A New Dawn

A few years ago, ‘The Boxing Letters’ began as a simple short story idea. It was a set of letters that a gay boxer named Sammy around the time of World War II wrote and kept to himself in fear of it getting out. Especially to his best friend Ken, who he has loved for a very long time. It was originally inspired by the anime of Danganronpa 3. As I kept going back to it, I realized that I wanted to enhance it, creating a much better story for it.

I played with the idea of keeping it in the original setting, but there were so many details I had to adhere to that I decided to make it in a modern setting instead. I did not delete the original ‘letters,’ instead I am going to change them around to take war out of it, and made it so that Sammy’s parents were extremist Catholics who emotionally and mentally abuse the poor boy into hating himself for who he is. I originally played with the idea of finding a Christian sect, but I was originally raised Catholic so I am sticking to what I am used to.

Now, I have to say I do not hate Catholics or Christians. I am an omnist, which means that I believe all religions exist and are valid. However, I am only making certain characters like his parents extremists. There are extremists in every faith. There will be plenty of characters who are very kind Catholics that are open minded and are helpful to Sammy.

Originally, I had Sammy die before he was able to tell Ken how he felt. However, I changed my mind because I wanted to give him and Ken a much different ending than Juzo Sakakura (the character that inspired Sammy; Kyosuke Munakata inspired Ken) had in the anime. This is another reason I decided to change the time period into the present. There is no war that Sammy can get himself killed in, and is a much safer time period to be in the LGBTQ community.

I will not be giving up on the Inolla Chronicles, but instead focusing on this book first. I plan to self publish this one and aim to traditionally publish the others. My decision was made because this is specifically a gay romance book with no fantasy themes. It is much easier to traditionally publish when self published books are not in the same genre. Now that I have finished my classes at Bournemouth University, I try to write at least 500 words a day, even if they are just in blog post or article form.

I plan to update this section of the site with character profiles and maybe some inner monologues, so please stay tuned!  Feel free to add comments and add your name to the email list below for updates. I will also try to ensure my social media pages are up to date as well too, so please keep an eye out for them.