A Bee's-Eye View from the Clouds

This Is Not a Drill: When the Soft Launch Goes Nuclear

📘 The Soft Launch | 🖇️ Amazon Author Page

Let’s get one thing clear: I don’t write fairy tales. I write survival stories dressed up like genre fiction. Horror in heels. Romance in red flags. Comedy that comes with trauma triggers and a Google Doc of therapy notes.

Because real love doesn’t arrive with a happy ending. It arrives with baggage, with damage, with someone standing at your door saying, “I know what broke you, and I’m still here.”

The Soft Launch is a queer romantic comedy. But it’s also a slow-burn identity crisis, a sexy sabotage mission, and a story about what happens when you curate your whole life for public consumption—then fall for the one man who sees what’s underneath.

“You’re so busy performing honesty that I can’t tell what’s real.”

The Premise:
Meet Rowan Beckett. Food critic. Brand consultant. Professional fake boyfriend on weekends. He lives by one rule: curate, don’t connect. But when his latest soft launch—aka public introduction of a “serious” boyfriend—blows up online, Rowan’s façade starts to crack.

Enter Everett Chase, CEO of a rising culinary empire and a man with a smile like a warning label. He’s guarded, ambitious, and completely off-limits… because Rowan was supposed to ruin him. Not date him.

“You were never part of the plan. And now you’re the only thing in it.”

Why I Wrote It:
I’ve always loved romantic comedies, but most of them lie. They tell us love fixes us. That it arrives clean, like a package at your door—delivered on time, undamaged, and exactly what you ordered.

But in real life? Love is a return-to-sender nightmare. It’s late. It’s wrong. It’s the one thing you didn’t think you needed, arriving just when you’re about to move. The Soft Launch was born from that space—where reinvention meets resistance, where the truth isn’t sexy but it might be necessary.

Because underneath the banter, the fake dating, the corporate backstabbing, this is a story about trauma—how it shapes the lives we perform and the lives we hide.

“Every version of me was a costume. Even the honest ones.”

The Characters:

  • Rowan Beckett: A food critic who doesn’t eat carbs in public. Witty, caustic, allergic to vulnerability. Think: Miranda Priestly with a trauma bond.
  • Everett Chase: The clean-cut CEO with a body made for sin and a past he doesn’t discuss. He’s not cold—he’s temperature controlled.
  • Darla: Rowan’s best friend and business partner. The only person who knows the real story behind every soft launch he’s ever staged.
  • Public Image: The third main character, honestly. Because in this book, perception is everything—and love is the risk of being seen.

“If I wanted to be known, I wouldn’t be this curated.”

The Metaphor:
The soft launch isn’t just an Instagram trend. It’s a survival tactic. It’s how we test the waters of intimacy without drowning. It’s how we say: “Here’s a glimpse of something real—please don’t ruin it.”

In this book, the soft launch becomes a metaphor for every guarded attempt at connection. Every time you hint at who you are before showing it. Every time you say “I’m fine” when you mean “please stay.”

Because Rowan doesn’t just fear love—he fears recognition. And Everett? He’s the one man who refuses to look away.

“You wanted to stay anonymous. I wanted to disappear. Maybe that’s what we saw in each other.”

Why It Matters:
I write across genres—memoir, romance, horror, satire—but they’re all built from the same raw material: trauma. My stories don’t revolve around queerness as a plot point. They assume it. Because queerness is not the subject. It’s the architecture. The paint on the walls. The resistance baked into the drywall.

I don’t want to tell stories about queer pain. I want to tell stories where queerness just is, and the story goes on anyway—toward healing, toward mess, toward hope that isn’t wrapped in a bow.

The Soft Launch is free on Kindle Unlimited, and if you’re the kind of reader who wants wit with wounds, sex with sabotage, and feelings that arrive uninvited but never unearned—this book is for you.

“You soft-launched your heart. I went full release.”

Final Thought:
Not every love story is loud. Some arrive in the quiet scroll, the accidental DM, the moment you stop filtering your joy. This one? It goes viral—and not for the reasons you think.

🖇️ The Soft Launch
🖇️ Amazon Author Page

Free to read now on Kindle Unlimited.

Choose your chaos. Choose your heartbreak. Choose the soft launch that wasn’t supposed to stick.