This Is Happening

In my experience, life is chaos. Sometimes it’s chaos with a capital C. Other times it’s chaos with a cup of tea and a biscuit. But largely, it’s chaos. But then, every now and again, amid the chaos, there’s a small moment where things line up in a way that feels oddly right.

That happened earlier this week, when my publisher rang me on a rainy Tuesday morning and said, very calmly, that Tobie Donovan would be hosting the launch of my book. It felt perfect.

Tobie plays Isaac, the book-loving character in Heartstopper, and if you know that show, you’ll probably understand why the alignment landed for me immediately. Not because of status or recognition, but because of what that work represents. Gentle queer storytelling. Care. Curiosity. Stories that don’t treat queerness as a problem to be solved.

One of the things I’m proudest of about this book is how it weaves queer lives into the story without making queerness the drama. Queer characters who exist. Who love. Who support one another. Who don’t have to grapple just to be allowed space on the page.

I started writing this book in 2020, and since then we’ve seen some genuinely beautiful examples of that kind of storytelling elsewhere. Heartstopper was one of them. Like a lot of queer adults, I loved it partly because it offered something I didn’t have growing up. I even wrote about it at the time for QueerAF.

And now there are just three weeks to go until The Boy From Elsewhere meets the world, and all that ambition becomes real, tangible action. I'm certain that the next few months will feel like even more chaos - the good kind - as a result!

But that's why I'm excited to get to pause for an evening and celebrate the book with a proper launch event. Launches are beginnings. Messy ones. Slightly unreal ones. The kind where you keep checking the date and then checking it again, just to be sure you didn’t imagine the whole thing. In The Boy From Elsewhere, the story begins with something quietly impossible happening, and everyone just sort of rolls with it. Helping anyway. Following the thread.

This feels like that.

On February 11th, we’re going to gather to celebrate the book being properly, officially out there. There’ll be a reading. A conversation. That odd, wonderful feeling of something that lived in my head and on my laptop for years suddenly being shared aloud with other humans.

And while it’s not actually my living room, I want it to feel a bit like one. Warm. Friendly. Slightly camp. The sort of place where you can turn up, sit down, listen to a story, and feel welcome without needing to know the rules in advance.

So this is me, very casually, opening the door and saying: if you’d like to come to the launch, I’d love that. Tickets are available now. That’s the official call to action.
The unofficial one is: come and help me mark the beginning of this book’s life in the world. If it resonates with just one person, I'll be happy to call it a success.

I'd better go buy the biscuits.