A Pride post about legacy, mentorship, and scale.
I’m writing this from the couch while my wife recovers from surgery. Not much time for deep coding sessions—they need snacks, a constant stream of charged PS5 controllers, and plenty of pain pills. So this’ll be a ramble, not an essay.
But it’s Pride, and there’s a story that’s been hanging around my brain lately that I want to share. It’s one of scale, and of the power of choosing to share yourself despite the cringe.
Here’s the gist: I keep running into people who tell me my books changed their lives. Like, literally changed—new name, new pronouns, new whole self. I meet them at cons sometimes, and they tell me stories of passing their well-worn copy around their high school queer group, or of crying their eyes out when they realized the protagonist of my book was them, in a way they had never been able to articulate before.
Like, check this out. I’m visiting a friend in Seattle, whose friend is also in town to visit. We’re making small talk, and the topic of books come up. I mention I’m a writer.
“What do you write?”
“Oh, YA Crossover stuff. It’s a world where some kids turn into cartoons. You probably never read it–“
Her skin went pale as a ghost.
“Bait and Switch,” she said. “I read it in high school.
“It convinced me to transition.”
What do you even say to respond to that honor?
We were taking part in something older and wilder—passing down the tradition of mentorship, of oral storytelling, of finding the people who “get it” and helping them light their own torches.
And here’s the nuttiest part: this isn’t even the first time this has happened.
Now, I don’t know that many people. I’m no influencer. If you made me count, maybe I know 200 people, tops, scattered through the Midwest and Discords and conventions and Twitter replies. So how is it that, out of those 200, six people have looked me in the eye (or DM’d, or come through a friend of a friend) and said, “Hey, your book helped me come out?”
Let’s do the bad-at-math math. Six out of two hundred is, what, three percent? If that’s even remotely the ratio for everyone who picked up a copy, then holy shit—how many people out there are quietly living as themselves because something I wrote made them feel seen? Ten? Fifty? A hundred? More?
And here’s the kicker: these weren’t people I set out to find. Another came up at a party, a friend-of-a-friend moment where my brain took a second to connect the dots. Most of them, I never would have known if they hadn’t decided, for whatever reason, to tell me.
There was a whole era, back in high school and college, where I was sharpening my pen in a pack of hungry writers, all of us trying to Make It, each staking out our corners in a shared universe we built from scratch. We argued, collaborated, rewrote the rules, and handed each other lines we never would’ve thought of alone. Some of those wild experiments ended up in these books; more than a few scars did, too.
Maybe, under all the awe of the power of books, this is really a story about mentorship—about the way people sharpen each other just by being in the same orbit, chasing the same big, reckless dreams. I learned more from passing drafts and trading brutal feedback sessions in that email list than any MFA could’ve taught me. And the cast of characters? Ridiculous in the best way.
Later, as my confidence grew and I took on my own stories, I learned the craft of novelling from a Team Leader at a Saturn plant.
(And yes, it’s a verb, and yes, I could go on for hours about how beautiful a verb it can be; but I’ll spare you all the words and just say “You learn to love to hate it.”)
He taught me the power of theme, the might of vulnerability, and the ancient threads binding all storytellers together.
“Every thread of your story has to sing the same song,” he once told me. (“Their harmony makes the book sing,” I now add to the writers I mentor. Humans love a good pattern.) From that pearl I learned to find my own voice and rhythm. From that rhythm, the confidence to tell big, messy, complicated stories.
I keep thinking about a conservative Christian boy in that writing group who read my first draft of Bait and Switch—devoured it, actually, fell for the characters, argued plot twists with me over emails. Here’s the wild part: he had no idea it was a queer story. Not a clue. He just saw himself in it, plain as day, as a Christian in a big city. That’s when I knew this book might do something special.
And now, looking back, I realize what was really happening in all those workshops, late-night DMs, and messy group edits: we weren’t just chasing publication, or a sense of belonging, or even the perfect line (though all those mattered). We were taking part in something older and wilder—passing down the tradition of mentorship, of oral storytelling, of finding the people who “get it” and helping them light their own torches.
That’s the core of it, I think. I mentor because someone mentored me. I tell stories because I was raised by a tribe of storytellers who believed in passing the magic along. We aren’t just writing books; we’re keeping alive something ancient, something stubborn and deeply human: the drive to be seen, and to help someone else see themselves.
I gave people the stories they needed to understand themselves–
the same way Odysseus taught the Greeks about resilience,
Magneto showed a generation of queer kids what it meant to resist,
Johnny 5 reminded us all what it means to be human,
Miles Morales taught us that anyone can wear the mask,
Mister Rogers taught us to be neighbors.
Writing tells on us. In the long, meditative space of the page, our biases and histories spill out: raw, messy, and deeply, damningly human. And once your story is out in the world, you have no idea whose life it will change.
Back to snacks and games now. Happy Pride, friends.
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