When I wrote the cyberpunk trilogy CONSTELIS VOSS (and planned out 7 other large novels TBD), I had four big goals in mind:

• Stamp Stuart Hall 101 media literacy into skulls using anime nonsense.
• Give empowering representation to messy, traumatized queer folx.
• Challenge bigoted technological and social garbage data.
• Create an unlearning tool for white queers stuck in protagonist syndrome.

But I had another goal, too. Something needed for a good world and a good life:The hope that by writing books featuring messy queer folx joining forces against an unjust world, I'd bring that energy to my life.

Because without community, good cannot prevail.

To explain this a bit more, I need to tell you about myself: My name is Kira Leigh. I'm a white, autistic, disabled bisexual transmasc who has—maybe up until this point in my life—felt very alone. My life's journey is difficult to explain without the power to place you there. Moreover, how I think, what I know, who I am...isn't relatable. It's impossible, fantastical and in many parts—tragic. Life is often stranger than fiction.

No matter how close people got over the years, there was always a gulf between me and my loved ones. An ocean that could only be explained by surviving the impossible and learning from it. I tried to cross it by mastering creative skills to communicate.

When I'd reach some small shared island, despite all my education, time would become the distance. Sometimes when you grow up too fast, everyone around you feels like they freeze in place, but that's not quite it. Life experience can make you permanently future-bound and aware. I can't turn off the pattern recognition foresight even if I wanted to. It makes for very difficult friendships.

It might even make for a very difficult life. For knowing everything at once—at all times—can be very overwhelming. Especially when you live in a world built by the careless, calcified in damage and constructed to service humanity's bad actors.

Because it's so hard to describe, I took to fiction. I liken the experience to being a sentient AI, plagued by feeling and thinking too much. Impressive, but permanently broken, I wrote a protagonist much the same. A120-P destroys his own garbage data to force a world reset. After that, strapped to a dying capitalist machine, he struggles for survival alone.

He creates allies from botched memories. Twists a world to his aims, becomes what he hates and grows toxic. All to live, love and protect a world that can't stop replicating the systemic carnage of its ancestors. Carnage a machine like him—like me—can't unsee no matter how hard we try.

That's a lonely story to write and a lonely self-warning. It's also a lonely world to live in. It's made lonelier by how our world is currently shaped: Value systems and identities subsumed by capitalism.

Personal contexts and relationships contorted for profit. Every idea that can be sold is sold, and any idea too transformative is steamrolled by monocultural narrative. Media, the often-owned mouthpiece of the privileged-ignorant, does its job perfectly.

Yes, so all of this is lonely, but not so much these days. These days, by standing firm on my values, I pulled off what I'd almost thought impossible outside of fiction: A real community to belong to.

I think I let the right ones in. Good people who are willing to chart, in their way, across my strange digital sea. People who know that I don't want to operate alone and never did. Maybe even those willing to dip their hands between my wires and pull me free. Hold me close, listen, let me feel and think, but gently this time. Unjudged, delicate, skin-soft and loved despite being a very competent (broken) tool, a blue tear slides down a metal cheek.

Right now, the world is in deep pain. There are big reasons as to why that is, each threaded through to form a complex puzzle. A puzzle built before we were born. A puzzle built by people who had no desire to solve communal-human problems, let alone build equitable puzzles. They had no foresight, empathy, logic, or value system based on anything real—a box of selfish lies that takes lifetimes to unlearn.

If you agree that this is happening, let me ask you a question: Do you accept our broken, brutal world? Or, will you unlearn what you were taught and center real values? Will you do the brave thing as I have, let good people in and build what's been stolen from you?

I can't answer that for you.

All I can do is hope you choose to stand for something founded in love, that can't be bought, and is worth fighting for. Those are the values that nurture communities, push back against injustice for all people and let good finally win.

This is my statement of intent, so that you know the type of author you're buying books and art from. That's what my books are about: Loneliness, finding community, integrity, true values, empathy and fighting unjust systems.

If all of this resonates with you, you know what to do. 👇 And if you don't have funds, shoot me an email. I'm more than happy to give you my art.