5 Things I Learned While Writing This Book
- If you write a book about a year of four losses and multiple dating breakups, you will have to relive the events over and over again. Especially if you’re using pseudo-graphic techniques that need to be reviewed for artistry. I probably have the book memorized! And while my love for the artistry is great, the reliving got hard. Like, living with the ghosts of exes past. Waking up to them. Understanding them. Being pissed at them. Wishing you could, um, again. I’m sure I still would have done everything I did if I’d known, but whoa. What a comitragic ride!
- I saw myself a lot. I learned, through the writing, how hubris and innocence can go together. I kind of knew I’d been both naïve and cocky, but the book made it very real. I thought because I had learned about working through triggers with my partner of 35 years, because I had learned how to be a team, how to talk, how to own my crap, I was a gift to the dating world. I thought I was woke about intimacy and I would be able to reach people. I didn’t know I thought that. I just thought I’d have a lot to offer. SO WRONG! I learned that I KNEW NOTHING about dating. I thought my marriage was really hard, but I learned I had been both very smart and very lucky in choosing someone who wanted to work with me and who placed value on my opinions. I didn’t realize how rare that can be.
- Writing as who I really am—plural, nonbinary—is so deeply rewarding and teaches me I am okay as all of me all the time! I have two degrees in writing and I know how to do the schtick—the arc, the climax, the turn toward meaning. But I’m bored by doing the expected and so to turn toward what is true for me as a person and as an artist creates an almost unbearable joy. It’s so big! It’s such a relief. It has so much more fun.
- Memoir challenged me to balance my drive to tell a story /my claiming of my own truth…with knowing that I’m writing about real people, many of whom may not like what I have to say. I don’t have to do that with fiction. And the fact that I’ve disguised their identities doesn’t mean they won’t know who they are. Of course they will. I resisted imagining how certain people might feel about me or what I said for a long time. When I finally allowed myself to do that, I claimed a kind of peace about the need to balance my truth and well-being with the needs and well-being of other people. It’s a life lesson. I get to tell my story. I try to tell it with compassion. And other people get to react as they do and use what I’ve said to feel how they feel.
- I learned that the right audience is EVERYTHING. I read this book out loud in a group of queer writers for over a year and they got everything I was trying to do and could tell me when I succeeded and when I didn’t. Everyone who has been a part of the project’s development has been queer…and that’s a first for me in literature if not in film and theater. I will now never do it any other way. I belong with my people! And I say this after two degrees in writing/theater, mostly with male teachers, mostly straight environments, highly critical and very “write like me.” What I want to tell queer writers: don’t listen.
- About dating: with my usual assumption that I can handle, well, anything, I charged in. As I wrote and relived, I learned It can take a long time to get over an obsessive, crazy, sexually charged relationship and it really is better not to walk down that road in the first place. I have known for a long time that when you lose someone, and the relationship has been good, healthy and fun, the grief is clean—it hurts, but there’s love in the hurt. It’s a survivable hurt, because you’re also grateful. But when the relationship was never what you’d wanted or hoped—it’s another kind of anguish, and there’s regret instead of gratitude. That’s what makes letting go of toxic dating relationships so hard.
Book Title: Bachelorx: a Nonbinary Memoir
Author and Publisher: Skylar Lyralen Kaye
Cover Artist: 100 Covers
Release Date: April 1, 2026
Pairing: Nonbinary protagonist/lesbian and trans love interests
Tense/POV: present tense/alternating POV.
Genres: Literary memoir with graphic and autofiction elements
Tropes: Friends to lovers
Themes: Coming out, Dating and sex, search for love, queer divorce, neurodiversity
Heat Rating: 3 flames
Length: 319 pages
It is a standalone book.
Buy Links – Pre-Order Now
A 60-something nonbinary queer abruptly leaves a 35-year sexless marriage to go on the apps and date, bringing along all their very vocal personalities.
Style
Worth noting that Bachelorx contains both graphic elements and fictional/mythopoetic elements. It’s intentionally outside the box, aiming for a true representation of neurodiversity while including comedy.
Blurb
When nonbinary Orpheus leaves their much-loved asexual partner Tobi after 35 years, they have never dated sober, never had a casual girlfriend and never had sober sex. At the age of sixty-two, they’re good at marriage and not at anything casual.
They’ve been living out and proud not only as nonbinary, but also as plural, filming a queer web series.
They’re completely unprepared for middle aged lesbians and their complicated desires. Romance, flirting, love-bombing, control, seduction, desire roll into Orpheus’ life and wake up every possible opinion among their many vocal and vulnerable personalities.
Their very painful history gets woken up in all their inner people, too.
As teenager personalities revel in the “queer prom that never was,” as Orpheus experiences a first kiss with a much younger trans person and then goes on to make out with a woman who confesses trauma in between flicks of her tongue, as child personalities run for cover and the wise inner yoga teacher Kaye warns that none of them are ready to date, Orpheus dog paddles through the waves of dysfunctional urge-to-merge dating.
Then two friends die and their landlord sells their building. Their now ex Tobi totals their car and breaks their own back.
Will a Eurydice appear, Orpheus wonders, as they search the apps.
Then she does, with a lump in her breast, heart problems, a live-in mother, disabled son and a need for a partner who will hold on, listen and take care of her no matter what comes, as they touch in a rush of a second adolescent joy.
At week six, Eurydice’s at passion. At week seven, she’s talking about adding an addition to her house.
And Orpheus, who will say that they’re plural but won’t show it, who resists commitment only in their silences, goes to every medical appointment, every work occasion, every family party, as their personalities argue about whether to stay, whether to go, whether anything could possibly be right with this woman they can’t get enough of touching.
Every hero must journey to Hades. In the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, innocence is sacrificed to experience. Life walks in when you open the door. No matter your age or circumstances.
Chapter 1: Becoming Everything
The child Orpheus comes forward in a memory of sunlight. Walking the long line of the green painted two by fours that top posts connecting a chain link fence, they follow its border behind the suburban homes of their Ohio neighborhood. They balance easily, their 1960’s striped t-shirt warmed by the light. Around them insects and birds raise voices for them to listen. They never fall. Held to the earth by tentacles of energy they send to every living being, they ask Gaia to become one with all life, just for a while, just until the pain eases and they can rise alone into a liminal sky, turning poems into songs.
Not boy, not girl, not feminine, not masculine, not straight, not cisgender, not singular, not a member of any tribe that will lay claim to them, Orpheus learns early to become everything.
* * *
That pandemic spring, I slump over my computer late into the evening with colleagues in California, figuring out how to get actors to film themselves while crew observes on Zoom. Outside the window, the moon hovers over treetops and telephone poles. At the far end of the street the commuter rails screeches by, empty of people. Staring forward into the computer screen, I compare lighting between sets in San Francisco and Pottstown, Pennsylvania. My director of photography assesses eyelines as I give notes to actors before calling for one last take to wrap the day. A multicolored collage of queer bodies appears on the screen as close Zoom. Androgynous nonbinary bodies like mine, trans masc like my spouse, cisgender women, old, young, BIPOC, full-bodied, thin, allo and asexual, appear with a background of pink, people like the ones I interviewed and whose stories I tell.
I stagger into the bedroom. Pull off my jeans and fall onto the bed in boxer shorts. My spouse Tobi stands near the entrance to the kitchen, tapping a foot on the floor, a stained green button down over their full belly. They stare, deep-set brown eyes burning toward me, toes pointed out, just a little bowlegged.
“Five minutes, Orpheus,” they say. “You could at least give me five minutes.”
“I have to sleep.”
“Then in the morning.”
“I have to work. You know I have to work.”
“Get up five minutes early.”
“I can’t. I’m too tired.”
They stomp into the kitchen, bang some cabinets. I cover my head with a pillow.
The next day, Tobi, now wearing a stained brown shirt—their ability to spill food on themself still confounds me after three decades—turns on the Biden-Trump debate at full volume. Stomping over the hardwood floors into the bedroom, I grab the clicker from where it lies on the bed.
“Everyone on Zoom can hear you.” I turn the television off.
They grab the clicker and turn it back on.
I turn it off.
They turn it on.
I turn it off.
“Watch on your computer or somewhere else,” I tell them. “I am WORKING!”
Abandonment issues meet workaholic artist.
Two days later, Tobi leaves to stay in an Airbnb so I can work in peace. Sleep in peace. Not be triggered.
They stay away for a month.
When they come home, I bring up polyamory.
Skylar Lyralen Kaye, fae/they is a queer, neurodivergent, social justice and award-winning writer as well as a lifelong activist. They have a BA in English from the University of Arizona and an MFA in Theater fromSarah Lawrence College.
Kaye was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Fiction in 1997 and was a finalist for the 2005 Massachusetts Cultural Council of thebArts Awards in Playwriting. They have published in literary journals such as Calyx, Persona, Phoebe, Girlfriends, Happy Magazine and the
anthology Out of the Ordinary, Children of LGT Parents as well having published the novella Priest Kid and most recently the novel Leaving Winter for a Desert Sky. Skye has had multiple theatrical productions of their plays as well as performing as a solo artist and running the theater company Another Country Productions. Their most recent awards include the 2021 NE Film Star Award as well as 13 film festival awards for the web series Assigned Female at Birth. In 2018 they won Best in Fringe at the San Francisco Fringe for the one person show My Preferred Pronoun Is We, in 2017 the Moth Story Slam and in 2018 the Boston Story Slam. Some other awards include: the 2015 Meryl Streep Writers Lab for Screenwriters and the 2002
Stanley and Eleanor Lipkin Prize in Playwriting.
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