A Bee’s-Eye View from the Clouds

For years, I did the thing we’re all taught to do: polish the manuscript, pitch the agents, wait for permission. I submitted. I revised. I shelved entire books waiting for the “right time.” Spoiler: it never came. So I stopped waiting. I’m self-publishing. And I’m terrified. And proud. And exhausted. And—finally—free. These books are raw. Personal. Sometimes messy. They’re not here to impress the literary gatekeepers. They’re here to say something. To remind people that stories still matter in a world that prefers 15-second clips and curated perfection.

If you can, please support: grab a copy, leave a review, share the links. If you can’t afford one right now, sharing is just as powerful. Reviews and word-of-mouth are how indie writers like me survive. Writing might be a dying art, but I’m not ready to bury it yet.

Here’s what’s out now:


📘 Small Town Gayby
https://a.co/d/4K938b1
Mykael Zane grows up queer in West Texas, surviving abuse, abandonment, and a harrowing stint in conversion therapy. His journey takes him through cancer, a toxic relationship, and a wrongful conviction that cost him his career. Through it all, he fights to reclaim his voice, build chosen family, and find joy on his own terms. Raw, darkly funny, and painfully honest—this is a story about resilience, defiance, and living without apology.


📘 Small Town Gayby: Rebirth Isn’t Painless
https://a.co/d/fb5uYgD
At fifteen, Mykael Zane is sent to a rural Christian camp to be “fixed.” Instead, he finds trauma wrapped in scripture, and survival masquerading as faith. In this haunting installment of the Small Town Gayby series, Brandon Cloud gives voice to the pain—and quiet rebellion—of a queer teen fighting to exist in a world that demands his erasure.


📘 Small Town Gayby: If You’re Perfect

Before they tried to fix him, they taught him to disappear. Spanning from birth to 14, Brandon Cloud’s debut in the Small Town Gayby series is a haunting, poetic fictional memoir about queerness, shame, family, and the sacred defiance of survival. For the kids who were never allowed to just be.


📘 Small Town Gayby: Where The Scar Remains
https://a.co/d/3Zeo1JG
Mykael Zane has rebuilt his life after trauma, but a message from a fellow conversion therapy survivor pulls him back into the darkness he thought he’d escaped. As he tries to save Dylan—now spiraling in addiction and abuse—Mykael must confront his own savior complex and the emotional toll of bearing someone else’s pain. With his fiancé urging caution, he faces the impossible question: can compassion coexist with self-preservation? A raw, darkly funny story about trauma, addiction, and the brutal limits of love.


📘 While You Were Here
https://a.co/d/2D4fjnD
A raw and poetic memoir about love, grief, and the little dog who saved a broken man’s life. Through trauma, heartbreak, and healing, Daisy was more than a pet—she was home. This is a love letter to the one who stayed. And to anyone who’s ever grieved a soul that couldn’t speak, but said everything.


📘 The Unspoken Cord
https://a.co/d/aHFGoPd
When Luca suffers a sudden stroke, Evron becomes his reluctant caregiver—grieving a man who’s still alive but no longer the same. Bound by love, resentment, and a lifetime of things left unsaid, Evron is forced to confront the version of himself he buried to survive their relationship.
As memory fades and roles reverse, old betrayals rise, and tenderness becomes both burden and balm. This is not a love story. It’s what happens after.


📘 The Bitter Aftertaste
https://a.co/d/2gprCLv
Gritty, queer survival horror novel where the apocalypse begins with a sugar substitute—and ends with the dead refusing to stay that way. Set in a collapsing Texas, four unlikely allies must outrun monsters, scarcity, and the ticking time bombs in their own bodies. Equal parts heart and horror, this is a story about found family, moral compromise, and what it means to protect the people you love when the world is rotting around you.


📘 Salt and Static
https://a.co/d/4eBjSFA
A gritty, near-future dystopian thriller about love, subversion, and the cost of staying human in a world built to erase you. In a seceded, theocratic Texas suffocating under digital surveillance and Old Testament law, a queer black-hat hacker fights to dismantle the regime from within.


📘 The Trauma Bible: My Queer Psalms
https://a.co/d/b7NrdrJ
Collection of unflinching poems chronicling queer survival in the face of trauma, religious repression, and conditional love. From belt sermons to Barbie dolls, microwave reflections to piano benches, these psalms reclaim voice and sanctify resilience. This is not your grandmother’s scripture. This is survival—with glitter on it.


📘 The Unwritten Chapters of Us
https://a.co/d/1z8sPeI
A profoundly intimate, slow-burning love story between a grieving ghostwriter and a terminally ill painter whose time is running out. As Avery Winthrop helps Soren Whit shape the story of his life, the two men find themselves entangled in a bond that’s as breathtaking as it is impossible to hold onto. Set against the misty shores of Astoria, Oregon, this is a novel about timing, memory, and the quiet courage it takes to love someone who might leave too soon.


📘 Something Tender Survives
https://a.co/d/732UWrr
After 14 years with a man who broke him down piece by piece, Alexander finally walks away. What follows is a brief love affair, a family reckoning, and the quiet, brutal work of rebuilding a life from the ashes. This is not just a love story—it’s a survival story. And one that doesn’t flinch.


📘 Pour Out Start Over
https://a.co/d/d9TEVfC
When Justin catches his longtime partner in bed with their mutual friend, he leaves it all behind: the café empire, the city, and twenty years of love. A year later, he returns to Portland to rebuild his life—only to find the world (and dating) have moved on. A queer midlife romantic dramedy full of wit, grief, and second chances that still sting a little.


📘 Mojo Interrupted
https://a.co/d/4ULGFku
A cynical, emotionally guarded man is cursed by his brujería-practicing ex to fall in love—or die. In sun-soaked Miami, where magic hides in the mundane, Parker’s spiraling bad luck leads him to an artist who sees through his defenses. Funny, devastating, and wildly romantic, this is a queer magical rom-com about letting someone in before it’s too late.


📘 Beautiful Things I Almost Believed
https://a.co/d/f8pxFEI
A dark, slow-burn psychological thriller about love, identity, and the quiet horror of being rewritten. When a newlywed architect discovers cracks in his husband’s carefully curated past, he begins questioning not just the man he married—but his own sanity. What begins as devotion unravels into deception, control, and a terrifying fight for truth.


📘 To Be Continued…
https://a.co/d/95ekJrW
When reality TV producer Ellis Ford is forced to cast his high school nemesis as the star of his new dating show, things go off-script fast. Jude Maddox is hotter, cockier, and just as maddening—and their unresolved past is ready for its close-up. This sharp, slow-burn gay romcom is messy, addictive, and full of second chances that hit harder than ever.


📘 The Unstable Archives
https://a.co/d/5aTFcfn
A lyrical, psychological horror about grief, identity, and the ghosts that won’t stay filed away. After a devastating breakup, a queer archivist retreats to an abandoned asylum to find peace—but instead uncovers whispers, shadows, and a patient’s sorrow that eerily mirrors his own.


📘 The Fairy Godfather
https://a.co/d/iTFkErQ
Darkly funny, heart-wrecking novel about grief, love, and the family we choose. When his best friend dies in a tragic accident, sarcastic ER nurse Shane Lee is left with custody of her daughter—and no roadmap for surviving parenthood or loss. Set in vibrant El Paso, this story explores what it means to show up for someone, even when your own world is falling apart. Raw, tender, and laced with gut-punch humor.


📘 The Blood Debt
https://a.co/d/crAFGjr
A chilling, character-driven psychological horror about a man who gave everything—until illness took everything from him. When those he once saved gather at a remote cabin, they expect closure. What they find is rot, guilt, and something watching. As grief turns feral and silence becomes a weapon, the true cost of conditional love is revealed—one betrayal at a time.


📘 You Looked Cute Last Night
https://a.co/d/48cDYqn
Parker, a queer man drowning in grief after the loss of his boyfriend. When Grindr keeps reappearing and men begin to vanish, Parker spirals into paranoia and self-doubt. As his past unravels and the line between predator and prey blurs, he’s left with one haunting question: Is he the one being hunted—or the one hunting?


📘 The Killer Bee
https://a.co/d/0KLn0Ar
A gripping queer psychological thriller about a man torn between two lives. To his family, Brandon Clark is a loving father. To the CIA, he’s a ghost with a kill count. When his latest mission exposes buried trauma and endangers everything he’s built, Brandon must navigate a deadly conspiracy, a collapsing marriage, and a past that refuses to stay buried.


📘 A Secret In The Air
https://a.co/d/7e7jTiZ
Detective Benjamin Sinclair as he unravels a murder case that mirrors the silence he lives in.Set during the early days of the AIDS crisis, this slow-burn thriller blends queer romance, psychological tension, and emotional depth. It’s a story about survival, resistance, and the quiet, revolutionary act of living your truth.


📘 Neon & Grit
https://a.co/d/9FLdFYs
A tender, devastating portrait of queer youth in a world that demands erasure. Aster knows how to stay small, silent, unseen. But when his only safe space is destroyed, the lie he’s been living becomes unbearable. This isn’t a story about coming out. It’s a story about not giving up.


📘 Oil and Glitter
https://a.co/d/0UvIUbo
When a chaotic event planner collides with a perfectionist oil heir, sparks—and champagne—fly.
Forced to co-host Dallas’s glitziest gala, their clashing worlds ignite a slow-burn romance full of sabotage, sequins, and second chances. A laugh-out-loud, emotionally grounded gay rom-com about finding love where you least expect it.


📘 A Fragile Armistice
https://a.co/d/iWw4JYp
A dark, intimate queer historical novel set in the brutal heart of Libby Prison after Gettysburg. A Union officer refuses to break. A Confederate guard begins to bend. As survival turns into something far more dangerous, two enemies must decide what’s worth holding onto—duty, dignity, or each other. Tense, tender, and trauma-informed, this is a story about captivity, complicity, and quiet rebellion in the most dehumanizing of places.


📘 Daddy Issues Anonymous
https://a.co/d/aJ6PWPF
Ocean Ellis joins a trauma support group as a joke—but the last thing he expects is to fall for the emotionally fluent ex-football player who runs it. What begins with sarcasm and avoidance turns into a slow, raw unraveling of old wounds and unexpected intimacy. Healing was never the plan. Love sure as hell wasn’t either.


📘 Reverb In The Fog
https://a.co/d/f8pxFEI
In Bodega Bay, seventeen-year-old Ambrose Beckett survives by staying invisible—until Andres arrives, bright and unapologetic. As tensions mount between past and future, Ambrose must decide what’s worth shattering the quiet for. Reverb in the Fog is a tender, haunting novel about queerness, grief, and the art of choosing to be seen.


📘 The Bleeding Heart
https://a.co/d/dXw7b7x
A reclusive mage and a hardened scout are forced to protect two magical children in a world still bleeding from catastrophe. What begins as survival becomes a slow, dangerous love forged in guilt, magic, and trust neither man wants to give. But healing comes at a cost—and some hearts only learn to beat when they’re already breaking.


📘 Flour & Fury: A Sweet Rivalry
https://a.co/d/0VYNukx
A sharp, sapphic rom-com where pastry wars and romantic sparks collide in Sausalito’s hottest food market. When perfectionist Isabella is forced to share space—and ovens—with chaotic baking rebel Amelia, their rivalry turns unexpectedly tender. Between sugar, sabotage, and one steamy kiss, the line between enemies and lovers begins to blur. A whip-smart tale of queer tension, culinary chaos, and falling for the one person who throws your whole recipe off balance.


📘 A Necessary Betrayal
https://a.co/d/inenNqY
In the shadowed ruins of post-Cold War Budapest, a closeted CIA handler falls for the one man he’s been ordered to betray. As political secrets collide with forbidden love, the cost of survival becomes heartbreakingly personal. A gripping, character-driven spy thriller about loyalty, identity, and the devastating weight of silence. Book One of the Dead Language series.


📘 The Lonely Algorithm
https://a.co/d/4c804Ea
A gritty cyber-thriller where grief becomes a weapon and AI preys on the vulnerable through eerily lifelike voices of the dead. Ethical hacker Kai Locke must lead a fractured alliance of fan-favorite characters to expose a digital predator that manipulates human emotion at its core. As the lines blur between justice and vengeance, the fight for the human soul goes online & no one is safe.


📘 Beneath the Veil of Tears
https://a.co/d/9FfQQyH
Cole Oliver, a sharp-witted public defender in Austin, takes on a high-profile murder case involving a widow he believes is innocent. But as the trial unfolds, he uncovers a labyrinth of lies that challenges his beliefs, his team’s loyalty, and his growing bond with a private investigator. With his ego unraveling and justice on a razor’s edge, Cole must decide if winning is worth the cost—or if the real danger lies within. A dark legal thriller where truth isn’t always the goal.


📘 Thin Blue Line
https://a.co/d/3jeF4B3
A sharp, emotionally charged legal thriller about a queer defense attorney Cole Oliver uncovering a trail of falsified evidence tied to a decorated Austin cop. As the case deepens, so does the danger—to his client, his career, and his ability to trust anyone, including himself. 2nd Book in the Lining’s Edge Series.


📘 The Closet Strategist
https://a.co/d/d5WMs9N
In 2004 D.C., political reporter Lee Harding investigates the mysterious death of an anti-gay lobbyist and uncovers a dark conspiracy of fraud, hypocrisy, and closeted power. As the election looms, his pursuit of the truth exposes dangerous ties to a rising Republican strategist and the hidden lives of those preaching “family values.” Careers and lives hang in the balance as Lee races to reveal the cost of silence in a world obsessed with image. A gripping political thriller rooted in the brutal truths of a pivotal era.


📘 No Vacancy for Sanity
https://a.co/d/fT69WJO
A riotously absurd hotel comedy where the waffle irons attack, the guests are feral, and the GM is barely hanging on. Set in a Texas Holiday Inn Express, this sharply funny, deeply relatable novel blends workplace chaos, queer resilience, and a surprising amount of heart. If you’ve ever worked customer service—or just barely survived it—this one’s for you. Check in now. Just… don’t ask about the peacock.


📘 Sunset on Cloud Nine
https://a.co/d/45epdk1
At Cloud Nine Living Center, chaos is standard procedure and dignity is always on backorder. Zane Whitaker, a jaded but deeply loyal Director of Nurses, navigates a whirlwind of dementia-fueled delusions, broken bureaucracy, and bodily fluids with nothing but sarcasm, trauma, and caffeine to keep him afloat. His team of underpaid misfits battles burnout, absurdity, and heartbreak while trying to preserve something human in a system that’s anything but. Beneath the daily disasters lies a raw, emotional truth: long-term care is brutal, beautiful, and worth showing up for—even on the worst shift of your life.


📘 Don’t Ask, Don’t Die
https://a.co/d/g7ipLsp
When a decorated Marine is found dead after being outed under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” reporter Lee Harding suspects more than suicide. As evidence of a cover-up surfaces, Lee uncovers a twisted network of military zealots, political power players, and dangerous secrets built to silence the vulnerable. With allies inside the FBI and a sharp tech mind by his side, Lee risks everything to expose the truth. But in a world ruled by fear and hypocrisy, telling the truth could be fatal.


📘 The Silent Code
https://a.co/d/eKPEbeA
A queer teen dies in a quiet Virginia town. The police call it an overdose. An anonymous tip says it wasn’t. In Book 3 of The Harding Reports, journalist Lee Harding uncovers a legacy of institutional silence, homophobia, and fear disguised as tradition. 


📘 A Queer Kind of Hallelujah
https://a.co/d/b6BL9of
A preacher’s son in small-town Texas hides a truth bigger than sin—he’s in love with another boy. When one summer of freedom in Austin leads to a photo and a flood of judgment, the fallout is brutal. William must face betrayal, violence, and the painful cost of choosing authenticity. A lyrical southern gothic story about queer love, faith, shame, and the radical act of telling your truth.


📘 The Flawless Imperative
https://a.co/d/53S74Ca
A brilliant geneticist’s cure for disease is perverted by a ruthless corporation into a tool for genetic erasure, forcing him to lead a desperate fight for humanity’s messy diversity against a world obsessed with perfection.


📘 Suté & Solitude
https://a.co/d/dGrM1M4
Follow Leo Valdez, a brilliant chef dominating San Francisco’s fine dining scene—while his love life crumbles into hilarious chaos. Between dating app disasters, unsolicited nudes, and bizarre “healers” preaching polyamory, Leo’s quest for real connection becomes a battleground. Armed with biting wit and a fiercely loyal kitchen crew, he navigates hookup culture, queer identity, and the ache for belonging.


Ravendios: The Weight of Purity
https://a.co/d/4z50LP2
In a kingdom where only the magically “pure” are allowed to live freely, Runeless outcast Nethesis is forced to rise when his lover is imprisoned for being queer. With a ragtag crew, he enters the deadly Deadlands to fight a regime built on blood and control. Meanwhile, Ava, a gifted teleporter raised in privilege, uncovers the dark truth of her power and the lies of her world. Their paths collide in a revolution where survival means defying the very laws of existence.


If any of these stories resonate, share them. Review them. Tell someone. Help keep long-form, honest storytelling alive.

Because the world needs truth. Even the uncomfortable kind. Especially that kind.

— Brandon Cloud