Author’s Notes

These novels arise from a fundamental conviction: queer women deserve the full imaginative, emotional, and moral range afforded to any literary protagonist. Their lives, relationships, desires, and ambitions warrant sustained narrative attention. Across four novels and their accompanying short stories, I have sought to create protagonists whose queerness is integral to their identities and whose humanity encompasses courage, vulnerability, intellect, tenderness, anger, pleasure, contradiction, and self-determination. My commitment is to the realization of complex women whose experiences possess intrinsic significance.

I undertake this work with an explicit awareness of my authorial positionality. As a cisgender white man writing principally about queer women, I recognize that I am writing across consequential differences in identity and lived experience. That undertaking requires sustained reflection on the assumptions, limitations, and potential blind spots that accompany my perspective. Good intentions cannot, by themselves, establish the ethical adequacy of representation. The responsibility of authorship includes examining how a narrative distributes power, whose interior lives it makes accessible, whose suffering it asks readers to witness, and whose choices it permits to matter.

My academic formation, which includes two master’s degrees and a Ph.D., has involved extensive engagement with feminist and queer literature, together with peer-reviewed scholarship concerning third- and fourth-wave feminisms. Within my own scholarly framework, I understand the #MeToo movement as a defining expression of fourth-wave feminism’s insistence on bodily autonomy, accountability, and the recognition of experiences historically subordinated to entrenched power. This intellectual engagement has informed my attention to consent, embodiment, agency, and representational ethics. My education deepens my responsibility to these subjects; it cannot substitute for experiences I have not lived or place my work beyond legitimate criticism.

That responsibility is especially consequential when queer characters encounter trauma, violence, or death. I am attentive to the concerns associated with the convention commonly described as “bury your gays,” particularly the possibility that tragedy may reproduce narratives in which queer lives appear expendable or queer desire becomes implicitly associated with punishment. A character’s death acquires meaning through its relationship to the life the narrative has allowed her to live: her loves, decisions, achievements, relationships, and unrealized possibilities. My intention is that no woman’s suffering should constitute a moral judgment upon her sexuality, and that no tragic outcome should suggest that her love rendered her deserving of loss.

The realms of Dungeons & Dragons provide the imaginative setting for these stories, including their warfare, dangerous encounters, antagonistic powers, and profound uncertainties. Violence, occasional torture, and death emerge within those circumstances. Nevertheless, a perilous fantasy setting does not relieve an author of responsibility for the narrative purpose or presentation of suffering. Where a character’s bodily autonomy is violated, the gravity of that violation requires acknowledgment. I have sought to preserve the character’s subjectivity throughout such experiences and to attend to their consequences in memory, relationships, grief, recovery, and subsequent choices. Her personhood must remain central even when another character attempts to disregard or destroy it.

My understanding of a strong woman also extends beyond martial proficiency or an extraordinary capacity to withstand pain. Strength may reside in the assertion of a boundary, the refusal of coercion, the articulation of desire, the exercise of judgment, or the willingness to receive care. Some of these protagonists possess an established sense of their own authority; others are gradually discovering the agency available to them. Some have survived trauma whose consequences remain inseparable from their daily lives. Their vulnerability does not diminish their dignity, and their entitlement to respect does not depend upon exceptional resilience. I want these women to have the freedom to be formidable, uncertain, loving, furious, dependent, autonomous, and imperfect without forfeiting their narrative worth.

The advocacy informing this work rests upon a commitment to human dignity across differences of race, sex, gender identity and expression, and sexual orientation. I recognize the plurality of experiences encompassed within LGBTQIA+ communities and the inadequacy of any single narrative as a comprehensive account of those experiences. My characters cannot represent every queer woman, and I do not claim the authority to serve as a spokesperson for communities whose lived experiences I cannot claim as my own. My undertaking is a particular imaginative contribution: stories about particular women, written from a particular authorial perspective, with care for the implications of bringing those lives to the page.

I have attempted to make that care evident through characterization, relationships, narrative consequences, and the treatment of agency. Nuance and subtlety are essential to this purpose because characters need sufficient imaginative freedom to exceed the arguments an author might wish them to embody. Their identities deserve respect, and their personalities deserve complexity. Their relationships should possess meaning beyond their usefulness to a plot, and their lives should remain valuable regardless of whether those lives culminate in triumph, survival, sacrifice, or death.

These notes articulate my artistic purpose and ethical commitments. Readers will bring their own histories, insights, and judgments to the work, and the realization of my intentions must ultimately be assessed through the novels themselves. My hope is that readers encounter queer women whose love is meaningful, whose autonomy matters, whose suffering receives serious attention, and whose presence is fundamental to the imaginative worlds they inhabit. Above all, I hope these stories affirm their right to occupy the center of an epic: to shape its events, determine its moral stakes, and be remembered in the fullness of the lives they have lived.