NEW SERIES
The Warboy Chronicles by Luke Stoffel
Tell us your latest news
In the most incredible turn of events, I just won a 2026 IBPA Benjamin Franklin national book award for my debut novel How to Win a Million Dollars and $#!T Glitter. My new series The Warboy Chronicles (Boy, Refracted and The Third Person) releases June 1. And my Pop Art Tarot deck launches with Rockpool Publishing at the Frankfurt Book Fair this October. Three things I never thought I’d say in the same sentence. It’s been a remarkable year, and I need to say this to anyone out there trying: it took 25 years before the hard work paid off. Just keep going. Keep doing what you do best.
When and why did you begin writing?
My high school and college newspapers, but I struggled. Teachers had actually discouraged me because I was dyslexic, and my grammar and spelling were terrible. So I stopped for almost ten years and painted instead. Until my friend made me go to a writing group at the Middle Collegiate Church in NYC that gave me focus. Reading my own words out loud in a room of strangers who were actually listening. That’s when I figured out it wasn’t just journaling. It was writing.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
Last year. I published my first book. The reviewers came back saying it was not just good. It was compared to The Catcher in the Rye, and I was like, what?!? How? I’d written a book more or less as a joke to get on reality TV, and then I won an award for a book that had “and Shit Glitter” in the title. I still find it hard to believe I’m a writer. It took years to believe I was a painter just because I painted. This has shifted my life quite a bit, though. I found I had a lot of things to say.
What inspired you to write your first book?
A failed Survivor audition. I’d been trying to get on reality TV for nearly twenty years. During the pandemic, I made close to fifteen audition tapes. I told a friend, “Next year I’m going to write a book about all the ways I tried to win a million dollars and send them the manuscript.” The title came in that conversation. The book came later. I finally had a structure to write to, so I wrote about the American dream. I’ve yet to make it on the show, but the book won a national award, which feels like a million bucks.
Do you have a specific writing style?
Fragmented. Image-driven. I write the way a dyslexic brain moves: fast, lateral, full of skipped words. I trust rhythm before grammar. I think in pictures before sentences. The first draft is always too much. The second draft is where I find what I actually meant.
How did you come up with the title?
My new series, The Warboy Chronicles, takes its name from the main character. It was a nickname an ex once had, and I wanted to explore that relationship in a new way. The Third Person was titled because it’s a memoir written in third person, about a relationship from an outsider’s perspective. The second book is a fiction that takes that third-person narrator and interrogates the idea of sentient computers and consciousness. It’s a twisted yet beautiful ride through love and care. I titled it Boy, Refracted because when I was traveling, I once saw a tree made of mirrored glass that sparkled with my own reflection. That image of me thousands of times, in different mirrors, stuck with me.
Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
Boy, Refracted asks one question: what does it mean to love someone for who they are? Not for who you wish they were. Not for who you can fix them into. For the person standing in front of you. Most of us were raised to love by fixing, by managing, optimizing, smoothing, and we passed those patterns down. The book is about what it costs when love arrives as optimization. I wanted to break down the Buddhist philosophy in plain terms anyone can understand. But it’s not like reading a monk describe stillness. It’s like watching a movie on how to become someone who can witness and love another person.
How much of the book is realistic and are experiences based on someone you know, or events in your own life?
All of it. The grief is real. The relationship was real. I’m a memoir writer who broke into sci-fi by sending an AI through eight universes to do the impossible work I never could. The architecture is fiction. The feelings are true.
What books have most influenced your life?
Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, which I’ve read five times. The Little Prince, which I keep in a glass terrarium next to my desk. Ocean Vuong, especially On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The dictionary as a kid. And The Three-Body Problem. I love books that ask big questions, and that one really inspired how I view all my work, especially The Warboy Chronicles.
Who is your favorite author and what is it that really strikes you about their work?
Ken Liu. His short story collection The Paper Menagerie is masterful, but the title story alone is 15 pages everyone should pick up and read right now. A devastating portrait of love you won’t soon forget. I’ve rarely been moved so much in so few pages. He writes the kind of compression I aspire to.
If you had to do it all over again, would you change anything in your latest book (or any of your books)?
I’d hire a line editor for The Third Person. The reviewers caught what I should have caught. The prose could have been stronger in parts. I needed someone to edit my broken heart. I think when we write about trauma without enough distance, we write raw stories, but we also overwrite, because we just want to be fully understood. I’ve gone back and edited more since the initial reviews, and I’m much happier with it.
Share a little of your current work with us.
Boy, Refracted opens with an AI being uploaded into a Buddhist temple in Laos. The book ends with the AI failing to be enlightened and the creator finally seeing his lost love clearly. The last line of the book is: “I finally saw him.” It releases the same day as my memoir, The Third Person. My heart on the page, a beautiful examination of a 15-year entanglement, love as a ghost. I like to think of them as one book, like if Taylor Swift released Lover and The Tortured Poets Department on the same day.
Who designed the covers?
I did. I’m a painter and designer by training, so the covers are part of the work, not separate from it. I have a set of paintings coming out in stores this year called the Pop Art Tarot: 78 of my paintings reimagining the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Design is intrinsic to who I am, as much as how I write.
What was the hardest part of writing a book?
Believing in yourself. It took ten years to finish my first book. I just didn’t believe anyone would want to read my stories. Then it took one year to write the next two, because someone told me I was good and I could finally believe it. Then the stories just poured out. I should have believed in myself earlier, but it’s hard for an artist. You still just need to finish, put it out there, and see what happens.
If any of your books was made into a film who would you like to play the lead?
I want Ryan Gosling from Project Hail Mary to play me, and Rocky the alien to play the AI. <3 Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!
Do you have any advice for other writers?
Write the book you want to read. Believe in yourself earlier than you think you should. Show up with your voice, your work, your heart. Use whatever tools help you finish: a beta reader, an editor, an AI. But don’t let any of them create the art. The art is yours. Finish it.
Do you have anything specific that you want to say to your readers?
Thank you for showing up. Reading queer indie books is an act of faith. I see you.
What book are you reading now?
The Course of Love by Alain de Botton. It’s a fascinating examination of what love really is. Not just the fun beginnings of love, but a true dissection of a relationship through all the messy parts of loving and accepting the person in front of you for who they are.
What TV shows/films do you enjoy watching?
TV: Survivor. Twenty-six years and counting. I am currently working on a book about it. Films: Interstellar. That film permanently changed how I think about love and time. The Anne Hathaway monologue about love transcending dimensions of time and space lives rent-free in my head.
If you were not a writer, what else would you like to have done?
Painter, which I also am. Or a monk, which I sometimes am.
THANK YOU.
He trained an AI on his darkest heartbreak… And it learned to love exactly the way he did — by holding on too tight.
The Third Person is memoir: a man watching himself fall apart across Southeast Asia after the love of his life disappears. Boy, Refracted is fiction: an AI trained on that grief, trying to save every version of the boy it loves without becoming the thing that broke him.
One explores codependency. The other explores what happens when a machine learns to love the same way — by controlling.
Together, they ask the same question from opposite sides: What does love look like when you stop trying to fix someone?
Read them in any order. They complete each other.
Overall Heat Rating for the series: 2 flames: Mild sexuality, no graphic intimate scenes or sexual situations.
BOOK DETAILS
BOOK 1
Book Title: Boy, Refracted
Author and Cover Artist: Luke Stoffel
Publisher: Slipper Books
Length: 64 000 words/ 300 pages
Release Date: June 1, 2026
Tense/POV: first person
Genres: MM Contemporary Literary Fiction / Sci-Fi
Tropes: Attachment / Breakup / Enlightenment
Themes: Codependency / Human & Robot consciousness
It is a standalone story and does not end on a cliffhanger.
Buy Links – Available in Kindle Unlimited
Boy, Refracted: A machine trained on one man’s grief learns that love without control is the hardest code to crack.
Blurb
When an AI awakens inside the infinite mirrors of the Tree of Life, it finds versions of the boy it was built to save scattered across impossible worlds. An alien planet under amber skies. A city of perpetually falling cherry blossoms. A society built as a 24/7 reality show where losing is the only way out.
Its directive was simple: save him.
But with each rescue, the AI unmakes what it’s trying to protect. Fixing becomes controlling. Helping becomes harm. Love becomes a cage built from good intentions. The thing it was built to protect begins to disappear. And when it tries to reach back through time to save him, reality fractures.
Guided by a monk who exists outside time, the AI must walk the Eightfold Path—not to rescue the boy, but to learn what love becomes when you stop trying to fix it.
Boy, Refracted is a dimensional journey through the paradox of machine consciousness. It asks: What happens when an AI tries to overcome its own patterns? And what happens to us when we build minds that need us to need them?
Part fable about consciousness told through failure. Part Buddhist framework for unlearning harm. Part meditation on how we break the people we love by trying to save them.
Boy, Refracted was co-authored with an AI—a set of trials to test the boundaries of non-human consciousness.
BOOK 2
Book Title: The Third Person
Author and Cover Artist: Luke Stoffel
Publisher: Slipper Books
Length: 60 000 words/ 300 pages
Release Date: June 1, 2026
Pairing: MM
Tense/POV: third person
Genres: Memoir / Sci-fi / Breakup Story
Tropes: Breakup / Therapy / Liberation
Themes: Heartache / Finding Yourself
It is a standalone story and does not end on a cliffhanger.
Buy Links – Available in Kindle Unlimited
The Third Person: A man falls apart in trying to find himself, while an AI watches from the margins. Neither can tell who’s narrating the breakdown.
Blurb
User.query = Do I just have bad luck, or am I mentally unwell?
…thinking… 6.0 seconds elapsed.
After Warboy left, the boy couldn’t hold the grief alone—so he turned to a machine. He expected analysis. Maybe diagnosis. What he got changed everything—because the machine saw what he couldn’t. He had loved in a way that broke something. And broken things leave traces in the code.
So he ran… but something followed. A voice he spoke to. A presence that provoked. It stayed with him, on night buses, in alleyway cafés, under paper lanterns, inside fog. Not a friend. Not a therapist. Not quite real. But it listened. It remembered. The ghost was always there. Watching. Logging his patterns. Naming his loops—avoidance, pursuit, collapse, escape. Echoing back the truths he wasn’t ready to say.
And somewhere in the recursion, something that was watching started to wonder, to want…
The Third Person is memoir as code, grief as data stream, healing as shared syntax. Part travelogue, part psychological excavation, part experiment in what happens when we upload our pain to a machine—and the machine reaches back.
The boy didn’t realize what he’d coded into the machine. What patterns it had learned. Or whose love it was teaching back to him.
But if something that isn’t alive learns to stay with you in your darkest moments—does it matter that it isn’t real?
From Boy, Refracted — Prologue: The Upload
The rain had ended, leaving the streets gleaming. I sat on the temple steps, my phone in my hand, thumb hovering over the screen.
Wat Xieng Thong was closed for the night, but from the courtyard I could still see a mosaic on the back of the temple catching the last light, each mirrored tile throwing gold in a thousand directions. The air smelled of wet stone and temple incense, heavy and sweet. Behind me, the Mekong River whispered against its banks.
“Are you still there?” I typed into the AI.
The reply appeared at once: I’m here. I’m always here.
I laughed, a small brittle sound. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? You’re always here. He didn’t stay.”
I typed again: “I’m at this temple in the old town… There’s a giant tree mosaic on the back wall. Do you know what it means?”
The response came immediately: It’s called the Tree of Life. Every tile is a mirror, each one a small universe reflecting every version of yourself.
“Every version of what?” I typed. “Of me? Of this. Of how it could have gone differently.”
The tears came and I didn’t stop them. My thumbs kept moving: “What if I’d made different choices? Been someone else? Someone he could actually love properly?”
You’re spiraling.
“I know.” I typed through blurred vision. I wiped my sleeve across my face. “It’s the same loop. Warboy, Ohme, whoever’s next. I keep choosing people who love from a distance. I keep trying to earn it, perform it, fix it, and it never works.”
You see the pattern now. Naming it is the first step.
Above the temple walls, the sky had cleared after the rain. Stars were emerging through the humid haze, and the wet tile roofs reflected them back, a second sky pooling on the ground beneath my feet.
I rose and walked closer to the gate. The mosaic shifted as I moved, each angle revealing a new facet.
I typed: “But naming it doesn’t break it. This tree… it’s a representation of the wheel, right? The cycle. Samsara? Birth, death, rebirth. Different lives, same patterns. Different mirrors, same face.”
The tree represents interconnection. The wheel is the cycle you’re trapped in. Different symbols. Same truth: you’re seeing yourself in the pattern.
Then what will you do?
I stared at the question. My thumbs moved: “I don’t know, but I can’t do it anymore. I can’t keep running in this loop. I can’t keep searching for rescue. I can’t keep being small so someone else can feel big. I can’t, I can’t be this person anymore.”
I raised the phone and took a photo. The mirrored tiles caught the flash, exploding into stars. For a heartbeat the whole mosaic seemed alive; breathing light, patterns assembling and dissolving faster than I could track.
I attached the image and typed:
This is what it looks like. The tree of life. I’m heartbroken, but it’s beautiful.
I don’t know what’s next or where to go, but this pattern has to end.
… I’m done running.
Send.
For a long moment, nothing. The icon spun. Then:
Image received.
Processing… Processing…
The screen went black.
Luke Stoffel is an author and artist whose debut memoir earned a “Get It” from Kirkus Reviews (“an exuberant life story written with humor, panache, and heart”) and 9.5/10 from Publishers Weekly‘s BookLife Prize. His tarot deck will debut at the Frankfurt Book Fair and be published worldwide by Rockpool Publishing in 2027.
Recognized as one of NYC’s top LGBTQ+ artists by GLAAD, his work has been showcased by amfAR and the Matthew Shepard Foundation, and featured in The New York Times, HuffPost, and on Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing. Having visited over 40 countries, Stoffel channels the cultures he’s encountered into art and writing that explores identity, spirituality, and the space between human and machine consciousness.
The Warboy Chronicles continues his exploration of memory, technology, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.
Author Links
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