A Look at My Works in Progress

Writing is a strange, beautiful, often frustrating thing. Some stories come to me fully formed, demanding to be told, while others simmer for years, waiting for me to remember how much I love them. Sometimes, I write a book in a feverish rush—only to put it down for months (or years) because I can’t figure out how to end the damn thing.

And that’s just the writing part.

Revising? That’s another beast entirely. Editing? A never-ending loop of self-doubt and discovery.

But despite the chaos, I keep coming back, because at the heart of it all, I have stories I need to tell. Right now, those stories are OUT, Brambles and Wire, and Not Your Cowgirl. Each one is in a different stage of the writing and revising process, and each one challenges me in ways I didn’t expect. They are, in every way, a labor of love—sometimes a frustrating, exhausting, heartbreaking love, but love all the same.

And because writing isn’t just about putting words on a page—it’s about sharing those words with the world—I want to give you a glimpse into what I’m working on, what’s taking shape, and what keeps me coming back even when writing feels impossible.

OUT: A Found Family Story That Means Everything to Me

Some stories are personal in ways you can’t explain. OUT is one of those. The idea came from something I’ve known for a long time: too many queer teens are displaced, kicked out, or forced into unsafe situations just for existing. And when that happens, where do they go? Who takes care of them? What happens when the world has already decided they don’t belong?

At its core, OUT is a found family narrative. Mitzy, Miki, Bandit, and Z are all outcasts in one way or another, but they find each other. They carve out a space for themselves in an abandoned house they call Out House, where they try to build a life despite everything that’s been taken from them. But survival isn’t easy. Trauma doesn’t just disappear because you find people who love you. The book explores addiction, loss, fear, and the fight to keep going when the world wants you gone.

It’s a story about queerness—not just in identity, but in the way queerness shapes how people move through the world, how it can be a source of power or a weapon used against you. It’s about the terrifying, beautiful process of learning to trust again. It’s about the family you build when the one you were born into won’t have you.

This book means everything to me. It was the first novel I ever completed during NaNoWriMo, and while it’s gone through several revisions since then, the heart of it has never changed.

Brambles and Wire: A Dystopian Story Rooted in Magic and Resistance

This book started as a dystopian survival story, but the deeper I got into it, the more I realized it was something more.

At its core, Brambles and Wire is about control—who has it, who loses it, and who dares to take it back. In this world, the government decides who gets to live past twenty. Every year, young adults are judged in the Aging Ceremony, and those deemed unworthy disappear.

Aella Brixby was never meant to survive. Raised in the Elm, a place long ignored by the capital, she knows what happens to people like her. Her family has already suffered—six of her siblings taken before her. Now, it’s her turn. But when she escapes, she finds herself in the ruins of Project 10, a decaying remnant of a city expansion that never came to be.

What sets Brambles and Wire apart from other dystopian stories is the way it weaves in magical realism. Aella’s power isn’t just in her fight—it’s in her very existence. There is magic in her Blackness, in the history of the Elm, in the way nature fights back against a world that tries to erase it. The government sees people like Aella as disposable, but the land knows better. The vines and the roots, the whisper of something old and powerful beneath the surface—they remember. And they’re on her side.

This story is about resistance, about reclaiming what was stolen, about refusing to be erased. It’s also about survival in all its forms—not just staying alive, but learning to live on your own terms.

It’s also the book that I struggle with the most. Not because I don’t love it, but because I want to get it right. There are so many layers to it, so many themes I want to explore. And sometimes, that means stepping back, letting the story breathe, and waiting until I can come back to it with fresh eyes.

Not Your Cowgirl: A Story of Home, Healing, and Maybe Even Love

Not Your Cowgirl is a story about grief, homecoming, and facing the past. It’s about what happens when the place that raised you no longer feels like home and the complicated choice of whether to rebuild or leave it behind for good.

It’s also the first book I’ve written with a dedicated romance subplot. In my other books, love comes through the story organically, developing as the characters grow. But in this one, there’s a love interest from the start. And as someone on the aromantic spectrum, that was a challenge. Romance in fiction often feels formulaic to me, and I never want to write something that feels forced. But love—whether it’s romantic, platonic, or something in between—can be a powerful part of a story, and I hope that it unfolds in a way that feels real.

Sadie is also disabled. The accident that drove her away from home didn’t just leave scars—it left her with chronic pain and a complicated relationship with the life she was supposed to have. But while her disability is a crucial part of her story, it’s not the whole story. Too often, disabled characters are written as if their entire existence revolves around their disability, as if their only narrative purpose is to suffer. But Sadie is more than her pain. She’s stubborn, fiercely independent, and deeply, messily human. She’s not defined by what happened to her, but it is something she carries with her.

This book challenges me in ways I didn’t expect. Writing about grief, homecoming, and the past’s grip on the present isn’t easy. But at its heart, Not Your Cowgirl is about something I think a lot of people understand: the complicated, bittersweet process of figuring out if the place that shaped you is still the place where you belong.

More than anything, Not Your Cowgirl is a book about reconciling who you were with who you’ve become. It’s about the spaces that shape us, the wounds that never fully heal, and the choices we make when we realize we can’t keep running forever.

The Hardest Part: Writing Through Depression

If you’ve been reading this and thinking, “Wow, that’s a lot of books to juggle,” you’re absolutely right. Some days, it feels impossible. And a lot of that has to do with my bipolar disorder.

Writing, in general, is a challenge for me, not because I don’t love it—because I do—but because I have to fight for it. My bipolar disorder shapes the way I interact with my creativity, sometimes fueling me with an unstoppable drive and other times draining me until I can’t put words together at all. It means there are days when I believe in my stories with my whole heart and others when I convince myself they’ll never be enough. Depression shapes how I see the world, and sometimes that means I can’t write without my characters suffering too. It’s why some projects stay unfinished for years—I lose touch with the joy of writing, and all I can see is the pain. It’s hard to write about healing when you can’t imagine it for yourself.

I used to see that as a weakness. I used to think that the inconsistency, the struggle, the way my writing comes in bursts instead of a steady flow, made me less of a writer. But I don’t believe that anymore. Because for all the ways my brain fights me, it also gives me something invaluable: insight. My neurodivergence means I see the world differently, and that means I see my characters differently, too. I understand what it’s like to live with your emotions at full volume, to struggle with identity, to grapple with the way your past and present shape who you are. I use that insight in every character I write, even the ones who aren’t explicitly dealing with mental illness. I know what it means to feel like your mind is both your greatest strength and your biggest obstacle, and I pour that understanding into my stories.

That’s why mental health representation matters. Too often, narratives about mental illness focus only on suffering, reinforcing the idea that neurodivergent people are doomed to struggle forever. But there’s more to the story than that. There’s resilience. There’s joy. There’s community. And that’s something I want to explore more in my future writing. Maybe my next book will dive deeper into mental health—not just as a struggle, but as a part of life that deserves space, respect, and understanding.

But the thing about stories is that they wait for you. Even when I set them down, even when I convince myself I’ll never finish them, they’re still there. And when I find my way back, when I remember why I started in the first place, it’s like coming home.

So, what’s next? More writing. More revising. More fighting to tell the stories that matter to me.

And, hopefully, one day, sharing them with all of you.

Until next time,

Oregon J. Sinclair