James Prince | 25 | Nonbinary | They/Their/Them | Queer
I see that you want to know a bit more about me. Well, first off, I’m an author. You may have noticed that from the header on my website, but if not, now you know. I’m a Utahn—yes, we do actually call ourselves Utahns—and grew up in various parts of the state. I currently live in the mountains with my family and pets. We have a veritable menagerie, but my own include 5 rats, a black cat, and a 90-pound puppy that is technically a family pet.
I’ve been writing and telling stories since I first learned the alphabet—and probably before, if my lovely pre-school illustrations are anything to go by. After the veterinarian phase, and the brief stint of wanting to be a garbageman, I decided that writing was my goal.
As I started to grow into myself, though, and came to terms with being queer and trans, I wanted to see more people like myself in fiction. Until more recently, these kinds of books were pretty hard to come by, and what I did find was never what I was looking for.
See, I wasn’t interested in reading about teenagers coming out to their families or being bullied for their identities. I didn’t want to read about people living lives of heartache and abandonment and then dying at the end. I already knew all that was happening. I wasn’t looking for an exploration of our struggles, I was looking for queer people going on quests and finding love.
I didn’t need to read about the pain and suffering that the world imparted to us. It was like those stories weren’t written for us, they were written for cis and straight people to better understand us. I wasn’t interested in being inspiration or in helping other people understand, I just wanted to explore a world where I was normal, where I was accepted.
What I wanted was to read books about life that went beyond gender and orientation. I just wanted stories where queer people played the same roles as everybody else.
As a kid, I didn’t think that was possible to do. I understood that publishers didn’t publish books like that. It was “offensive” to people. It was “unmarketable.”
So for the longest time, I separated my writing into two categories. There were the stories that were about straight people and romance and action. Things that people wanted to read, I thought. But there was always another category. These were the stories that I wanted to tell, these were the stories that I needed to write because I needed to read them, too. They were stories that reflected myself in the characters.
It wasn’t until college that I realized that the world was starting to change. Slowly, but surely. I was seeing more and more queer representation in media and I realized that, even if publishers didn’t want to publish works written about people like me, I could do it myself. I could create books that I wanted to write and books that I wanted to read. That were about all aspects of life, good and bad, and stories that were about queer people without being about being queer.
The world has changed a lot in the last 15 years, some for the better, some for the worse, but I like to think that even if we take a step backwards, we’ll always take two more forward. And until we see people for nothing more and nothing less than people, I’ll continue to write about queer people in stories that are about so much more than their queerness.
I hope you enjoy that here, and keep getting in touch and letting me know what you want to see more of!