hadawayink

So instead? I'm gonna show off some art I made for my characters. Apologies that it's not great, I'm only a mediocre artist, but at least a human made it. I promise my writing is better lol

Each of my six leads is represented by a color of the rainbow, cuz this be the queerest shit imaginable. From left to right / top to bottom, the illustration features: Morrigan Roake, Tanner Ward, Wyatt Vollendroff, Ben Warrender, Kat Novacek, and River Dufresne.

Think they're cuties? Wanna learn more? Then try...

Devil On My Shoulder

—queer tales from the garden state—

And honestly? That fact is part of what created this book. There's lots of things I was exploring about my world (and within myself) during this process, but one of the essential questions I asked myself was what it might have looked like if I'd found my place a little earlier than I did.

And Wyatt's story isn't the same as mine. No way. But his passages about falling in love with a place he'd never thought twice about? Those are way me-inspired.

I think many Jerseyans would be irritated by my mission to spread the good word, though. One of my favorite things about this place is that we're a bunch of godsdamn misanthropes. I'll see posts about people thinking about moving to NJ and natives? They usually respond some smartass version of "we're full, move on." And people take this as "well it's just Jersey assholes being assholes, surprise surprise" when in reality, I think it's like that first semester of college where profs make everything harder than it needs to be to weed out the people who can't hack it.

Like sure, you can come, I guess, but don't be stupid about it. Cuz Jersey (mostly talking about Central here cuz that's where the majority of my experiences have been, but all of it imo) is this unique, beautiful place and stupid dickheads don't deserve it. That's the real message. Cuz while I can't speak for everyone, (generalizations always miss some folx) NJ is full of people who tell you what they mean. Who, instead of throwing faux-politeness at everyone, blow you off until you prove your competency — at which point they're ride or die, loyal as all hell companions.

We are not a friendly people. Not by default. But façades of niceties aren't my style anyway. What is my style? A state where more than a quarter of it is very haunted woodlands. A place where the produce kicks ass, that produces art and music like nobody's business, that DOES MAKE BETTER BAGELS AND PIZZA THAN NEW YORK FITE MEEEEE.

This place? It's a hidden gem. It really is.

Now, if this post made you want to move here? My bad. I guarantee you, we're full. Move on.

But I've got a book for you to read about it.

Devil On My Shoulder

—queer tales from the garden state—

That said, I'm not going to spend this post talking about US income inequality or our entire government being bought and paid for or mass-vanishing of local businesses that get replaced by mega-corporations or paying more for shittier products. It's all true to an embarrassing degree, and plenty of people are talking about it.

Instead, I'm going to talk about passion.

From the time you're little, adults come at you with questions about what you'd like to be when you grow up. And the little ones give the A+ answers. Princess. Pirate. Dinosaur. And when you're tiny, adults love those answers. They love that you're just excited about something, even if it's something fantastical. But if you keep giving those kinds of responses as you get older, people stop thinking it's cute. "That's not a real job though." Which is usually news to the elementary kid it gets hurled at.

Then you get a little older and get the same questions, and you give more doable answers. Astronaut. Pro Athlete. Musician. Writer, perhaps, nudge nudge? And despite those being REAL jobs, you get even less positive responses most of the time. "Well, you better have a backup plan." "That's not realistic." "Only 1 in a million get to do that." Maybe some cool message about how people of your sex, gender, race, creed, or ability don't get to do that job. Or? Or just a comment how you better pick something else or end up destitute.

And eventually, you either face the music and change your "dream" to something practical, or you go to into what you love with constant mockery about how long it's taking to reach your goal, or how unlikely it is for your plan to pan out at all, or how little money you'll make in that path.

As a writer that was dumb enough to get an MFA about it, I get a lot of comments about this, and I'm fairly certain that usually, it has nothing to do with my craft, method, or personality. The issue is that there's no guarantee of financial return. Same with most of the arts. People who fumbled down the greenest path can't imagine another way.

I did not pick the greenest path, but I prefer my paint, blood, sweat, tear, and text splattered one. Cuz it's the one I forged for no reason other than the love of a craft.

So I'm releasing this book free of charge. Yes, there'll be paid Patreon exclusives like deleted scenes, but the book itself? Everyone gets to have it so long as they want something queer as fuck.

No shade at all to people who make money off their art. That's fucking awesome, and we all deserve to afford to live off of whatever vocation we were put on this earth to pursue (not the one we pick because we need the cash, but the one we live because it's the beat of our hearts).

But I want my work out there now. I want queer kids (and millennials that remember being kids in the era I'm writing about) to find it now, even if they're dead broke.

Do you have a passion that nets you $0.00? Are people weird about it? Fuckin' ignore them and GO AT IT with your whole damn chest. I wrote this book for me, and I really couldn't be happier about that fact. I hope people find it that find themselves in it, because I do think I wrote a story worth sharing. But if it's just a few? Alright. I still loved every second of it.

Be one of those few.

Start your journey today.

Devil On My Shoulder

—queer tales from the garden state—

♒︎ Day 6: Tanner Ward ♒︎

Birthday: February 7, 1989

Aquarius - Fixed Air

Unflappable as a cool, windless night, Aquarius is incredibly analytical. These intellectual, unconventional people are open-minded humanitarians that don't stress over societal expectations. Ranging from friendly to aloof, Aquarius is unashamed to be different.

Tan's Giving Aquarius When...

- he X-rays you free of charge

- he meets you where you're at

- he lets things get weird with a smile on his face

- he analyzes his emotions instead of feeling them

- he'd rather do what's proven to work than try something new

- he takes space instead of asking for it

Like what you see? Check out...

Devil On My Shoulder

—queer tales from the garden state—

♑︎ Day 5: Morrigan Roake ♑︎

Birthday: January 15, 1990

Capricorn - Cardinal Earth

Reliable as ground beneath your feet, Capricorn is a tenacious sign known for its responsibility and discipline. Despite their reserved nature, Capricorn has ambitious goals and is patient enough to wait for carefully laid plans to come to fruition.

Morr's Giving Cap When...

- she's so fastidious that she even works on homework at group hangs

- she intervenes right before things get out of hand

- she lets things happen in their own time

- she forgets to be nice when she corrects people

- she spends too long waiting for the opportune moment

- she has incredibly high expectations for herself and others

Like what you see? Check out...

Devil On My Shoulder

—queer tales from the garden state—

♈︎ Day 4: Kat Novacek ♈︎

Birthday: March 24, 1991

Aries - Cardinal Fire

As quick to ignite as a match struck over a bundle of kindling, Aries has the courage to go out on a limb when others might balk under the pressure. With the confidence to get things started and the passion to impulsively chase them down, these bold people are direct, energetic, and competitive.

Kat's Giving Aries When...

- she instigates a good time, all the time

- she puts her all into everything, even when half-effort would do just fine

- she has energy so hypnotic it's like a dare to keep up

- she refuses to back down, sometimes even once she knows she's wrong

- she's brutally honest about everything except the deep stuff

- she whips herself (and others) into frenzies with her passion

Like what you see? Check out...

Devil On My Shoulder

—queer tales from the garden state—

♓︎ Day 3: River Dufresne ♓︎

Birthday: March 2, 1991

Pisces - Mutable Water

Like the gentle lap of waves against the coastline, Pisces is almost psychically sensitive to emotional undertones. Unwaveringly empathetic and compassionate, these creative people are imbued with a sense of imagination like no other, which means they're known to have their heads up in the clouds.

Riv's Giving Pisces When...

- they notice the undercurrent of any room

- they dreamily stare off into the middle distance with all the charm of a sunning sea otter

- they bring the absolute best out of others

- they feel the pain of their loved ones with terrifying clarity

- they lose themself in trying to be there for everyone else

- they avoid conflict to a compulsive degree

Like what you see? Check out...

Devil On My Shoulder

—queer tales from the garden state—

♐︎ Day 2: Wyatt Vollendroff ♐︎

Birthday: December 11, 1990

Sagittarius - Mutable Fire

Restless as a rampaging inferno, Sagittarius is an independent, freedom-craving sign. Always ready for the next adventure, these honest people are most well-known for their curiosity and charming sense of humor, but also possess penchants for both optimism and impatience.

Wy's Giving Sag When...

- he breaks the rules to chase adventure

- they care about people with their whole chest

- he tells it like it is even when it's hard

- they try to rush paint into drying

- he literally moves across the country to flee his problems

- they make light of a serious situation out of anxiety, coming off as dismissive

Like what you see? Check out...

Devil On My Shoulder

—queer tales from the garden state—

♏︎ Day 1: Ben Warrender ♏︎

Birthday: November 9, 1989

Scorpio - Fixed Water

Private and mysterious like the barely-touched waters of the deepest ocean, Scorpio is known for emotional depth hidden beneath a protective outer shell. Refined intuition and perception are used in concordance with fierce determination and loyalty to create an intense, razor-sharp straight-shooter.

Benji's Giving Scorpio When...

- he decides he wants something and seizes it by any means necessary

- he protects his friends to the very goddamn end

- he reads those around him with unnerving ease before using the findings to his sometimes-manipulative advantage

- he pretends he's hard only to turtle intensely once he realizes you're starting to figure out he's actually pretty soft

- he holds the truth close to the chest even when it's no longer an asset

- he pokes the bear just to see how far he can push it

Like what you see? Check out...

Devil On My Shoulder

—queer tales from the garden state—

Looking back, I know that a large part of it is being a Libra — I found that most readings characterized me as a vain social butterfly, and since I'm an awkward little bean, I figured that meant all of it was bullshit. I now realize that I'm more of the justice-obsessed, indecisive, can-find-beauty-anywhere brand of Libra? But enough about me.

Creating the characters for this work was a labor of love that had a lot of steps. I was still characterizing them most of the way through my first draft, knowing that I'm an obsessive editor and would be able to iron out the continuity stuff later. I was eventually deciding their birthdays, and I realized how much fun it would be to build them with their zodiac deeply in mind. And so once their birthdays were decided, if I as an author had a hard time deciding what the character might do in a situation, I harkened back to their astrological sign to help me make decisions. The characters were already so built by then that I found their signs blended kinda perfectly with the intentions I already had for them. I didn't have to change a thing — only had to notice the patterns I'd already created more concretely.

So in honor of that, I'm gonna spend the next two weeks doing an in-depth dive on each of the six queerbabies' astrological reads and how it shows in their narratives.

This week we'll talk about Ben the Scorpio, Wyatt the Sagittarius, and River the Pisces. Next it'll be Kat the Aries, Morrigan the Capricorn, and Tanner the Aquarius. I'll talk a bit about what's awesome about their signs! Aaaand about the less awesome parts too.

And in the meantime? Check out:

Devil On My Shoulder

—queer tales from the garden state—

That said? I've never been able to get on board with writing anything that's JUST romance. And younger me turned that into genre fiction. Sure, it's a love story, but there's elves. Aliens. Ghosts. Whatever. And don't get me wrong, I love genre fiction. The idea that real literature only exists in classic settings is ridiculous, and I'm not trying to weasel my way into the English Canon anyway.

But this time, I didn't go the supernatural route with the same gusto a younger version of me would have. Cuz the thing about the supernatural is that it only continues to count as that so long as we haven't discovered proof that it's real.

Cryptids seemed like a perfect way to bridge the gap between contemporary fiction and fantasy — to make it so the reader doesn't necessarily know what's real and what isn't.

So yes. Part of my book is two trans boys falling for each other, and the drama that ensues throughout the rest of that school year. But it's also about the unexplainable. Situations you walk out of going "I don't know what the fuck just happened, actually."

Because certainty, even about something frightening, is comforting. The unknown, however? Most people's worst nightmare.

So come explore the woods (and hearts) nestled in the queerbabies' mid-2000's world, where things aren't always as they seem.

Devil On My Shoulder

—queer tales from the garden state—

And one of the things I just didn't have it in me to include is a single Christian character that isn't wildly tertiary in importance. I'm not going to give paragraphs of not-all-Christians here, cuz just like not-all-men and not-all-cops and all the rest, it's trying to make allowances for the people who suck by saying some of their peers don't suck. If anything, that's even more reason why the ones that do suck could maybe ... quit it?

But the constant pushing of Christian ideals is rather fucking tedious for an ex-Protestant-turned-practitioner-of-witchcraft and it felt really good to just revise them out of existence a bit on this one.

The queerbabies (the group of six queer kids this story follows) contains two atheists, two agnostics, and two neo-pagans, where religion only plays a major part in one of their lives — cuz in my humble opinion, more stories need a ✨ sapphic trans witch ✨. Even the trans-and-homophobic rhetoric from antagonists is not so much religiously motivated as socially — since I would argue that many Christians, too, are more motivated by judgment and fear than the words in their holy text.

Yes, there are some books where Christian queers exist in healthy spaces. This is not that book.

What can I say? Guess I like my folklore with leathery wings and cloven hooves.

Devil On My Shoulder

—queer tales from the garden state—

Maybe it's silly to actually post this after tumblr sent me the notification, but I'm excited to have people find my work. 100 likes feels like a lot when I wasn't even on social media before May 2026, so genuine thanks to people who are finding my ridiculous lil micro-essays, and double thanks if you then went and found my serial pub!

Devil On My Shoulder

—queer tales from the garden state—

Let's move past the ridiculous gatekeeping that's so pervasive in this industry for a second and to the actual core belief.

To imply the problems teens face aren't serious.

To posit that writing about those problems (and the fun they have in between) isn't humbling and exciting and intense and fun and moving.

Perhaps people who say things like that don't remember being a teenager? Or they had a very boring, dramaless experience.

That was not mine. Nor most of the people I know who have told me about their high school years. Interpersonal relationships are a minefield when your body's being soaked in all sorts of hormones, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Teenagers deal with adult problems, but without the benefit of adult brains. They're undervalued and untrusted by authority figures, constantly being forced into boxes that will be awful convenient for their future contribution to the work force.

None of this is to say I have no interest in adult writing. I've got some adult WIPs that I might get back to eventually. But writing YA, just like my panness and transness and witchiness and all the rest of it, isn't a phase.

I love diving deep into what happens when you shove the most emotionally volatile age group into a brick box, armed with preconceived notions of normalcy and under-construction empathy centers, and tell them all to just get along.

Cuz ya know what? A lot of the time, they don't just get along.

And the aftermath of it? Can range from intriguing to horrifying.

Devil On My Shoulder

—queer tales from the garden state—

But if you're just here to hear about pets, that's alright too.

Ben Warrender: Three dogs live at Mom's house and one lives at Dad's house.

Rosie - Australian Cattle Dog puppy with majority blue coloration other than red socks and one red ear. She's got that classic heeler hyperactivity with a dose of empath and a dash of pure devilry. She's the only pet that's actually owned by Ben.

Lugg - Enormous mix containing St Bernard & Mastiff. Slaps you for ignoring him too long, contains enough drool to fill the oceans twice, and gets sad whenever Ben's sister Olivia is out of the house.

Major Asswipe - An old Bassethound that literally only cares about food and Ben's brother Luka. Otherwise he is only howls of protestation and most spiteful glares.

Sarge - Unfriendly black German Shepherd that Ben can't admit he's a little afraid of thanks to getting bit one too many times as a kid. Only nice to Ben's dad and his brother David.

Wyatt Vollendroff: Wyatt has two guinea pigs, and his parents (who he does not live with) have a dog.

Hel - Black roan piggie number one, very sweet and cuddly. Likes everyone, but more calm around feminine presences than masculine presences overall.

Sekhmet - Other black roan, stand-offish grudge-holder. Can have moments of docility, but not usually around strangers.

Meatball - Chubster chocolate lab who is very gaseous. He's prone to long naps and not emotionally needy, probably because he has an emotional support duck toy named Noodle.

River Dufresne: A dog and a cat live at Dad's house.

Asha - A red Golden Retriever intelligent enough to escort people around the property, bring simple items like towels and blankets without being asked, and much more. Gets so excited about playing fetch that you can't say the word "ball" near her without her freaking the fuck out. She hates the car.

Sitka - A ragdoll cat who frequently jumps on people's shoulders. Is an overall friendly cat, but can kinda tell who doesn't like cats and bothers them seemingly for pleasure. Has been spotted lying on top of Asha but stalks off if caught as if embarrassed.

Kat Novacek: She has nine fish.

Cheech & Chong - Guppies that have lower than average fish intelligence. Seemingly unsure where they are at all times.

Bleep, Bloop, Blep, Blip, Blop, & Moist Greg - Despite being nearly identical neon tetras, Kat can genuinely tell them all apart. Especially Moist Greg. Never trust Moist Greg.

Sir Suckington - Adoptive sucker fish mother of all the other fish. She's the glue that holds the whole tank together.

Morrigan Roake: She has one tarantula.

Ymir - A very friendly Brazilian Black that all of Morrigan's friends are terrified to meet (except Wyatt). She startles and hides when approached by loud people, which is frankly similar to her mother. Morrigan tries not to handle her often, afraid of a fall (which would likely be fatal). Fantastic poetry workshop partner.

Tanner Ward: He has one cat.

Insert Name Here - "Name" for short. Tanner has no idea what breed of cat he is, and when asked he says, "I dunno, black?" He's got white socks on his front feet and is incredibly skittish. Most the group doesn't know he even has a cat, because he usually hides under Tanner's bed.

Wanna see more of the queerbabies and their various pets? Try...

Devil On My Shoulder

—queer tales from the garden state—

I am so SO sick of fat shaming. I'm sick of body shaming in general. People are shaped the way they're shaped. It's nobody's business other than the literal human living in the body. And so? I didn't just make one lead be fat. BOTH my main characters are thick. One more than the other. Cuz seriously, can we stop behaving like fat is grotesque? Like being a fat person decreases your overall value to society? It's so godsdamn damaging to not just fat people, but everyone the hell else that feels they must keep up with societal standards that will never let up. You will NOT get skinny enough. And the second you do? It'll be comments about how you have an eating disorder or look sick. It's a game you CAN'T win.

So I've decided to stop playing.

Of the six queerbabies featured in my story, half of them are on the fatter end of the spectrum (without regularly being described as ugly, pathetic, or used as comic relief). Cuz we just have to stop this. Be skinny. Be fat. Be somewhere in the middle. It just does. not. matter.

The constant ache for thinness within us isn't about health, that I can assure you. Because thin people can be unhealthy. And fat people can be healthy. It's all aesthetics.

So just be you. And come meet the queerbabies, where every size, sexuality, gender, race, and creed of human is welcome.

Devil On My Shoulder

—queer tales from the garden state—