Back in 2018, I drafted a retelling of Sleeping Beauty that was never really about castles or curses. It was about MySpace. It was about being twenty-one in the early 2000s—when dial-up whined through your bedroom wall, when your whole life could be demolished in a single public post, when “delete” wasn’t an option because screenshots weren’t even required. It’s about what happens when privacy fails, when cruelty metastasizes in a feed, and when someone you love collapses under the weight of it.
That manuscript has sat with me for years, and now, in 2025, I’m finally polishing it for release. The first book in The Faeries Tell series, Sleeping Fairy, should be out later this week—depending on when I can carve out the time to finalize edits between everything else in my life. This is the queer retelling I wish I had at twenty-one: no dragons, no true-love-kisses, but the brutal reality of chosen family, messy recovery, and imperfect love that still counts.
The Logline
When a closeted college student’s journal is posted on MySpace, destroying his life and leading to a near-fatal overdose that leaves him with traumatic brain injury, his secretly-in-love best friend must learn to fight for them both—proving that real love isn’t about rescue, but about choosing each other through the messy, imperfect work of healing.
That’s the backbone of this book. A “curse” not cast at birth but embedded in culture. A “spindle prick” that looks like an overdose after humiliation. A “sleep” that’s really a coma. And “fairy godmothers” who are ICU nurses, speech therapists, and the fierce queer community who show up when biological family can’t.
Why I Wrote It
I wrote Sleeping Fairy because fairy tales often lie. They tell us salvation is a single act: a kiss, a sword, a crown. But for those of us who lived through the early internet—especially queer kids—rescue was never that clean. Coming out wasn’t triumphant; it was terrifying. A journal entry could be weaponized, a rumor could snowball, and being seen could be dangerous.
This book is my counter-spell: a story where the magic is advocacy, the curse is silence, and the happily-ever-after isn’t perfection but partnership.
A Sneak Peek at Chapter One
Note: This is still in editing, but I want to share the opening with you—the moment where the curse first begins to whisper.
Chapter 1
BORN DIFFERENT
Brennan kitchen, 1990. Rory, 8.
The dishwasher knocks like it’s swallowing marbles, and the TV hums from the living room until Stephen stabs the remote and says the news is “too loud while we eat.” Paul Harvey keeps talking from the little radio on the counter anyway, his voice riding the rattle of the dry cycle. Rory sits up straight because straight seems safer. He counts peas in threes, then fours, then aligns his knife with the blue stripe on the placemat so the line looks like a lane he can stay inside.
Leah has already pushed the mushrooms to the edge of his plate the way she always does, small mercy disguised as absentmindedness. “How was music today?” she asks, topping off everyone’s water like the answer is as simple as thirst. Rory brightens, then checks himself, then brightens anyway. “We got to pick a song, and Mrs. Lin said next week we can bring one from home,” he says, and when the words turn into a shoulder shimmy without his permission, Leah’s smile appears—the quick one she saves for when he looks most like himself.
Stephen sets his fork down in a quiet that says more than noise. “Let’s sit still at the table, okay?” His eyes don’t lift from the plate. “No one wants a jittery boy.”
Rory locks his hands around his napkin. “Sorry.” He keeps his voice small, which is not the same as quiet, but it counts here. The radio says, “…and now you know the rest of the story,” and Stephen clicks it off too so there’s only chewing and the dishwasher stumbling over its own rhythm.
“I put the Little League sign-up on the fridge,” Stephen says to the table. “Coach says they’re starting earlier this year. Good program. Teaches focus.” He takes a drink and watches the glass the way other men watch sunsets.
Leah glances toward the fridge where a magnet holds up a paper with a baseball clip art man mid-swing. “We can see how it fits with piano,” she says, voice almost light. “Maybe both?”
Stephen answers like he’s correcting math. “One thing at a time.” He looks at Rory now. “You’ll like it. Teamwork. Discipline.”
Rory tries the words on his tongue and they taste like the pea skins he has to swallow one by one. “Do they have… I mean, is there a position where you just, um, watch?” He means scorekeeper. He means bench. He means safe.
Stephen’s mouth curves, not a smile. “You’ll play.” He spears a mushroom as if it were an argument.
Leah’s foot nudges Rory’s ankle under the table, small touch that says keep your face calm. “You don’t have to finish the peas,” she starts, and Stephen’s fork ticks the plate and leaves a faint line, and the line stays when he lifts it. Leah resets. “You can be done after—”
“All of it,” Stephen says. “We don’t waste.”
He presses his knees together and reaches for his water glass. He makes a chart in his head—ten peas left, two at a time, five turns—and pretends each tally mark is a green marble he gets to put away. He doesn’t look toward the living room where a canned audience laughs at something easy. He looks at Leah’s hands instead, the way her ring turns where she twists it, the way her thumb keeps worrying the knuckle like she’s smoothing a wrinkle no one else can see.
“So what song are you bringing?” she asks, voice cheer now, steady and brave. “We should pick one.”
He wants to say the one with big drums that makes him dance on his bed, the one from the movie musical on the VHS that he rewinds until the tape hiccups. He says, “Something from choir,” and cuts a pea, which is stupid, but it lets him cut instead of swallow. “Mrs. Lin says we should pick something that sounds like us.”
“We can ask Mrs. Lin about it after dinner,” Leah says, keeping it light.
Stephen stands to refill his own glass, though the pitcher sits next to Leah. “Pick something solid,” he says. “Nothing silly.” He puts the glass back down the way he puts down heavy ideas, and the water rings find each other on the wood.
After dinner, Rory makes himself a narrow thing moving through the kitchen, rinsing plates, stacking cups, trying to help before anyone decides he’s in the way. He hums the drum line under his breath like a secret string, and when he forgets and lets his shoulder catch the beat, Stephen’s hand lands on the back of his neck, firm. It is not unkind. It is not kind. “Still,” Stephen says. “No shimmying around the house.”
Rory becomes a statue of a boy doing chores. Leah dries with a towel that leaves faint threads behind and says, easy as a weather report, “We should find your cleats from last year,” though he did not play last year. “Maybe they fit.” He nods. He always nods. He saves the words for later when everyone else is tired and he can lay them out and see what they are.
Saturday — city park.
The park smells like cut grass and sticky oranges sweating in a cooler. Someone’s golden retriever is off leash because rules bend for friendly dogs, and it steals a foul ball and runs a victory loop while kids laugh until the adults pretend they don’t. Rory laughs too and forgets himself in it, and then Stephen’s look finds him from the bleachers and the laugh trips over its feet.
The helmet swallows his ears so sound becomes a tunnel where instructions echo. The bat shocks his palms so he tells himself the sting means he’s done something right. The coach says, “Next,” bouncing on the balls of his feet, and the boy ahead of him hits a line drive that makes the metal fence cough. Fathers call their sons by name like those names have a right to the air.
Stephen stands with a small gang of men who all wear the same stance like a uniform—feet apart, arms crossed, faces set to serious. When Rory turns to look, Stephen cuts a single line across the air with two fingers—face forward. Rory faces forward.
“Square up,” Stephen calls when it’s Rory’s turn, voice not loud but shaped to carry. “Don’t dance around the plate.” It’s the same voice he uses when he says grace before dinner and when he says “we’re done talking about it.”
Rory plants his feet the way the other boys do, but his knees don’t like to lock and his body leaks music even when the world is quiet. He tries to make everything small—breath, shoulders, hope—so nothing shakes loose and draws a stare. The pitch comes. He swings late, like he always does, because the ball shows up a second after the fear leaves. Strike.
The second pitch comes in friendlier, and he gets a piece of it, but the bat buzzes his hands and the ball dies at his feet like it changed its mind. Someone giggles near first base and then tries to swallow it. The coach says, “Good contact,” because coaches know one of their jobs is to keep small boys from quitting before they’ve even started.
He starts to say, “That’s it,” then resets. “Hands quieter,” Stephen says, which is the whole house in two words. “Watch the ball.”
He breathes once through his nose and resets his stance. He lifts the bat and thinks about making each part of himself a still photograph. He watches the ball until his eyes water. He swings on time this time and misses for clean, perfect nothing. Strike three is gentle in its certainty. He stands there under a hat that wants to be a blindfold and hears nothing for a second and then everything. The golden retriever drops the ball at someone’s feet and thumps its tail against the fence.
“Good try,” the coach says, the way adults say it when the try is not the point. “Hustle it back.” Rory hands over the bat and jogs to the end of the line like he knows where the end is. He doesn’t see Stephen’s face yet; he saves it for later when he can take it in private.
On the bleachers, Leah sits with the other mothers and peels an orange into perfect crescents, sticky under her nails. “You did fine,” she says when he shuffles up for water, voice quiet and quick so it fits between other people’s sentences. “We can practice in the yard. Or not. You’re okay either way.”
He nods, gives the picture‑day smile, and lets it sit. “It’s just tryouts.” He makes a joke out of the word try, says it like it’s spelled t-r-i-e because spelling is a place he wins. A boy nearby wears a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt with Michelangelo throwing a pizza like a Frisbee, and Rory wonders what it feels like to belong to a team that doesn’t ask you to shrink first.
Stephen appears, hand on Rory’s shoulder that means both possession and guidance. “We’ll work on your stance,” he says, as if working is love. “You’re fine. You just need to focus.” He looks at Leah and nods once, a whole conversation he’ll have later pressed into a single gesture.
At home that evening, he stands in the backyard while Stephen draws boxes in the dirt with the end of a rake—one for feet, one for the plate, one for some future where Rory gets it right. “Head still,” Stephen says. “Elbows down.” Each cue knocks into the last one like grocery carts bumping in a narrow aisle. Rory does what he’s told until the light leaves and the porch bulb makes moths slam into glass like they’re trying to get back inside their own bodies.
When he’s finally sent inside, Leah is rinsing a colander that doesn’t need rinsing. She touches the back of his head like you’d touch a doorjamb you’ve walked through for years. “Can you pick a song for Mrs. Lin before bed?” she asks, soft, like protection can sound like an errand.
He says yes because he always does. He will pick something solid. He will say it is his favorite. He will stand very still while he says it so the liking looks right.
Sunday — fellowship wing.
The church foyer smells like coffee and old carpet and the perfume that tries to hide both. Miss Elaine’s Sunday school room is bright with cutout lambs and careful smiles. There’s a feltboard on one wall where everyone sticks Noah’s animals in twos like that’s how the world always works. A boom box sits on the counter with a cassette of Adventures in Odyssey stacked nearby in a cracked case with someone’s initials in Sharpie.
They start with a song about joy that bounces more than it sings, and Rory keeps his hands folded because the movement in the room is allowed movement—clapping on two and four, stomps that match—and he doesn’t trust himself not to add extra where it wasn’t invited. Miss Elaine says, “Good energy, friends,” in the way of adults who like children best when the rules of liking are posted on the wall.
During craft, she passes out crayons and a photocopied ark where pairs hold still under a rainbow that always prints too light. The glue smells like almonds and someone eats a dab of it and no one dies. Glitter is banned because it “gets everywhere,” which Rory knows is the real reason adults hate anything—they can’t control where it lands.
When it’s time for questions, Rory raises his hand because that’s what you do with questions you’re not sure are allowed. Miss Elaine calls on him with the relief of a teacher who planned perfectly for every question except the kind students bring from home. He asks without performing it, voice plain: “If boys love boys, can they still sit together in heaven?”
A couple of kids snort in a way that could be laughter or air leaving their noses too fast. A boy near the crayon bin whispers, “My cousin says they can’t,” then bends over his paper. Miss Elaine doesn’t look at them. She smiles her careful, professional smile, the one trained to fold hard things into gentle shapes. “That’s a thoughtful one,” she says. “We’ll talk about love and God’s plan in youth group when you’re older. Today we’re learning about Noah, so let’s keep our focus there.” She puts a brown crayon in his hand like she’s handing him a rope back to the lesson. “Can you make Mr. and Mrs. Giraffe extra tall for me?”
He blinks once, slow; bodies that agree don’t get corrected as much. He draws two long rectangles for legs and a box for a body and then a thinner box for a neck because boxes feel safer than curves. He gives the girl giraffe eyelashes because that’s how the books at home do it, and then he erases the lashes with the corner of his sleeve because he can feel Stephen in the future looking at that page and sighing through his nose.
At snack time, Miss Elaine lowers her voice to a private channel and says, “Some thoughts are private prayers, not class questions.” She means to save him. He can hear the meaning trying its best to carry both of them across a gap with no bridge. He says, “Okay,” and dips a sugar cookie in lemonade because the texture is better that way even if it is against the rules.
After church, Stephen shakes the pastor’s hand like he’s signing a contract. Leah hugs people she doesn’t like because she knows which hugs make everything look normal. In the car, Stephen says nothing about the question because silence is an instrument too, and Rory knows better than to play along.
That night he lies in bed under a ceiling with one long crack that runs from the light fixture to the wall like a road someone forgot to finish. He traces it with his finger in the air and gives it a destination—school, a friend’s house, a place where he can bring a song and not fold it in half first. The house hums familiar. In the hall, the corded wall phone hangs with its long, twisted coil brushing the baseboard. Down the hall, a toilet runs and stops. The sound is a clock that doesn’t tell time so much as keep you company while you can’t sleep.
He folds his hands because that’s how they taught him prayers work and whispers fast before the second thought shows up and argues him out of it. “Fix it,” he says into the quiet, then adds the part that feels like the truth and the betrayal in the same breath. “Whatever’s wrong—take it out.” He waits for the room to change temperature, for the crack to close, for the air to say yes. Nothing moves. He slides his hands under the pillow and holds still, watching the crack not move.
That’s the opening chapter: no spinning wheels, no curses from wicked witches. Just a boy, a roommate, a journal, and a ceiling that feels like it’s listening.
What Comes Next
In the first act of Sleeping Fairy, Rory will come out to the wrong person, trust the wrong roommate, and discover that the internet is less forgiving than any curse in a fairy tale. His words will be stolen, posted, mocked, and turned into a viral cruelty that earns him the nickname “The Sleeping Fairy.” By his 21st birthday, he will drink too much, mix the wrong pills, and collapse into a coma. That’s the “spindle prick” of this retelling—not magic, just the tragic math of shame and desperation.
But if this were just a tragedy, I wouldn’t have written it. What follows is what matters: the vigil of a boy who always loved him but never said so, the awakening of a mother who finally sees her son, the chosen family who stitch together dignity where blood failed, and the brutal, beautiful process of recovery that doesn’t erase scars but turns them into something livable.
Finalizing the Release
I wrote Sleeping Fairy back in 2019, but I wasn’t ready to share it. Editing has been slow because the story is personal, and I’ve wanted to get every rhythm right—the humor that lands like armor, the silences that feel like punishment, the recovery scenes that honor the reality of TBI survivors.
Now it’s almost ready. I plan to release it later this week—depending on when I can find the time between life, work, and the endless chaos of the world. It will be available on Amazon, free with Kindle Unlimited, and like all my books, free for the first five days of launch.
Why This Story Matters
Because fairy tales should belong to everyone. Because queer kids deserve to see their pain turned into something that doesn’t just end in tragedy. Because healing is never neat, but it is possible.
Sleeping Fairy is my love letter to resilience, to chosen family, to the people who sit at your bedside when you can’t sit up yourself. It’s also a warning: that the curses we face aren’t cast by sorceresses but by systems, silence, and the cruel ease with which private words can be made public.
And maybe most of all, it’s a reminder that love isn’t about waiting for rescue. It’s about choosing each other, every messy day.
✨ Sleeping Fairy will be out this week (if I can wrangle my schedule). Stay tuned for the official release announcement, and thank you—as always—for supporting indie authors. If this story speaks to you, please read, share, and leave a review. That’s the magic that keeps these books alive.