Every book that carries the Paper Moon Bay name is built on the same five things. Not as a marketing line, but as the actual thread running through every character, every story, every book I write.

Acceptance

Every character in these books is learning the same lesson: that they don't need to be fixed, hidden, or made smaller to be loved. Blue learning to trust that Katherine's love for him has no conditions attached. Bailey letting himself be seen, even mid-apocalypse. You belong here, exactly as you are, not as anyone else needs you to be.

Tolerance

These stories make room for difference rather than smoothing it away. A stammer, a diagnosis, a silence, a background that doesn't match anyone else's. None of it needs to be overcome before a character deserves love or belonging. Tolerance here isn't a lesson characters learn about other people; it's the air the stories breathe.

Identity

Coming-of-age, at its core, is a story about figuring out who you actually are underneath who you've been told to be. Elias choosing truth over the script his family wrote for him. Bailey learning who he is once the world that defined him is gone. These books trust readers to sit with that same question in their own lives.

Voice

Some characters find their voice literally. Finn, learning to speak not because he has to, but because he finally has something he wants to say. Others find it by finally telling the truth to the people who need to hear it. Either way, having a voice, and being heard, is never treated as a small thing in these stories.

Inspire

These are hard stories, sometimes. Grief, illness, survival, corruption, abuse. I don't soften any of it. But every one of them ends somewhere with light in it, because that's the promise underneath all of it: no matter how different you feel, or how hard the road has been, you matter, exactly as you are.

These five values are why every Paper Moon Bay book looks the way it does: LGBTQ+ young adult and new adult fiction that never treats being different as something to be fixed. Explore the collection →