SERIES TOUR: The Warboy Chronicles by Luke Stoffel (Excerpt + Q&A with Author)
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.
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.
Q&A with Luke Stoffel
Indie or Traditionally published? Tell us how this works for you.
Indie publisher. I run a small independent press called Cinderly Press (cinderlypress.com), a creative hub for all my work: kids’ books, unicorn cookbooks, tarot, card games, and more. I’ve been producing with Cinderly since 2016 and have figured out the logistics of printing through trial and error. It’s had its ups and downs, but our motto is “don’t quit your daydream!” Even when it seems impossible, find your fairy dust and keep going.
Plotter or Pantser? Do you pre-plot your books, use an outline, fly by the seat of your pants or some combination of things? How do you keep track of characters in a series? Do you keep a journal of your characters’ statistics, such as hair and eye color, relatives, hometown, etc.?
This is interesting. I plotted my first book, How to Win One Million Dollars as a dual narrative. Then I stumbled into the next four. Since my books are mostly based on personal experiences, it’s more about finding the themes in my life that work to tell the story and make a bigger point about society, and where we find ourselves in the larger picture of the universe.
Tell us about your first published gay fiction/romance.
This is interesting. My first book was non-fiction. It was my life as a fairytale, a series of misadventures through life, love, and trying to succeed. My next book was speculative fiction. The Third Person is where I took notes from the end of a 15-year relationship and tried to sort out the pieces left of my life while traveling Vietnam, with my emotions, journey, and trials being tracked and haunted by someone in the fog.
And then your most recent one…
My current gay fiction, Boy, Refracted, is a wild ride through the sixth dimension, using Buddhist philosophies as a mirror into a sci-fi journey that helps an AI find enlightenment. At its heart, it’s about what it truly means to love someone for who they are. Not for who you wish they were, not for who you can fix them into, but for the person standing in front of you. It explores love, betrayal, healing, and the long work of letting someone be.
Publishers Weekly BookLife called it “a truly singular book,” and Kirkus Reviews said it’s “a fascinating examination of humanity, resolve, and virtue.”
Do you write full-time or part-time?
For the last two years I’ve written full-time, thanks to a very flexible work schedule. I’m grateful to have this time to dive into my creative work, and I hope to keep it going as long as possible.
Something people would be surprised to know about you…
I have a deck of tarot cards coming onto the market with Rockpool Publishing. The Pop Art Tarot is a rainbow deck inspired by living an authentic queer life. I’m so excited because it’s going to be on shelves in a bubblegum-pink box, with “The Fool” modeled after me: a dandy blond boy walking along the mountains, carefree about the journey ahead.
Which character still pops into your mind to visit from time to time?
I can’t drop this Warboy character. I never intended to write five books based around a character who’s half AI and half my ex-boyfriend, but sometimes weird ideas just stick and grow and become something much more than you ever anticipated.
Where do you write? Do you have a routine?
I think my editing process has been more unique than my writing. I upload each chapter into an AI voice reader, then go for a two-hour walk along the Hudson River, making notes while listening. When I come home and sit in front of the screen, I have a really good idea of the things I need to fix.
When plotting, I tend to write in a fever-fugue state over four or five days, then can’t think of a word for ten days afterward.
What are your writing goals for the next year? The future?
I have two books I’m trying to launch by 2027. The first is a follow-up to my debut novel called The Game, based on a multiverse where I try to get on the same reality TV show for 20 years. Sometimes I get on, sometimes I don’t. Each season explores a different part of a relationship, or a personal barrier I try to overcome. It’s wild. Each read of the book is different for each reader because it’s structured as a choose-your-own-adventure. I think it’ll be the most fun book I’ve ever completed.
What’s the hardest part about writing LGBTQ fiction?
Finding honesty in our own experiences. Trying to make the story universal enough for everyone to feel like it’s their story too, regardless of the community they belong to. I don’t shy away from intimacy or hardship, and I don’t find it hard to write because I don’t know any different way to see the world. But I do want to bring more people under the umbrella, to help them see what it’s like from my side of the story.
What made you decide the genre you wanted to write?
I don’t think I chose to write in one genre. I write my life and let it inform the output. Sometimes I write memoir, sometimes I write fiction, sometimes sci-fi. It’s just dependent on what format the story should be told in.
Where do you find inspiration?
The universe drops ideas in my head I can’t say no to. Most of my ideas I find when I’m walking, the times I try to leave my phone at home and go walk in nature for an hour. My mind trips on so many ideas when I leave the house.
What do you do if you hit a wall while writing? How do you combat writer’s block?
I stop, and I don’t force it. It’s aggravating, but I know sitting there looking at nothing is harder than getting up and going for a walk. We’re always thinking about our lives and our characters. Just because we can’t find a way to write about them doesn’t mean they aren’t culminating in our heads in their first forms.
What is your favorite thing about writing?
Explaining life, heartbreak, and the mistakes I’ve made, so many that you don’t have to make them yourself. I think the universality of life is the real message of my books. They have little to do with me. I am a vessel for a lot of the thoughts and feelings we’re all having and struggling with. I’m just not scared to be open with my most intimate details.
What else do you want us to know about you?
What people misunderstand about using AI while writing is that it frees me up to just write. To concentrate only on writing. I can have a free-flowing thought process with my words, then have a reader without ego run through 1,500 words in two seconds and give me observations on the points I’m trying to make, where I could use clarity, what’s going to resonate strongest with the audience I’m writing for. That’s invaluable to a dyslexic writer.
There’s a difference between generating a story with AI and using it to flesh out the thoughts you already have on the page. I can feed it a 60,000-word manuscript and get back observations in minutes. It’s not a replacement for a human beta reader. But for an early gut check, for finding the holes in my own work, it’s helped me ship books I might not have otherwise had the confidence to release.
Bring your art to it. Don’t let it create the art.
How can we connect with you?
@lucasstoffel everywhere. lucasstoffel.com for the work.
If you could invite 4 people (real or fictional, living or dead) to a dinner party, who would you invite and what would you serve?
Jeff Probst from the TV show Survivor. I love the show, and I think it’s interesting that he’s been working on a creative project for 20 years. I’ve seen how it has changed, and I think it reflects who he is as a person, because how could it not?
Hillary Clinton, because she reminds me of my mom and a generation of women who brought me up, taught me my values, taught me to believe in myself.
Steven Spielberg, because his stories and vision have influenced how I see the world, and how I dream. Movies like E.T. as a kid opened my mind to magic and possibility.
Zack Morris and AC Slater, because they were the biggest crushes of my life.
About the Author
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
Website | Facebook | Instagram
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