Read Sleeping Fairy and browse the rest of my catalogue on my Amazon Author page.
Across every page of my books, there’s an invisible thread—thin as filament, strong as fishing line—braided from loss, queerness, and the stubborn need to keep going. It’s the tensile strength that lets a character hold on when the room tilts; it’s what binds one chapter to the next even when life insists on coming apart. Sleeping Fairy is that thread, lit from the inside. A MySpace post becomes the spinning wheel; a hospital hallway becomes the forest; community, not a prince, does the heavy lifting. Come for the fairy tale; stay for the ordinary magic that keeps people alive.
Why I wrote Sleeping Fairy (and why I won’t write fairy tales the old way)
I grew up hungry for wonder but too often found the door barred by fine print—beauty coded thin and white, love presented as rescue, consent edited out in favor of optics. As I put it in the book’s author note: “I write The Faeries Tell because I grew up hungry for wonder and never saw myself invited to the feast.” I love the bones of fairy tales—the ritual, the archetypes, the hum of transformation—but I refuse the rot.
So The Faeries Tell keeps the spell and changes the terms. That means the curse is cultural, not mystical; the forest is a dorm room, a browser window, a hospital hallway; and the magic is competent care delivered by people who show up when it’s boring, humiliating, and real. It means queerness isn’t a plot twist or a villain’s signature; it’s the weather everyone breathes. It means “consent isn’t a speech—it’s the texture of every choice.”
I also wrote this book because parts of it are mine. Being outed before you are ready cleaves your life into “before” and “after,” and the climb back to yourself is long and not linear. The book’s stroke recovery arc is built honestly—halting speech, stubborn steps, rage that has nowhere polite to go—because trauma is not a cinematic montage. It’s a practice. It’s appointments. It’s paperwork. It’s the slow return of a word you needed yesterday. The original Sleeping Beauty hands a kiss to a sleeping girl and calls that love. I lived a different story and wanted to write the one so many of us actually survived.
What Sleeping Fairy is about
Sleeping Fairy is set in 2003–2004 in a Pacific Northwest college town. The early internet hums like a fluorescent light. Privacy is a rumor. A private journal is turned into public spectacle by a boy craving relevance, and that violation triggers the “sleep.” In this retelling, “A MySpace post becomes the spinning wheel.” The “awakening” is not a prince’s mouth; it’s rehab, grit, and community: “The ‘awakening’ isn’t a kiss; it’s rehab.”
Rory—observant, precise, striving for “good” in a house where “good” often means “small”—is the heart of the book. Philip—gentle, capable, a “good boy” who mistakes silence for love—becomes an advocate because he learns that quiet isn’t care. Leah’s arc, as Rory’s mother, is an awakening of her own: love that stops managing, starts listening, and pays the cost of change. Stephen is the father who wants order so much he mistakes discipline for mercy. And standing where a fairy trio used to stand, we meet the women who do real magic: Florence (ICU nurse, protector of dignity), Fawn (speech therapist who treats language as a human right), Mary (physical therapist who believes patience is a muscle). The book names them as magic on purpose.
Formal choices echo the story’s truth: close third-person that stays close to the body; dialogue that deflects until it can’t; humor that lets you breathe without letting you off the hook. The antagonist isn’t a dragon; it’s the machinery that rewards cruelty with attention and trains institutions to value optics over truth. This book refuses optics. It chooses honesty.
The Faeries Tell, in brief
The series is a reimagining of fairy tales without the harmful scaffolding—modernized, trauma-literate, told through a queer lens. We keep the rhythm, the ritual, the image system; we remove the poison. “Happily ever after becomes the daily practice of showing up, apologizing well, forgiving slowly, and choosing one another when it’s boring, humiliating, and real.” The stories are not lessons about queerness; they are lives where queerness is a given. The magic is ordinary care that compounds over time.
Why does this matter? Because forever-after stories shape how we love, and when every “forever” is straight, thin, able-bodied, and tidy, everyone else gets trained to rehearse erasure just to be allowed at the table. Because disabled bodies and recovering minds deserve love stories that don’t use them as metaphors or punish them with martyrdom. Because some of us were outed and told to be grateful for the attention. Because we are still here.
What was broken in the original Sleeping Beauty—and how this version repairs it
- Consent: The canonical kiss is nonconsensual. Desire acts without permission. In Sleeping Fairy, consent is granular and constant. It lives in how people touch, how they ask, how they wait. A late-night line—“Tell me the story again… All of it. Don’t fix it.”—is a consent practice disguised as a request. Telling the truth without sanitizing it is consent too.
- Agency: Classic versions reward passivity; the heroine sleeps until acted upon. Rory is not passive. He fights—first to be himself, then to rehabilitate a body that has changed, then to return to school on his terms. Philip doesn’t rescue; he learns to advocate. Leah doesn’t punish; she revises herself. The work of the book is shared.
- Heteronormativity: The “forever after” typically centers straight coupling. Here, queerness is the setting, not the lesson. It’s not “acceptable” because the characters perform goodness; it’s intrinsic. There is romance, yes, but there is also a broader civilization of care: aunties, nurses, therapists, classmates, all practicing love that is service, not spectacle.
- Ableism: Sleep is treated as aesthetic—glass coffin, perfect stillness. This story does the opposite. Recovery is boring and brilliant. Words come back out of order. Steps wobble. Humor stays. Rage gets named. Bodies are not props; they are sites of work and joy.
- Optics over truth: Fairy-tale kings fix the kingdom with an edict. Institutions do, too. In Sleeping Fairy, the university’s polished statement about “tolerance” misses the point; the work happens in rooms with flickering lights and nurses who know where the good blankets are.
The people you’ll meet (and why I love them)
- Rory begins as the child who learned to make himself small to be safe. He’s meticulous, tender, sometimes funny by accident. He is also ferocious. He learns that “perfection was the original curse.” Watching him choose enoughness over performance is watching someone wake for real.
- Philip starts as the boy fairy tales reward—quiet, reliable, easy to like. His growth is my favorite: he learns that silence isn’t kindness; advocacy is. The good cup he keeps handing across a loud house party becomes the promise he keeps handing across much darker rooms later.
- Leah is not a wicked mother; she is a complicated one who learns. Her arc is the proof that love can change shape without breaking.
- Stephen is the man a certain kind of church gave a script. He isn’t a monster; he’s a mirror. He learns slowly—maybe too slowly—and that, too, is real.
- Violet (Auntie) gives the line that saved me while I was writing and, frankly, while I was remembering: “You don’t need my permission to exist.” Then she adds the policy: “Just don’t hand them the pen and let them write your name for you.”
- Florence, Fawn, and Mary are the fairy godmothers—competence, boundaries, humor. They embody the book’s thesis that “the truest magic is ordinary care multiplied over time.”
- Malcolm is the boy the internet made brave in the wrong way. He isn’t a dragon; he’s a system’s favorite son.
The early-2000s texture (because place is also character)
The book is set when AIM door-opens ticked like permission and a single pixelated glitter border on MySpace felt like a personality. The elevator clicks across from Room B-214. A Legally Blonde flyer curls on a corkboard, and a Discman hiccups when someone bumps the table. A clean cup in a loud kitchen becomes an act of devotion. Those details aren’t nostalgia; they’re honesty. They anchor the body memory of a time when “privacy settings” were largely decorative and “tolerance” was a word adults used when they meant “conditional love.”
Why queer forever-afters matter (and why I relate to these characters)
When you’re outed before you’re ready, the damage is architectural. It rearranges rooms you thought you knew—family, faith, school, even your own body becomes a house you don’t trust. If you’ve survived that, you know recovery is not ideological; it’s practical. It’s a neighbor who shows up with a ride. It’s a therapist who says the right word at the right hour. It’s the friend who knows how to wait outside a bathroom door without asking if you’re okay. For some of us, it’s also relearning speech after a stroke, counting steps out loud, and forgiving a face in the mirror you didn’t ask for. We deserve forever-afters that include that truth and do not punish us for it.
That’s why the book gives Rory lines like “If it’s still there, then so am I,” and lets him say them without an orchestra swelling. That’s why Room B-214 holds space with a pizza box, a pronoun sticker, and a facilitator who can say, with a straight face and a steady hand, “We’re planning a teach-in about not being a jerk. Want in?” That’s why the story allows a whispered, practical intimacy: “Tell me the story again. All of it. Don’t fix it.” It’s consent, care, and love disguised as ordinary conversation.
What you can expect when you read
Expect to laugh a little in the wrong places and then realize they were the right ones. Expect to recognize a nurse before you know her name and to feel safer the minute you do. Expect friendships that feel like scaffolding and mothers who surprise you. Expect to want to underline more than you have highlighter for. Expect to see your own invisible thread.
You’ll also see the book’s thesis enacted in small gestures—Philip handing the good cup in a room where everything is sticky; Leah learning to ask a different question; Violet’s keys on the step between “you can’t” and “come get me.” You’ll watch a community assemble itself like a makeshift ramp at a doorway that should have been accessible all along.
And you’ll reach a last page that refuses the old ceremony. As I say in the note: “Sleeping Fairy ends not with a wedding but with a return: to school, to self, to community.” The book’s ever after is not fireworks; it’s light you can read by.
Five (okay, more than five) lines I keep close
- “I write The Faeries Tell because I grew up hungry for wonder and never saw myself invited to the feast.”
- “This series keeps the spell and changes the terms.”
- “A MySpace post becomes the spinning wheel.”
- “Consent isn’t a speech—it’s the texture of every choice.”
- “The ‘awakening’ isn’t a kiss; it’s rehab.”
- “You don’t need my permission to exist.”
- “Just don’t hand them the pen and let them write your name for you.”
- “Tell me the story again… All of it. Don’t fix it.”
- “The truest magic is ordinary care multiplied over time.”
Those lines aren’t slogans; they’re coordinates. If they resonate, the book is already reaching for you.
If this is your first entry into The Faeries Tell
Start here. You don’t need a map. The series revisits the stories we were handed and offers them back without the parts that taught endurance without agency or love without accountability. If you’ve ever been told your difference disqualifies you from wonder, this is your invitation back to the feast—with new seating, better lighting, and room for the people who actually kept you alive.
I wrote Sleeping Fairy to tilt the mirror toward all of us who were always in the room but cropped out of the frame. It’s a book about the moment a life breaks, and all the honest work that follows when you decide to build again—slower, kinder, truer. If you’re carrying your own filament—loss braided to queerness braided to stubborn hope—I made this story to catch the light on it.
Read Sleeping Fairy. If it finds you where you are, let me know. And if you need to hear it one more time before you go: you don’t need anyone’s permission to exist.