About Leroy Brown

Leroy Brown is a queer fiction author, hailing from the haunted woods of western Washington and lurking in a dark room in Seattle. They have a giant collection of tarot cards and dice and pretty rocks.

Best described as chaos with intended consequences, they studied for both a Bachelor’s of Arts and a Master’s of Arts in English & Creative Writing (with a concentration in fiction) at Southern New Hampshire University, also earning a minor in English literature.

They have written several works, such as the poetry anthology A Collection of Flowers for My Love, the romantic short stories of Intimate Moments: Chaste Kisses, Quick Glances, and Short Stories, and the fantasy horror series The Necromancer’s Tales. In these, they explore various themes, such as grief and how we learn to survive it, how to cherish the small moments of beauty in the world, and self-identity and the ways people grow into what they think of themselves as.

Their ambitions are to bring honest, hopeful, and heartaching queer stories into the world, diving into intersections of identity and the quintessential nature of personal journey. They are currently seeking representation to help further the visibility of queer stories in fantasy, romance, and horror. When not consumed by ever-growing projects, they work as an English tutor at a local college and spend too much sleep on hyperfixations.

Who actually are you?

Well, in more detail, I am Leroy Brown! I love cats, the color green, and rain. I’m an ambivert, a huge nerd about all kinds of topics, and for those that enjoy it, I’m also a Capricorn. I started writing as a way to create the world(s) that I wanted to see and to express myself in a world that was generally very hard to feel like I had a place in. I’ve dealt with two decades of severe chronic depression and anxiety (yay for medication!), a relatively-recent awareness of ADHD, and years of generally being that go-to therapist friend. My journey of navigating my mental health and my queer identity has always been interwoven with a kind of storytelling and getting lyrical about things. Even outside of that, I’ve always wanted to do something related to being creative, and writing was something I’ve always had a knack for. At the end of the day, it’s the thing I’ve always turned to in order to make sense of things or to get me through things. It has helped me find—and appreciate—beauty in all of it.

I also work in education! I am part of the student services for a college as an English tutor; it’s been incredibly helpful for me to appreciate the power and effect of words and everyone’s own innate talent for it. I’ve helped people of all levels of English proficiency with all kinds of ways that English can be used. As part of that experience, I’ve heard all kinds of people’s life stories; journeys through depression, through growing up, through life-changing decisions. I’ve seen people whose experiences have been similar to mine and people whose experiences are from a different world. It’s helped me see our inherent humanity no matter what we call ourselves, no matter what we choose to do, and it’s helped drive me to want to create things for people.

I also have a decade of experience in playing Dungeons & Dragons! (Fifth edition, specifically.) I’ve been both a player and a gamemaster in a number of campaigns, and it’s been a wonderful experience—as long as I’ve helped created a good story. My favorite class is cleric, my favorite spell is inflict wounds, and I have homebrewed enough content to release a book on it. I spend a lot of my free time thinking about D&D and wanting to create things that can explore its storytelling even better; related to this, I’m a huge gamer! I’ve played all kinds of games since I was 4 (ever since my father traumatized me when he played Resident Evil 2). Some of my favorite games are Minecraft, Terraria, RuneScape (specifically RuneScape 3), Baldur’s Gate 3, Stardew Valley, and Wildermyth! Other honorable mentions: the God of War series, Hades, and the Horizon series. I’ve built some of my closest friendships through games and have always loved to indulge in the creative and narrative experiences they offer.

Other hobbies include photography (and I have some examples of my work below), drawing (despite how bad I am at it) and designing, making marshmallow & cereal treats (and promptly eating them all), and playing music! I’m classically-trained with the trombone and self-taught with piano, guitar, ukulele, and lyre harp. I also sing even if I’m not in the shower.

A lot of things! And yet, nothing. Experiences inspire me, emotions inspire, narratives inspire me. The things that people have accomplished inspire me. There are a lot of people—both authors and not—that have served some element of admiration, inspiration, or ideal to me.
Others have shown me how I never want to be.
Honestly, the best way to get a good answer to this is to see who I talk about in the foreword, or what kind of work I compare it to. Anything I have written has been shaped by something else I’ve encountered, and I will always try to list it.
Chaos. Complete, utter chaos. And a lot of staying awake for too long.
Some things have taken me a decade to create a first draft for. Others took me a single, quiet day at work. Some took a lot of thought and consideration and refinement, others sprang from me in full regalia and perfection. A lot of the time, it’s been an iterative process that just gets bigger every time I look at it.
And sometimes, it’s just me being unable to stop talking.
I write everything, as long as I feel like I have a good story to tell. I love to focus on themes of queerness, identity, self-love, nature, grief, and anything else that feels expressive of the world or that I think someone will enjoy.
For forms, I write the most in prose, especially vignettes, novella, and novels. I have a ton of poetry I’ve crafted over the years as well, but it’s not where I’ve concentrated my work.
For genre, the short answer is I write speculative, literary, and genre fiction. I’m a fiction writer by nature. While I won’t shy away from nonfictional works, it’s not something I gravitate towards, and even my nonfiction doesn’t focus on the … well, nonfictional parts. Fiction writing, to me, is a clay that I can sculpt into anything and everything I need and want.
Beyond that, I consider myself mostly an author of fantasy. That’s where my heart has always been and it’s the thing that delights me the most. Almost everything I’ve ever dreamed of, wanted to create, or wished for has had a tinge of fantasy to it. I’m a lover of romance stories as well. I tend to include at least some romance elements as I work on a project, if it’s not the major focus to begin with. To me, romance is about exploring that sense of love and fulfillment, and everything in the world is something that either can be the focus of that sense of love and fulfillment or gets in the way of a sense of love and fulfillment. (Did I mention a sense of love and fulfillment?) Because of that, romance can be used in a lot of ways and I want to explore as many of them as I can.
I also enjoy writing horror! Despite my love of writing it, I’m also someone who is pretty easy to scare, and I don’t really consume much horror media. Horror, to me, is something that serves the tone of what I want to accomplish with other genres, but it’s not something I make a point of writing on its own or without using other genres and tools to support it.
What truly counts as being qualified? Is it education? Is it experience? Is it an innate quality, or is it a validation from something outside of us?
Ponderings aside, I like to think that everything in my life has gotten me ready to write and publish! I’ve been crafting stories ever since I was a little kid, creating narratives with toys and entertaining myself with what my child brain thought was good drama. I had also started to write poetry as a way to try to express myself when I didn’t have anything that felt good enough—-love poems (and by love poems, I mean “roses are red / violets are blue” poems) to the boys I had crushes on, angry poems also to the boys I had crushes on, questions put into poems to capture a longing and wistfulness.
Poetry was my first love of the written word, but prose was what changed and defined me as a person. I first started to truly commit to prose when I was only 12 years old as part of forum roleplays, and I stuck with doing roleplays for years. It helped me learn a sense of pacing and how to work with people.
Fanfiction was another huge part of my life and developing as a writer. Even long after I had found a style for myself, fanfiction had been a huge part of creating connections with people and telling stories we could all enjoy. Not to mention it made it a lot easier to start getting into storytelling and perspective.
I won’t even mention my Dungeons & Dragons experiences for this.
And, of course, all of this led to me enjoying every step of building a story—-the narrative, the world and worldbuilding, the characters both big and small, the reason to care or be impacted.
My personal favorite part to play with? Prosody. It’s why a lot of my style is the way it is: I’m enjoying myself. It feels like dancing with the words rather than dictating them. Because of my focus on prosody, my style has been called languid, like floating along a river, and I feel that’s the best description for it.
Just don’t ask me to write with concision.
Looking outside of writing qualifications, I’m also just a huge nerd about all kinds of topics. I’ve always loved the sciences, and I’m especially obsessed with pretty gems and flowers. I’ve had a strong love of physics, psychology, and anthropology ever since I first encountered them. In general, I’ve made a point to pick up as many skills as I could over the years and learning whatever interesting thing there was. Sometimes, I actually get to be good with it—but other times it turns out I can take an engine apart. I never said that I could put it back together.
I’ve also always loved collecting trivia, and I was able to explore a wide array of topics as I studied my degree. I know enough to know I’m no expert, but I do know how to look for the information I need.
In short, it’s because I like to write about the things I’ve experienced, wished I’d seen, or can find in the world.
I write about sad things because the world has many sad things in it. I write about love because there is so much love in the world. I write tragedy, grief, and healing because these are things that I have experienced. I write queer stories because we exist in the world, because I wish I had seen more queer stories when I was younger, because everything I’ve known and experienced has been in some way queer.
Fantasy, to me, is an exploration of hope and possibility—a way to engage with a world in a way that we can’t any other way. Romance is an exploration of desire and fulfillment—a way to discover things about ourselves and what we want to happen. Each genre has a purpose and inherent beauty, the same way that prose and poetry do, and they all accomplish different things. They all accomplish things I want to create.
And so I write them.
The delicious kind. Perhaps a mushroom soup.
In sincerity, I’m a few different intersections. It’s easiest just to call me queer, but it’s pretty easy to call me gay, or ace, or nonbinary. At the end of the day, I’m a not-quite-man that loves men. Life is a complicated thing to work with and describe, and a part of my purpose for writing is to explore the facets of living and having experiences. For myself, the For My Love series and the stand-alone work Floral Touch explore how I feel I fit into all of it and my self-expressions.
I’m all over! The easiest way to find me on other places is checking out my Linktree.