About October

I write emotionally raw queer fiction about people society has pushed to the margins—and what happens when they find someone else stumbling about on the edges with them.

My characters are often neurodivergent, disabled, chronically ill, plural, traumatized, ace or demi (both appallingly absent from queer romance), obsessive, frightened, and trying very hard to survive. They are not diagnoses, lessons, or problems waiting to be solved, but fully realized people with desires, agency, terrible coping mechanisms (and cooking skills, tbh), strange senses of humor, and an enormous capacity for devotion.

My books live somewhere between literary fiction and romance. They are character studies about trust, obsession, survival, repair, and the difficult work of learning safety after the world has taught you not to expect it. Love is not a magical cure in these stories (though it can get close). It is a place where people can stop performing, begin rebuilding, and remain fully themselves.

I write from inside these lives, not from a safe distance. To any reader who has been told they are too much, too strange, too difficult, or too broken to find themselves at the center of a story: I was told the same thing. Even as wee little October, I was powered by one stubborn thought: “If these books don’t exist, I’ll write them myself.”

Born and raised in Brooklyn, I thrive (okay, stumble along) in the city’s chaos while perpetually dreaming of quieter, wetter places (I’m part frog on my grandfather’s side). When I’m not writing, I can usually be found hyperfixating on a new hobby, hoarding fountain pens and egregiously expensive beautiful paper, sitting beside a body of water, or plotting fresh emotional devastation for fictional people.

If you like unusual minds, fierce devotion, messy healing, and books that may reorganize something inside you, there is room for you here. Come sit with me.