More Stuff About Five Stages...

I can't promise that I'm not going to talk your ear off about The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley, but I promise to try not to.

However, I do want to take a moment today to tell you a little more about this crazy book that I love so much.

Five Stages is about a young man named Andrew Brawley, who secretly lives in a hospital.  He's got these great friends in the children's ward, Lexi and Trevor, he works in the cafeteria, and he hangs out with Steven, Jo, and Emma, three nurses who work in the ER.  Oh, and he thinks he's being stalked by Death.

Along the way, Drew meets Rusty, another troubled boy, and he finds in Rusty somone he can connect to.  Theirs is the sweetest love story I've ever written.

Did I mention there's a graphic novel in this?  My narrator Drew spends his spare time drawing a graphic novel about a superhero with no memory named Patient F.  When I say that Patient F is one badass superhero, that's no exaggeration.  Patient F exists outside of time.  And he has a list.  Of people to kill.  I can't even begin to imagine what this is going to look like, but if it's even half as cool as it is in my head...it's going to blow you guys away.

The coolest part of Five Stages for me personally is that Drew is my first gay hero.  Shane played the gay best friend in Deathday, and Ben and Coop are a hilariously cute gay couple in FML, but I've never had a gay protag.  Not for any reason other than I hadn't found the right story. Five Stages is the right story. What makes it even sweeter is that Drew is a gay hero in a story that's not about being gay.  There's no coming out, no angst.  He's just gay.

That's a huge thing to me.  In my own life, being gay doesn't define me.  It's a part of me, but only one part.  It's not the whole of who I am.  The same goes for Drew.  He's a broken kid living in a hospital, who draws comics, falls in love and thinks he's being hunted by Death.  Gay is just one facet of who he is.  And I love that I live in a time when that's okay.

Seriously, The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley is going to be amazing.  I wish I had a time machine so that I could travel to the future and put it in your hands right now.  But until then, FML is coming out in a couple of months, and my story in the GRIMM anthology will be out next year, so it's going to be a busy, exciting time.

Lastly, I want to thank you all for the support.  I was (and still am) soaring yesterday from all the comments and tweets.  You guys are amazing.  For real.