With his debut novella, local author Seth Walker set out to tell a story that he thinks wasn’t represented enough in the literary world for how often it occurs in real life. Walker grew up in Greater Cincinnati, where he spent a lot of time in his local library and discovered a passion for storytelling. As one of the only “out” gay, young adults in school, Walker says he was the target of bullying for his appearance and sexual orientation.
As an adult, Walker saw his passion for writing materialize into a book as he began to use his life as a muse to write Life After This.
Life After This outlines the “everyday” struggles of individuals who identify as LGBTQ+ as it follows the main character Hayden Wheeler, an “average teenager” who’s coming-of-age story loosely mirrors that of Walker’s life experiences.
“I’m around books a lot. And I was kind of just tired of not seeing a lot of queer representation,” Walker says. “And especially, I don’t see a lot of books with asexual characters. It kind of started as a dream. And then I wrote it down in my notes app. Then I was sharing it with people, and they told me that I should publish it.”
After passionately writing the whole story in an app on his phone, Walker wasted no time getting the book in front of readers. He used Barnes & Noble’s self-publishing service to turn his scattered but detailed notes of Life After This protagonist into tangible words.
Walker says that initially, he didn’t imagine that jotting down Hayden Wheeler’s journey would translate into an entire book, but it became a “realistic” version of life that is sometimes exaggerated into something too “cutesy” or “tragic” in the LGBTQ+ genre of storytelling.
“It’s just about being gay and figuring out what you’re doing after high school and where your life is going to go,” Walker says. “The main character is based off of me loosely. His struggle with anxiety and stuff are things I deal with. So I just wanted a story that was like that, in a sense that people have those everyday struggles. And just a gay story that was relatable. I just wanted something that I would want to pick up and read.”
Walker says he worked through a lot of trauma when creating Life After This. Telling the story gave him a sense of purpose and solidified the notion that words matter. He hopes readers can relate, no matter their gender or sexual identity, and that the story helps anyone going through a tough time to realize that things get better.
“The book became so much more for me personally — it was like a form of therapy. I did want to tell this story and some experiences I had in high school and working through that trauma. It helped me work through that, like the bullying and stuff I experienced in high school and writing about it and writing about my anxieties really helped me move on from that.”
Walker says he’s currently working on a sequel to Life After This, which will follow the life of another character in the book named Ryan, beginning where Hayden Wheeler’s story ends.
Life After This is available at barnesandnoble.com.
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This article appears in Feb 12-12, 2024.
