austin. Trans rights have been under serious threat recently in Texas, making TENT’s work all the more important. Their focuses include bullying and harassment support for trans youth, cultural competency programs for schools and businesses (TransSafe), and lobbying for trans rights in the Texas legislature. Learn more about their important work here, and click here to donate.

Fielding, Josh, and Logan—Choosing to Centre Friendship, not Romance, in “Hope Echoes”

Before anything else, a moment please to admire this amazing piece of artwork from Micah Draws!

Fielding, Joshua, and Logan. You can find Micah, the fabulous artist, at Twitter, Patreon, Instagram, and his Sparrow Comic.

The little details kill me in this. Fielding’s Catadora T-shirt. Joshua’s Softshoe Diner shirt (and a wee Bi-Pride pin). Logan’s seatbelt belt-buckle and eyebrow ring. Gah. I love them, and writing Josh and Logan’s nascent friendship story with Fielding got me through some of the worst of the first year of the pandemic.

Which, I suppose, is all the segue I need for the topic of the blog.

Reviews are coming in for Three Left Turns to Nowhere now, and more than a few have mentioned how my novella, “Hope Echoes,” doesn’t have a romance at the centre of the narrative for the main character, Fielding. That was a conscious choice, and one I was indeed nervous about, but I thought I’d take a moment to talk about the reasons why I chose to leave Fielding flying solo. Now, it shouldn’t need saying that I love romance (I mean, I write romance, and often) but just in case someone sees the title of this blog and reads this entry and somehow makes a leap I’m not making: it wasn’t about not loving romance.

But, as I said, it was a conscious choice for four reasons.

One: I want to be super-clear about this—I was 100% motivated by wanting to write a queer YA without romance because queer fiction—including queer YA—isn’t by definition romance, and there’s a tendency to conflate the two which definitely can definitely wander right into erasing aromantic queerfolk. I mention that quite a bit when I’m talking to writers about queer inclusivity. So, when I sat down to write “Hope Echoes,” it occurred to me the story I wanted to tell (which does, to be clear, also contain two other romantic partnerships, one in the past, and one in the present between Josh and Logan) was an opportunity to walk my talk and craft a story where Fielding’s story is 100% queer, but has nothing to do with his romantic relationship status. He’d like a boyfriend, sure. But that’s not what’s happening right now.

Two: This was the character crux of it—Fielding’s personal arc in this story was about feeling left behind, about facing down his sense of just not being able to start living his life the way he’d intended to, of being on his own, and about coming to grips with a lot of looming uncertainties. YA, to me, is a great place to explore that sense of wanting life to just start already, but also hitting the realizations of how life won’t necessarily align the way you’d like it to. Fielding has a lot of things going on in his life that have taken control and choice away from him, and so this story—his story—is about figuring out a way to feel okay on his own, but also feel okay with opening up to others, and—because this is me, after all—a healthy dash of how wonderful it is when strangers become chosen family.

Three: …which is where Joshua and Logan come in. I’d had Joshua as a character in my head from the bare-bones basic outline of “Hope Echoes,” but I realized pretty quickly that if I had Joshua be a queer guy helping Fielding out, no matter how much I tried to make it clear what was happening was a budding friendship, readers might project (or expect) a romantic resolution. So: Logan. Writing them as the friendly queer couple actually shifted the dynamic of friendship and support in the story into a much better place, which was an added benefit, but the original reason Logan appeared was 100% to make sure readers didn’t get the impression they should ship Fielding and Joshua. Also, if we’re doing honesty, Joshua kept threatening to overtake the story, and I have a feeling I’ve not written the last of him. But what I wanted to show with Joshua and Logan was how central those first queer friendships can be when you’re a queerling. Fielding has friends and a supportive family, yes, but Joshua and Logan are the first queer friends he’s ever really made, and their day together gives him a glimpse of what it might be like once he’s gathered those sorts of people around him. They get him on a few levels in a way he hasn’t had access to before. The oddness of their situation—being somewhere he’s never been before and doesn’t think he’ll ever return to—has a kind of freedom attached to it that Logan points out, and Fielding gets to be 100% himself with these two guys, and is maybe surprised at how good that feels, even when things go bad. Chosen family and queer friends groups are a huge part of my lived experience as a queer guy, and I wanted “Hope Echoes” to give a sense of what those first queer friend groups can feel like.

Four: Finally, narratively, I wanted to put all the romantic eggs into one basket: the love letter Fielding, Joshua, and Logan are trying to decipher and deliver. That story, and what it means to Fielding, who has pinned a lot of his feelings into this letter over the course of this long, strange day, becomes a bit of a lesson to Fielding about how he’s been viewing the world, and especially his odd gift to catch glimpses of the past replaying itself.

So. There you have it. That’s the answer to the question “Why is there no romance for Fielding in this story?”

Cover by Inkspiral Design.

Three strangers heading to a convention in Toronto are stranded in rural Ontario, where a small town with a subtle kind of magic leads each to discover what he’s been searching for.

Ed Sinclair and his friends get stuck in Hopewell after their car breaks down. It’s snark at first sight when he meets local mechanic Lyn, but while they’re getting under each other’s skin, the town might show them a way into one another’s hearts.

Rome Epstein is out and proud and clueless about love. He’s hosting a giant scavenger hunt at the convention, but ends up in Hopewell. When the town starts leaving him clues for its own scavenger hunt, he discovers a boy who could be the prize he’s been searching for.

Fielding Roy has a gift for seeing the past. His trip to reunite with friends hits an unexpected stop in Hopewell, but a long-lost love letter and two local boys give him a chance to do more than watch the past. This time, Fielding might be able to fix the present.

Three Left Turns to Nowhere, by Jeffrey Ricker, J. Marshall Freeman, and ‘Nathan Burgoine

Three Left Turns to Nowhere, now available everywhere!

Hey all! All the February titles from Bold Strokes Books (webstore) have launched widely, and that includes Three Left Turns to Nowhere! My novella, “Hope Echoes,” rounds out the trio of queer YA novellas included in the book, and as of this morning, you can head to your favourite brick-and-mortar or e-tailer of choice for a copy of your very own. I’ll also be doing a virtual launch tomorrow at Left Bank Books in St. Louis (where fellow author Jeffrey Ricker makes his home)! And, as always, if you want to keep up to date with releases from Bold Strokes Books, you can sign up for their newsletter.

What’s Three Left Turns to Nowhere? Well, I’m glad you asked.

Cover by the brilliant Inkspiral Design.

Three strangers heading to a convention in Toronto are stranded in rural Ontario, where a small town with a subtle kind of magic leads each to discover what he’s been searching for.

Ed Sinclair and his friends get stuck in Hopewell after their car breaks down. It’s snark at first sight when he meets local mechanic Lyn, but while they’re getting under each other’s skin, the town might show them a way into one another’s hearts.

Rome Epstein is out and proud and clueless about love. He’s hosting a giant scavenger hunt at the convention, but ends up in Hopewell. When the town starts leaving him clues for its own scavenger hunt, he discovers a boy who could be the prize he’s been searching for.
Fielding Roy has a gift for seeing the past. His trip to reunite with friends hits an unexpected stop in Hopewell, but a long-lost love letter and two local boys give him a chance to do more than watch the past. This time, Fielding might be able to fix the present.

Three Left Turns to Nowhere, by Jeffrey Ricker, J. Marshall Freeman, and ‘Nathan Burgoine

It’s long been a dream of mine to take part in shared-world writing, and with this book—and the novellas by Jeffrey Ricker and J. Marshall Freeman—I’m stoked to launch “Hope Echoes” out into the world.

Three Left Turns to Nowhere now available at the Bold Strokes Books Webstore!

Hey all! All the February titles are now available at the Bold Strokes Books webstore, and that includes Three Left Turns to Nowhere! My novella, “Hope Echoes,” rounds out the trio of queer YA novellas included in the book, and as of this morning, if you wanted a copy in any of the e-formats or paperback faster than it’ll be available anywhere else, that’s the place to go do it! (Don’t worry, though, if you’ve got a local brick-and-mortar or an e-store you prefer to support, the book will release everywhere else queer books are sold on February 15th!) And if you want to keep up to date with releases from Bold Strokes Books, you can sign up for their newsletter.

What’s Three Left Turns to Nowhere? Well, I’m glad you asked.

Cover by the brilliant Inkspiral Design.

Three strangers heading to a convention in Toronto are stranded in rural Ontario, where a small town with a subtle kind of magic leads each to discover what he’s been searching for.

Ed Sinclair and his friends get stuck in Hopewell after their car breaks down. It’s snark at first sight when he meets local mechanic Lyn, but while they’re getting under each other’s skin, the town might show them a way into one another’s hearts.

Rome Epstein is out and proud and clueless about love. He’s hosting a giant scavenger hunt at the convention, but ends up in Hopewell. When the town starts leaving him clues for its own scavenger hunt, he discovers a boy who could be the prize he’s been searching for.
Fielding Roy has a gift for seeing the past. His trip to reunite with friends hits an unexpected stop in Hopewell, but a long-lost love letter and two local boys give him a chance to do more than watch the past. This time, Fielding might be able to fix the present.

Three Left Turns to Nowhere, by Jeffrey Ricker, J. Marshall Freeman, and ‘Nathan Burgoine

It’s long been a dream of mine to take part in shared-world writing, and with this book—and the novellas by Jeffrey Ricker and J. Marshall Freeman—I’m stoked to launch “Hope Echoes” out into the world.

Queer, Coded

Brilliant artwork via Inkspiral Design.

When I started writing “Hope Echoes,” my novella in the upcoming Three Left Turns to Nowhere, I knew right away I wanted to include something I’d not touched on before but is intrinsically locked in my head with queerness: codes. I don’t mean code-switching (though, also that) but rather actual cryptography—hiding messages inside messages, coding and decrypting messages.

In “Hope Echoes” my main character, Fielding Roy, finds a letter tucked into a book, but when he unfolds the letter, it’s just a series of numbers on a piece of paper, and he realizes whatever is written there—it eventually turns out to be a long-lost love letter from one girl to another—was encoded. He figures out how, is lucky enough to have what he needs to decode it, and this sends him on his mission of trying to get the letter to where it belongs, albeit many decades late, most likely.

Why are codes and queerness intertwined in my head?

Because of a diary.

I kept a diary from the time I was thirteen until my university years, once I was working full-time at the bookstore and things like Livejournal came into being, which scratched the same itch of scribing down details of the day, but also hit the “being social without having to go anywhere” button (a button that still takes up a large part of my dopamine-producing brain, if I’m honest). That first original diary was a little blue book with one of those silly key-lock flaps that had zero actual security to it, and had one page for each day that didn’t have much more room than a square on a wall calendar. My largest entries could only grow to about a paragraph, and often included such brilliant declarations as: “I wish they’d include Windcharger more often. I like his tractor beam!” (a reference to my love of the Transformers cartoon) or such incredible insights as “Kirk is a terrible leader. He doesn’t listen to anyone.” (I wasn’t a Kirk fan, apparently. All my praise tended to go to Spock.)

It also included the realities of thirteen year-old me: “Moving. Again. I hate it.” or “Gym today. I hate it.” or “[Insert rotating bully name here] on the bus again. I hate him.” I had a lot of things I hated when I was kid, is what I’m saying, and putting them down in my diary was a way to get those feelings out, because I didn’t really have a lot of places I could say them out loud. Moving? That was because of my father’s job, so to declare any frustration with that would be tantamount to criticizing the breadwinner, which would never fly, and besides, why couldn’t I be more like my sister and just make new friends? Gym class? My father was an athlete, as was my sister, so they didn’t understand my visceral hatred of gym class (which only grew as I began to understand many of the reasons I was so uncomfortable). I should just try harder. Bully of the week? Ignore him, and he’ll go away. Or he was just jealous of me. (Neither of those things were true).

Then, an incident with my bank passport for my savings account happened when I was fourteen or fifteen. I’d taken some money out of my account and transferred it to my sister, who was older and living in another province, because she’d gotten behind and needed cash and didn’t want to let our parents know it had happened—this was a sentiment I completely understood, not wanting our parents to know anything about me myself—and even though those little passports were held shut, and I’d put it back in my drawer, the very next day my mother asked me what I’d done, and she said the passport had “fallen open” when she was putting something away. That wasn’t possible, at all, and the conclusion was simple: my mother, at least, was snooping into my bank passport. And it was in the same drawer as my diary.

That was when it clicked for me, and some past conversations replayed in my head with a kind of horrifying understanding. After particularly awful days at school, which I was sure I’d managed to pretend weren’t happening—I so did not need another lecture from my father about how to face-down bullies, given he’d only ever been a bully and not the bullied—my mother would often ask, rather pointedly, about “any friends at school.” When I’d gone to my room to “study” and instead had created Dungeons & Dragons maps, my mother had told me I should study more, forbidding me a television show until I spent another hour at it—at the kitchen table. And so on.

My mother was absolutely reading my diary.

I’m not sure I can explain the terror of that moment, because those were the years I’d started to realize. I was different, and I the inkling of how I was different was absolutely settling in with utter dread because everything I knew about that specific kind of different—I so wasn’t going to use any of the words I knew, given they were all bad things—was clearly not a good thing to be. But I re-read my diary, wondering if my mother—or, God, my father?—might have seen anything in there.

In retrospect, there wasn’t much in there. I’d not even gotten to the point where I was willing to write things down, so much as I mentioned feeling “bad” that day, or how I just wanted “to go find somewhere quiet to draw for a while” or my enjoyment of Quantum Leap (read: how often Scott Bakula ended up shirtless) or or or…

But the diary, this outlet of expression, was compromised.

Unless…

Enter codes. I’d always enjoyed codes, and I often took books about codes out of the library, but I realized a simple code wouldn’t work. For one, if my diary entries were suddenly gibberish in code, then my parents (or was it just my mother?) would be on to me knowing I was on to them (her?) and that wasn’t what I wanted, because it might lead to questions. Eventually, I stumbled on a simple—but hidden—code that worked perfectly for my diary. It involved drawing, which was already my favourite, as you’d put little pictures, stars say, or bees (that was the example in the code book), and write around them. On a little strip of paper, you’d write out the alphabet in some order, and then you’d write your message by putting your little pictures, from top-to-bottom or side-to-side, by sliding the paper along and drawing the images beside where that letter was located. Then, you just filled in your diary entry around the little pictures, and it just looked like you’d drawn a picture.

I often used stars, or snowflakes, or leaves, or raindrops, and to make my image harder to decode, every single entry where I encoded something—not every day, but quite often—I’d make my decrypting slip of paper out of the entry from the day before, using the first words, up to the first repetition of a letter, as the start of the order of the letters.

So, if an entry began: “Today it rained…” The little slip of paper would be: T-O-D-A-Y-I, and then all the rest of the letters in order: B-C-E-F-G-H-J… and so on. I had this down to an art, destroyed the little strip of paper I’d use to make my drawings right away, and then rarely even needed to make a new one to decode, since I often just remembered what it was I’d written.

Like the day I got caught with a guy I was tutoring in French in a rainy cabin and had my first kiss. ‘I kissed [Name]’ was encoded in raindrops on the diary, hidden in my mundane description of a walk home in the rain with [Name]. I can picture it in my head, even today, mumble-mumble years later, and I don’t think I ever once recreated the paper for that day, instead just knowing what those raindrops meant.

Those diaries and journals are all gone, unfortunately, lost to the mad scramble of finding somewhere to live, but coding my secrets where I could be sure I could put my thoughts down and be safe from those I didn’t dare let know? That’ll always be tucked into my head as something queer, and I’m so looking forward to having that tiny piece of my experience of existing as a queer kid tucked into “Hope Echoes,” albeit in the hands of a young girl who had to encode her own conversations in a different way, and even more years into the past than mine.

Three strangers heading to a convention in Toronto are stranded in rural Ontario, where a small town with a subtle kind of magic leads each to discover what he’s been searching for.

Ed Sinclair and his friends get stuck in Hopewell after their car breaks down. It’s snark at first sight when he meets local mechanic Lyn, but while they’re getting under each other’s skin, the town might show them a way into one another’s hearts.

Rome Epstein is out and proud and clueless about love. He’s hosting a giant scavenger hunt at the convention, but ends up in Hopewell. When the town starts leaving him clues for its own scavenger hunt, he discovers a boy who could be the prize he’s been searching for.

Fielding Roy has a gift for seeing the past. His trip to reunite with friends hits an unexpected stop in Hopewell, but a long-lost love letter and two local boys give him a chance to do more than watch the past. This time, Fielding might be able to fix the present.

Three Left Turns to Nowhere — Jeffrey Ricker, J. Marshall Freeman, & ‘Nathan Burgoine

Appearance: Left Bank Books, Wednesday, February 16, 7pm CT (8pm EST)

Left Bank Books, Saint Louis

Hey everyone! I have news. Book news. Appearance-based book news, even. Thanks to the (incredibly rapidly approaching) release of Three Left Turns to Nowhere and the (incredibly wonderful) Left Bank Books, I get to put my mug on the internet alongside my (incredibly talented) fellow authors Jeffrey Ricker and J. Marshall Freeman in a conversation with an (incredibly gracious) host, Shane Mullen. If you don’t know Left Bank Books, they are a Saint Louis bookstore beloved by the aforementioned Jeffrey Ricker (who is the author of our trio not from Ontario who wrote a character who is not from Ontario because he’s clever like that). Left Bank Books is the oldest and largest independently-owned full-line bookstore in St. Louis, and they offer a full-line of new and used books, gifts, cards, magazines, toys and services.

And us. They offer us. Or, rather, they’ll be offering us on February 16th at 7pm CT (that’s St. Louis’s time zone, it’ll be 8pm EST for those in my orange-slice of the globe). To head on over to said events page to get all the rest of the details, you can simply click here. (The link to the Facebook event is here.)

I hope to see you there! Bring questions, if you’ve got ’em, and get prepared for likely two very erudite writers of YA (and also me)!

Cover by Inkspiral Design.

Three strangers heading to a convention in Toronto are stranded in rural Ontario, where a small town with a subtle kind of magic leads each to discover what he’s been searching for.

Ed Sinclair and his friends get stuck in Hopewell after their car breaks down. It’s snark at first sight when he meets local mechanic Lyn, but while they’re getting under each other’s skin, the town might show them a way into one another’s hearts.

Rome Epstein is out and proud and clueless about love. He’s hosting a giant scavenger hunt at the convention, but ends up in Hopewell. When the town starts leaving him clues for its own scavenger hunt, he discovers a boy who could be the prize he’s been searching for.

Fielding Roy has a gift for seeing the past. His trip to reunite with friends hits an unexpected stop in Hopewell, but a long-lost love letter and two local boys give him a chance to do more than watch the past. This time, Fielding might be able to fix the present.

Three Left Turns to Nowhere, by Jeffrey Ricker, J. Marshall Freeman, and ‘Nathan Burgoine

Living a Life on Hold

Cover by the Amazing Inkspiral Design.

“Hope Echoes” is the novella that rounds out the trio of novellas in Three Left Turns to Nowhere (coming out next month from Bold Strokes Books!) after Jeffrey Ricker’s opening “Roadside Assistance” and J. Marshall Freeman’s “Scavenger Hunt.” The three novellas all take place in Hopewell, Ontario, our fictionalized northern Ontario town where our protagonists all find themselves stuck on their way to an event in Toronto. Hopewell is an odd little town—there’s a kind of magic to the place that some of the locals think helps people find things, or other people, they might need. Of course, other locals think that’s completely ridiculous, but our three queer teens all have a brush with Hopewell’s magic.

When I first started writing “Hope Echoes,” Ontario was under one of the lockdowns, and everything was very much on hold. Staring at the blinking cursor, it struck me how the feeling of everything being on hold could be a place to begin, and some of Fielding Roy’s life started to come into focus.

Fielding is a young man whose life has been put on hold thanks to a trio of events: first, his single mother’s hours at her job got cut way back, putting Fielding in a financially perilous place to start university as planned, so he made the choice to defer; second, his uncle had a major health issue, and Fielding taking over running his uncle’s pet shop and animal rescue was a way to take some of the financial pressure off his family, but meant he didn’t get to leave his hometown along with all the rest of his friends; and third, those friends are now in Toronto, at university, living the life he’d expected himself to be living, and it’s underlining just how much he’s not where he wants to be.

My own path to university got very tangled and delayed thanks to my coming out, but that’s not Fielding’s issue at all. He’s out, and has been for a while, has supportive friends (albeit friends who are now hours and hours away and from whom he’s feeling disconnected) and his mother, his uncle, and his cousin are all supportive, loving people. The reasons it feels like his life ground to halt aren’t anything to do with him being queer.

That was purposeful. When my fellow Three Left Turns to Nowhere authors got together on a Zoom call to discuss our world building, events, and thematic notes, we’d all more-or-less agreed we didn’t want the stories to be “suffering because queer.” Similarly, initially we talked about how our fictional town of Hopewell, Ontario would have “kind of a Schitt’s Creek vibe.” I’d bumped into a story about Pride in Canadian Small Towns, and that helped shape Hopewell, as well—even down to deciding who the mayor would be. Now, Fielding still has a pretty sensible reaction to being trapped there without notice—he wonders how safe he might be—but I wanted “Hope Echoes” to be a queer YA story where Fielding’s queerness wasn’t ever the conflict.

Instead, Fielding has a knack. Sometimes, seemingly at random, Fielding catches glimpses of the past replaying itself. Prior to the events of “Hope Echoes,” it’s happened about once every other month or so for the last couple of years, and he’s kept it very close to the chest because he’s not sure how anyone would react—or, rather, he’s afraid of how people are likely to react. Fielding’s not entirely sure what’s up with these echoes he sometimes sees, but when he gets to Hopewell and is killing time in a second-hand store, he sees one of these moments: a young woman, crying and upset, tucking a letter into the back of a book. When he checks, the letter is still there. He buys the book, finds out the letter is a long-lost queer love letter, and then—with the help of two locals—decides to deliver it, even if it will be decades late.

That’s the set-up of “Hope Echoes.” It’s a story about a queer kid who really just wants his life to start, please. It’s a story about Fielding catching a glimpse of a queer relationship from generations ago and wanting to know what happened—that’s a facet of queerness I tend to explore often; we don’t get to inherit a continuance of queer history or culture from our families, since the vast majority of us queer people don’t have queer parents telling us about our queer grandparents—so finding these pieces of queer history (or queer fiction) are important. It’s often the only way we see people like ourselves. It’s why I write queer stories, to add to that chance that someone might bump into someone like themselves in one of my stories at just the right time.

But mostly? “Hope Echoes” is an adventure about Fielding and two new friends solving the mystery of the letter, about hoping for things to turn out well even when you’re pretty sure they won’t, and about the importance of letting things out when they get to be too much.

If you’re on NetGalley, you can request an ARC of Three Left Turns to Nowhere, in exchange for a review. If you do make a request, please let me know so I can nudge my Publisher to approve the request. Right now, you can also pre-order at the Bold Strokes Books Webstore, which will release the book February 1st, ahead of the February 15th general release date.

Three Left Turns to Nowhere—Now available on NetGalley!

Three Left Turns to Nowhere will be out next month (how did that happen?) and as of today, there is a listing on NetGalley (click here to hop right there). If you don’t know what NetGalley is, it’s a digital ARC platform—ARCs are Advance Reader Copies, meant for reviewers so there are reviews of a title before it’s officially released, which generates buzz—and you can sign up, request books, and review them ahead of the books release (or, if you’re anything like me, months and months later when you finally catch up to your to-be-read pile).

If you don’t know what Three Left Turns to Nowhere is? I got you.

Cover by Inkspiral Design

Three strangers heading to a convention in Toronto are stranded in rural Ontario, where a small town with a subtle kind of magic leads each to discover what he’s been searching for.

Ed Sinclair and his friends get stuck in Hopewell after their car breaks down. It’s snark at first sight when he meets local mechanic Lyn, but while they’re getting under each other’s skin, the town might show them a way into one another’s hearts.

Rome Epstein is out and proud and clueless about love. He’s hosting a giant scavenger hunt at the convention, but ends up in Hopewell. When the town starts leaving him clues for its own scavenger hunt, he discovers a boy who could be the prize he’s been searching for.

Fielding Roy has a gift for seeing the past. His trip to reunite with friends hits an unexpected stop in Hopewell, but a long-lost love letter and two local boys give him a chance to do more than watch the past. This time, Fielding might be able to fix the present.

Three Left Turns to Nowhere

I wrote the third novella in the book, “Hope Echoes,” the one with Fielding Roy. He has a knack for seeing the past replay itself, and after getting stuck in Hopewell, Fielding bumps into a long-lost queer love letter a girl wrote. My novella isn’t a romance—I feel nervous not mentioning that, given how much anything gay comes with a heightened expectation of romance—but rather a mystery, as Fielding, and two local boys and the people they know, try to figure out who wrote the letter, and how to get it to the person it was for in the first place.