behind sam

It’s been a couple of years, and I don’t exactly remember what it was. Usually, in my other writing, the character comes to me in a dream (or while I’m out walking and let my soul wander) and announces themself somehow. With Sam, I honestly don’t remember. But I do know they originate somewhere deep within me. They’re, in a way, an extension of me—something I know we’ll talk about later.

This is a very personal question for me, as I had recently—before I began writing Sam—come to the conclusion that I am nonbinary myself. It was the end (?) of a very long internal debate about sex, gender and, above all, gender roles and expectations. I never had role models when I was young, never had someone else in whom I could see similarities (or differences), so it was only natural for Sam to be nonbinary. I write stories I would have wanted to read when I was younger—or even today—stories that simply didn’t exist at the time.

Jasper is Sam’s unexpected protector, an Air Force soldier who takes his charge very seriously. Given his difficult background, he takes the events surrounding Sam personally and will risk anything, including his life, to save his charge. They get to know each other gradually across the book’s chapters, and the tragedy of their lives bonds them tightly.

Jasper is a young man with strong convictions and a solid moral compass. He complements Sam in many ways, with Jasper’s strengths rooted in the finest human qualities: loyalty, courage and love, preparing him to make the most difficult decisions.

Sam certainly doesn’t think so. To them, it’s a curse that disrupts their regular teenage life. They don’t begin to see it as a gift until much later—for reasons you’ll have to discover for yourself—but I think that, in the end, they do come to regard it as something precious, despite the enormous personal cost to them and the people they love.

The story also asks what any of us would do with such an ability. Would we be willing to sacrifice something important to us in order to help someone else? And, more broadly, we don’t need supernatural powers to face that question. How much time, comfort, money, security—or even courage—are we willing to give up to do good or help someone in need? In a time marked by war and instability, I think that’s a question worth asking ourselves.

I learned a long time ago that reality can easily trump fiction. Shortly after I published my fourth novel, a pedophile ring far larger than the one I had imagined in the book was uncovered in the UK and internationally. That same year, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded for work very similar to something I had already described in the novel. Experiences like that taught me early on that the world has an uncomfortable habit of catching up with fiction.

Sam proved that lesson all over again. I wrote the first version in 2024, and it quickly became a victim of real-world events. I ended up rewriting the novel twice, with substantial changes to the story, because the world had shifted in ways I hadn’t considered possible—not even in my wildest dreams, as they say.

So yes, my fiction tends to be grounded heavily in reality. It makes extraordinary events feel more plausible and gives readers a world they can recognize themselves in.

Or perhaps the truth is simpler: I just can’t imagine myself creating an entire Middle-earth or Westeros from scratch.

I think that might depend on the reader. Some of them may identify with Sam. For them, I hope they’re someone they can relate to, see themselves reflected in or simply marvel at the fact that stories are being told about people like them. For others, I hope Sam is a story about individual courage and resilience in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

I hope they’ll find it entertaining, heart-wrenching and hopeful. And I hope they’ll shed a tear or two, just like I do when reading parts of the story.

The obvious answer is that this is a YA novel. But when Jasper appeared at the bottom of that elevator and I got to know him, his backstory explained why he is so young. His upbringing in the South, how his family’s religious fanaticism drove him away (quite literally), and how he—and this is sadly a far too common story in real-life America—managed to survive on the streets before he was able to join the armed forces. In my writing, I try to keep things realistic, and in order to describe real-life queer lives, these topics keep coming back. They are culturally relevant, and sadly still a reality for young queers in today’s USA. Wishing it were not like that won’t make it any less real.

What I hadn’t really accounted for was the fact that US politics would so quickly turn sour on queers and run off in directions that forced me to rewrite the second half of the novel not just once, but twice. It’s not the first time in my writing career that reality trumps fiction, but this time I was scared by the speed of the change. It makes me wonder how long it’s going to be before the pendulum stops and starts to swing back.