Bachelorx: a Nonbinary Memoir by Skylar Lyralen Kaye

NEW RELEASE 

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.

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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.

Excerpt 

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.

About the Author  

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.

Author Links

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Dark Justice by Janice Jarrell

RELEASE BLITZ

Book Title: Dark Justice

Author, Publisher, and Cover Artist: Janice Jarrell

Release Date: March 17, 2026

Pairing: MM

Tense/POV:  Third Person 

Genres:  Contemporary dark/suspenseful gay romance

Tropes: Married Couple, Hurt/Comfort, Protector/Protected, Found Family, Trauma Recovery, Healing Journey

Length: 84 791 words/ 283 pages

Heat Rating: 3 flames:

It is the first book of a new series, The Unbreakable Vow.

It can be read as a standalone and does not end on a cliffhanger.

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Buy Links - Available in Kindle Unlimited

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The world may be burning–but here, in this moment, there is grace.

Blurb

Joshua believes love can bring Colin home. And even from across an ocean, Colin hears it calling.

Colin Campbell–Abrams went to Ireland carrying a weight his pack could never hold. Grief he couldn't name. Guilt he couldn't shake. A marriage he loved too much to destroy with the pieces of himself that remained.

Ireland didn't heal him; it offered him the grace that allowed him to heal himself.

In green hills and strangers' kindness. In ancient stones that remembered centuries of pain. In thirty seconds of unexpected sunlight breaking through gray skies. In the slow, stubborn work of putting one foot in front of the other until the man he used to be began to walk by his side.

The road taught him something Joshua had been trying to tell him from the very beginning: You don't have to be unbreakable to be worthy of love.

Some journeys you walk alone—not to leave, but to learn how to come home.

Note: This book contains depictions of violence, injury, and the on-page death of a character.

Excerpt 

The taxi rumbled up the narrow gravel lane, tires crunching over stones still wet from morning rain. Colin sat in the backseat, his head resting against the cool glass of the window. Trees arched overhead—familiar, ancient. A canopy of green that whispered welcome in a language older than sorrow.

The driver pulled to a stop in front of a large yellow house at the edge of town. Smoke curled from the chimney. A lace curtain fluttered in the front window. She was waiting for him.

Aunt Aileen stood on the porch, wrapped in her thick wool shawl, hands folded in front of her like she'd been standing there for years—like she'd always be standing there.

Colin stepped out of the cab. Shouldered his bag. Their eyes met. She didn't speak. Neither did he. She just came down the steps and wrapped him in her arms. He sank into the hug like a man who'd been treading water too long. Let his head drop to her shoulder. Let the tears come—silent, steady, unstoppable.

"There now," she murmured, stroking his back. "There now, mo chroí. You've come home to us, so you have."

Inside, the fire was already lit—the kettle already whistling. His room was made up just as he'd left it. Just as it had been all those years ago—when he'd come here broken and grieving after Kathy.

Nothing had changed. Nothing except him.

That night, he sat by the hearth while Aileen knitted in her chair across from him. No questions. No conversation. Just the soft crackle of the fire and the rhythm of needles clicking in her lap.

He hadn't known how badly he needed the quiet until it wrapped around him like a balm.

Tomorrow, he'd walk the park trails again. Visit Ross Castle. Breathe the green back into his lungs. But tonight? Tonight, he was simply home.

Morning light slanted through the kitchen window, warming the scrubbed wood table. Aileen moved easily around the stove, the clink of porcelain and the hiss of steam familiar, comforting. She placed a pot of tea between them, then poured it into two mismatched mugs—just like she had when he was a boy.

Colin sat, hands folded around the mug. He hadn't spoken much since arriving. She hadn't pressed him.

That was her gift—presence without pressure.

"Sleep all right?" she asked gently, settling across from him.

He nodded. "Some."

Aileen studied him over the rim of her cup. "You've lost weight."

"I've lost a lot of things," he murmured.

The silence between them stretched—not uncomfortable, but thick with memory. Colin looked out the window, eyes distant. "I keep thinking how much he loves it here," he said finally. "The light. The quiet. The way the wind sounds different in the trees."

Aileen waited.

"God, Ahn-tee, I want him with me," Colin whispered, his voice choked. "Not for me. For him. Because this place... it heals things. And he's hurting too."

She reached across the table and covered his hand with hers. "You carry him," she said. "He may not be sitting in that chair, but he's here, mo mhac. In your blood. In your bones. In your heart. In every step you take toward yourself."

His throat tightened.

"I don't know how to come back to him," he said. "I don't even know if I can." He looked into her eyes, his own welling with tears. "And that terrifies me."

Aileen gave his hand a squeeze. "And sure, didn't you come back here all the same?"

He nodded.

"Then that's your start, mo mhac. This land knows you well—it hasn't forgotten. And it'll help you remember yourself, so it will."

Colin looked down at the tea. It smelled of bergamot and comfort and just... home. The ache in his chest didn't fade—but it softened a little. He thought of Joshua's hands. His voice. The way he would murmur 'mo ghrá milis' when no one else could hear, and a warmth stirred beneath the sorrow, born from the memory of that gentle voice and the life waiting for him across an ocean.

About the Author

My name is Janice Jarrell. I’m a retired IT tech and grandmother living in Port Angeles, Washington, near the Olympic National Forest. I have two children, three grandsons, and I’ve been writing gay romance since I was twelve years old—only back then it wasn’t called “gay romance.” In the fifties, it was worth your life to admit to being gay, let alone confess to being a girl who constantly fantasized about relationships between men. I didn’t even know what a homosexual was. I just knew I loved the idea of boy-on-boy romance. I was that kid on a farm in a tiny Michigan village, watching Tom Corbett and his Space Cadets and all those guys on Combat and thinking: there’s something going on here.

I wrote slash fanfiction for about 30 years and produced over 300 stories—some a hundred-word drabble, some sprawling novel-length series. The feedback I received from readers, and the community that formed around those stories, became the creative home I’d been searching for my entire life. I still bless the internet for leading me to that artistic oasis.

Love’s Magic was my first step into creating my own original characters, and from it grew the interconnected worlds of my Revolutionary Heart and Fearless Heart series, featuring Colin, Joshua, David, Nate, Trent, Jeff, and the rest of the gang. Those books—along with collections like Trial Runs, Glory Days, Relevant Justice, Heart’s Treasure, and Rainbows Still Glow—follow these men through love stories that are messy, hard-won, and always, always worth it. I’ve also written stand-alone tales like Under the Midnight Sky and Beyond the Rainbow: Stories from Camp Pride, and I’m currently working on Dark Justice, the first book in my Unbreakable Vow series.

Many of my novels and short-story collections are available as audiobooks on Audible and other retailers, bringing my characters to life in a whole new way for listeners who love to experience stories on the go.

It’s been an amazing thing to watch the gay community’s growth over these past decades. In many ways my own journey has echoed theirs, and I’m deeply grateful to the activists who fought to win the rights and recognition the LGBTQ+ community has always deserved. I’m equally grateful to the gay romance community—readers, authors, publishers, and promoters—who are making my retirement years the most creative of my life.

When I’m not writing, I’m traveling, walking, knitting, crocheting, and generally plotting more trouble for my characters. And for the record: no matter what I put them through, I am a firm believer in HEA.

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