New Series: The Warboy Chronicles by Luke Stoffel

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NEW SERIES

The Warboy Chronicles by Luke Stoffel


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.

Goodreads

 

Buy Links – Available in Kindle Unlimited

Amazon US | Amazon UK

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.

 

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Series Tour: Digging up Bones by TA Moore

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SERIES TOUR with NEW RELEASE

Digging Up Bones Series

Author: TA Moore

Publisher: Rogue Firebird Press

Cover Artist: Tammy Moore

Book 1: Bone to Pick

Book 2: Skin and Bone

Book 3: Down to the Bone – Releases June 22, 2026

Book 4: SWIPE (a standalone story)

Deputy Cloister Witte has a dark past and a cute dog. He’s happy to talk about the dog.

Genres: Contemporary MM Romantic Suspense/Police Procedural

Tropes: Enemies to lovers, workplace romance, black cat/golden retriever, grumpy/sunshine, best dog in the world 

Themes: Coming to terms with your past, dealing with trauma, accepting other people’s acceptance.

The stories are best read in order.

Overall Heat Rating for the series: 3.5 flames

POV/Tense: third person POV/past tense

BOOK DETAILS

BOOK 1

Book Title: Bone to Pick

Length: 261 pages

Release Date: Second Edition 2024 (originally 2017)

Goodreads

Buy Links 

Universal Link 

Cloister Witte has a cute dog and a dark past. He’ll talk about one.

Blurb

Cloister Witte is a man with a dark past and a cute dog. He’s happy to talk about the dog all day, but after growing up in the shadow of a missing brother, a deadbeat dad, and a criminal stepfather, he’d rather leave the past back in Montana. These days he’s a K-9 officer in the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department and pays a tithe to his ghosts by doing what no one was able to do for his brother—find the missing and bring them home. He’s good at solving difficult mysteries. The dog is even better.

This time the missing person is a ten-year-old boy who walked into the desert in the middle of the night and didn’t come back. With the antagonistic help of distractingly handsome FBI agent Javi Merlo, it quickly becomes clear that Drew Hartley didn’t run away. He was taken, and the evidence implies he’s not the kidnapper’s first victim. As the search intensifies, old grudges and tragedies are pulled into the light of day. But with each clue they uncover, it looks less and less likely that Drew will be found alive.

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New Release Blitz: Phoning Faust by Sophie Mutiara Nova

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Title: Phoning Faust

Author: Sophie Mutiara Nova

Publisher: NineStar Press

Release Date: 06/02/2026

Heat Level: 1 – No Sex

Pairing: F/NB

Length: 208

Genre: Paranormal, Genre/lit, paranormal, urban fantasy, lesbian, demisexual, bisexual, genderfluid, trans, devil, pandemic

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Description

Queer mixed Indonesian college student Dian Faust attempts to call the suicide hotline only to dial the wrong number, her finger slipping and typing in six three times (the mark of the Devil). The mysterious voice on the other end of the line is revealed to be a charming scam caller named Memphis with a penchant for chattiness, trapped in a dingy bus stop bathroom, wanting to learn a concerning amount about the lonely Dian’s life.

But this scam caller is more than just a Mr. Robot hacker wannabe—a sinister presence lurks in the pixels on Dian’s laptop screen in the shadows of her apartment. The Devil themself has come to collect Dian’s soul, and “Memphis” is actually Mephistopheles—Hell’s foremost golden-tongued agent and notorious liar.

In this loose retelling of Goethe’s Faust, will Dian save her soul before time runs out—or will she fall prey to the renowned storytelling deception of the infamous Mephistopheles?

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Book Review: The Third Person: Rewriting Him (The Warboy Chronicles)by Luke Stoffel

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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 — to Bangkok, Hanoi, Luang Prabang, a temple in Pattaya being built without nails. 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.

Review

Having already read Boy, Refracted, I started this novel kind of knowing what to expect but from the very first page any expectations I had flew right out the window.

Written from Luke’s POV The Third Person, chronicles his travels throughout Thailand and Vietnam whilst still in the midst of the grieving process. Despite the wonders that surround him, Luke is constantly searching, constantly moving as he grapples with his emotions and grief.

This novel interjects sorrow with moments of calm, clarity and even happiness as Luke tries to find himself again. In the background, the AI records events and comments on the turbulent journey. To me, the journey felt like a mirror to life. There were ups and downs, setbacks and moments of joy.

This novel is a deep delve into loss, grief and learning to come back to life after such events. I cannot recommend it enough.

New Release: The Strange and Unbelievable Tall Tale of Mighty Max by Duncan Gaye

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NEW RELEASE

Book Title: The Strange and Unbelievable Tall Tale of Mighty Max

Author: Duncan Gaye

Cover Artist: Vaselina Georgieva

Release Date: May 12, 2026

Tense/POV: third person/past tense

Genres: Contemporary MM, magical realism

Tropes: Size difference, body worship, psychological, opposites attract, friends to lovers, small town, lumberjack

Themes: A meditation on how love, belief, and storytelling blur the line between imagination and reality—until the distinction no longer matters.

Length: 35 000 words/113 pages

Is it a standalone story and does not end on a cliffhanger.

Goodreads

 

Buy Links

Universal Book Link

 

A weary writer falls for a literal tall tale and must decide what he’s willing to sacrifice to keep that love breathing. Tender, wry, and quietly desperate, this is a book about belief, desire, and the work it takes to hold someone in the world.

 

Blurb

Brian Dunleavy comes to the North Woods to write a serious novel. Instead, he falls in love with a kitschy paper towel mascot.

It begins with a whistle in the trees and the unmistakable sense of being watched. A bootprint the size of a bathtub. Then a muscular, 43-foot-tall lumberjack steps out of the forest.

Mighty Max is handsome. He is kind. Broad-shouldered and blue-eyed, he lives in permanent flannel. He claims he was born from tall tales and campfire legends—back when giants were needed, and believed in. But giants fade when they are mocked. Legends disappear when they’re forgotten.

As solitude turns to intimacy, myth turns warm and very, very tangible. Brian finds himself lifted in the careful palm of the colossal man whose shadow stretches across the meadow like dusk itself. Beneath cold stars and beside impossible bonfires, he discovers that loving a giant means choosing to believe in him even when belief bends reality.

Reality is definitely bending. And when Max is reclaimed by the forest, Brian may be the only one who can write him back into being. If stories invent their tellers, who is keeping whom alive?

Strange, tender, playful, and proudly queer, The Strange and Unbelievable Tall Tale of Mighty Max is a mythic romance about loneliness, longing, and the radical act of loving something larger than life.

For readers who cherish the mythic queer devotion of The Song of Achilles, the tender whimsy of The House in the Cerulean Sea, and the wistful magic of Puff the Magic Dragon.

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Book Review: The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu

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1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China’s Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind.

Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang’s investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable and unpredictable interaction of its three suns.

This is the Three-Body Problem and it is the key to everything: the key to the scientists’ deaths, the key to a conspiracy that spans light-years and the key to the extinction-level threat humanity now faces.

Review:

This is one of the best science-fiction novels I have read in a long time. The author successfully combines first contact with the philosophical and ethical quandaries that come with it.  The depth and knowledge that has gone into the Three Body Problem makes this a truly compelling read and one that I had a lot of trouble putting down.

The science behind it is as fascinating as learning about the alien race that seeks to claim Earth for its own. Yet, despite viewing themselves as superior, like humans individuals struggle with their own moral and ethical reasoning.

I highly recommend this novel to fans of science fiction and I cannot wait to read book 2 in the series.

New Release Blitz: The Black Parade by Ilana Lindsey

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Title: The Black Parade

Series: After the Dust, Book One

Author: Ilana Lindsey

Publisher: NineStar Press

Release Date: 04/28/2026

Heat Level: 3 – Some Sex

Pairing: Male/Male

Length: 286

Genre: Sci Fi Horror, action/adventure, activism, aristocracy, captivity, class differences, coming of age, dark, dystopian, folklore, grief, healing, hurt/comfort, illness/disease, mental illness, morality, music, nature, political, PTSD/post-traumatic stress, road trip, tearjerker, LGBTQ+, m/m, romance, heartbreaking romance, social justice, survival, horror, post-apocalypse, climate fiction, United Kingdom, trauma bonding, speculative romance, scifi, achillean

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Description

As billions die from an apocalyptic cloud of polluted dust, David—a climate activist in a previous life—is holed up in an abandoned hospital in London offering a cure to anyone who needs it. Months earlier he escaped from a rogue government scientist whose illegal experimentation gave David two unasked for gifts: the ability to cure people with his blood and a locked collar around his neck. When Lysander, the sheltered son of an aristocrat, arrives and begs David to save his mother’s life, David has to try. Together, the two young men begin a journey across the UK toward an island community they hope will provide food and shelter.

Lysander struggles, longing for the security he took for granted before society crashed. He despairs over David’s hero complex and tendency to lead them both into danger. David is torn between protecting Lysander and the guilt that drives him to use his power to save the dying. Their clashing personalities, values, and ideas of what safety looks like, are woven together with an irresistible attraction that grows into something deeper. As they face the elements, other survivors, and a government desperately trying to reassert control, David and Lysander’s greatest challenge becomes staying together while fate conspires to rip them apart.

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Book Review: Boy, Refracted by Luke Stoffel

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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 is one half of The Warboy Chronicles. The companion, The Third Person, tells the same story from the ground. From the wreckage. From the human side of the mirror.

Two books. One collapse. One awakening.

Review

Right from the beginning, I knew this was going to be a powerful read. You could just feel it through the narrative and how the author drew on their own life experiences of the subject matter to craft a very realistic and beautiful read.

I think everyone will take something meaningful away from reading this novel. For me, it was the sentiments surrounding grief and trying to fix everything rather than see things as is and find meaning in them.

This book will stay with you for a long time after the last page.

New Release Blitz: Claimed Without Mercy by Dulce Dennison

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Title: Claimed Without Mercy

Author: Dulce Dennison

Cover Artist: Marteeka Karland

Publisher: Changeling Press

Release Date: April 24, 2026

Genre: Action Adventure, Contemporary, Mystery /Suspense /Intrigue, New Releases, Romance

Themes: Capture Fantasy, Dark Romance, LGBTQ+ Gay, Mafia /Organized Crime

Book Length: Novel

Page Count: 150

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Synopsis

Captive. Claimed. Protected by the devil himself.

I’m Tyson Hughes’ right hand. Collector. Enforcer. Executioner. When a low-level idiot tries to clear his debt by offering up his own nephew, I expect a clean transaction. A body to move. A message to send. Business.

I don’t expect Kellen. Bruised. Beautiful. Untouched by this world in ways that make my jaw lock. He looks at me like I’m either the devil come to claim him… or the only thing standing between him and worse. Taking him wasn’t part of the plan. Delivering him to Tyson would’ve been easier. Smarter. Safer. Instead, I claim him.

Now he’s living under my roof, breathing my air, learning the rules of a world I don’t sugarcoat. I’m not a hero. I don’t rescue people. I own what’s mine. I protect it. And I destroy anyone stupid enough to threaten it. But the deeper I pull Kellen into my life—into the violence, the loyalty, the blood that binds us—the harder it is to tell where captivity ends… and desire begins.

When the debt comes due, I’ll have to choose. Tyson’s empire. Or the young man I claimed without mercy—and refuse to let go.

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New Release Blitz: Somewhere in Nowhere by Steven Gellman

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Title: Somewhere in Nowhere

Author: Steven Gellman

Publisher: NineStar Press

Release Date: 04/14/2026

Heat Level: 2 – Fade to Black Sex

Pairing: Male/Male

Length: 238

Genre: Contemporary YA, Genre/lit, young adult, family-drama, gay, lesbian, high school, lesbian mothers, coming out, funeral, friendship group, friends to lovers

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Description

Coming out is hard, especially when you have two gay moms. At least it is for Simon Bugg. He doesn’t want the world to think that having gay parents has turned him gay. And he certainly doesn’t want anyone to know about the alien in his stomach that’s trying to kill him.

It’s Simon’s senior year and his world just turned upside down. When his mom scores a dream job, Simon lands at a new school away from the only friends he has ever known. Now, his mom is overworked and chronically stressed, and his deadbeat dad is back on the scene. Navigating a new school and new friends is a challenge for a neurotic overthinker, and Simon finds himself turning to his rescue cat and a local barista for support. But when Simon meets the handsome PJ in drama class, he gets talked into a date that he derails in spectacular fashion.

With a little help from his friends—new and old—Simon finds his way back to PJ. But how can he have a real relationship with the boy of his dreams when he’s convinced he’s going to die? No one knows about the nightly alien attacks at 11:22. Why then, and why do they keep getting worse? Simon must face a dark secret inside before he loses his chance with the boy he loves.

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