Notes from the research and writing of Where All Your Attempts Cease — the sources, the surprises, and what four books of queer fiction taught me about writing one without the words for it.
July 25, 2026
The Whitman Massacre in 1847 is the moment when specific peoples with strategies and agency become the "Indian problem." The epilogue sits in that exact hinge moment—the last day before the middle ground becomes impossible to write.
Read the post →July 22, 2026
Every book I've written so far has lived in a world that already had a name for what my characters were. That's easy to take for granted until you try to write a story set before the name existed at all.
Read the post →July 22, 2026
Where All Your Attempts Cease follows a wagon train leaving St. Louis for Portland in the 1840s, and like everything I write, it comes back to one question: the distance between who we are and who we're becoming, and what closes that gap. Three things from the research reshaped the book more than anything else.
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