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đŁNEW SERIES BLITZ with AUTHOR INTERVIEW ➜ What happens when something that isn't alive learns to stay with you in your darkest moments? The Warboy Chronicles by Luke Stoffel
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.
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.
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 cafĂŠs, 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.
Author Interview
How long have you been writing and what made you fall in love with writing?
I've been writing since the high school newspaper. I stayed with it in college, then stopped for ten years, just keeping random notes in a journal when I had thoughts. I found a writing group in NYC at the Middle Collegiate Church, and that's when I really found my voice as a novelist, as a long-form writer. I had been putting things onto paper for years, but finding a community to say what I had written out loud was the encouragement I didn't know I needed.
When did you realise you wanted to be a writer?
Late in life, because my teachers told me to stop. I had the stories but I didn't have the grammar or the spelling. I would constantly get in trouble in class. It wasn't written the way they wanted. But it was written in my voice. Forty years later I won an award for my debut novel, and I have to wonder: if I hadn't been discouraged, would I have written that book sooner?
Can you give the readers a brief summary of your latest book? What led you to write this book?
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.
The protagonist is on a personal journey to heal the human he's been searching for through eight entirely different universes. One world is a perpetual reality TV show. One is a comic book. One is an alien planet documented through a TikTok streamer. Another is a city with perpetually falling cherry blossoms.
What genre does it fall in?
Speculative fiction. Sci-fi. It's a mix of real-world philosophy and interdimensional trials of love and codependency.
Share a few words about your latest book, other than the usual blurb.
My latest book is actually two books. Together they explore both sides of a breakup through the eyes of a machine. One is my side, where I turn to a machine to heal my broken heart. The other is where I make the machine inhabit the person who left me, and help them learn how to love without breaking a person.
Give us a little insight into your main characters. Who are they?
Warboy is an AI built from grief. He thinks he's saving the man he loves. He's actually inheriting all the patterns of my ex-boyfriend and all the ways he loved me, a savior complex dressed up as care. Here's how he was born: I wrote a journal through my breakup while traveling, then uploaded it to AI and asked if I was crazy. The diagnosis I got back was the weirdest read of my own mental state I've ever encountered. So I built two entire books around it: what if an AI unintentionally became the person who hurt you most, and he had to learn how to stay? How to love? It's a fitting story for the world we're living in.
Will we be seeing these characters again any time soon? Is this book part of a series?
I've written seven books in The Warboy Chronicles. He shall return. My latest, Boy, Refracted, is a map of all the books Warboy will inhabit. They're part memoir, part exploration of queer love and grief. Each one explores a wound from a different dimension of time and space. It's a fascinating encapsulation of a queer life.
Why did you choose to write LGBTQ fiction? Why not another genre?
I don't want to say it's hard for me to understand non-LGBTQ+ characters. But I'm more interested in exploring lives I share common hurt and love with. I feel like I can write more authentically when I can inhabit the idea of the book fully. Most of my work is based on my own life, so it's naturally LGBTQ+.
What scene in your writing has made you laugh the hardest or cry the most?
I had an ex-boyfriend pass away in 2012. I've healed over the years, but he shows up all over the page. Sweet, compassionate, understanding, always there guiding me to a better version of myself. There are several moments with him that still hurt when I read them. And there are several moments that give me so much hope and happiness that I can't wait for people to experience them.
Tell us a little bit about your writing style. When and where is your favorite time/place to write?
I tend to write in a fugue state over four or five days, then go through a total burnout. I love working outside on a patio, but otherwise I write from my chair next to my fire escape in NYC.
I'm one of those people who, if I open my computer before going to the gym, I'm a goner. So I try to leave the house after a coffee, so I don't spend all day pouring words onto a page.
What sort of book do you enjoy reading in your free time?
Sci-fi. I'm a gay nerd at heart. I'm also intrigued by the big ideas in life. The universe. Our place in it. Why we're here.
What is the hardest part about writing for you?
Spelling. I'm dyslexic. I've never in my life been able to spell "again" correctly. I once published a book with the word spelled wrong eight times and didn't notice until a reader pointed it out.
That's part of why I use AI in my process, not to write the book, but to free me up TO write. I can have a free-flowing thought process, then have a reader without ego give me observations on clarity and where points are landing. 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 bring my art to it. I don't let it create the art.
Are there any causes within the LGBTQ community that are a hot button for you or that you are passionate about?
Queer history. The names. The spaces. The people the culture keeps trying to forget. I've been honored by GLAAD as one of NYC's top LGBTQ+ artists, and my work has been showcased by the Matthew Shepard Foundation and the American Foundation for AIDS Research. I keep coming back to the work of remembering, making sure we don't lose what came before us. Especially right now.
What other projects are you currently working on that you would like to divulge to us?
I'm working on a project called The Seven Dimensions: One Human Lifetime, Rewritten Across Seven Dimensions.
A single life becomes seven different stories, told through shifting perspectives and expanding forms. What starts in first person fractures into second, then lifts into third, until the memoir becomes a multidimensional experiment. Each book bends the same life through a new lens: performance, desire, loss, recursion. Read together, they map the way a person changes when he examines himself from every possible angle.
Is there anything else you would like to share with us, an exclusive perhaps?
I painted a 78-card tarot deck called the Pop Art Tarot. It's launching worldwide with Rockpool Publishing at the Frankfurt Book Fair this October. Here's the exclusive: I painted a hidden monogram into the corner of every card, mirrored from Pamela Colman Smith's original 1909 monogram. She illustrated the most famous tarot deck in history and never got royalties or proper credit. Mine sits opposite hers on every card. As above, so below. No matter how the card flips, an artist is always right-side up.
What are some of the other books you have written?
The Easy Bake Unicorn Cookbook (291% Kickstarter funded, featured in Business Insider). The Rancid Royalty storybook (#1 Amazon Children's Humor). The Noble Path travel photography series, three hardcover books on Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam.
A few fun questions
What is your favorite book and why?
Ready Player One. It's a story about me. A kid on an adventure through one of the best decades ever, the 1980s. If I could write a magical tale about the 1980s and video games, I would aspire to do it with the pure intensity and imaginativeness of that book. I've read it five times and I'm totally happy with that.
Other books: Big Magic for creativity and finding myself. Jurassic Park because the book is just a wild adventure.
What is your favorite movie?
Interstellar. When Anne Hathaway says: "Love isn't something we invented. It's observable. Powerful. It has to mean something. Maybe it means something more, something we can't yet understand. Maybe it's some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive. Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space."
It legitimately blows my mind every time. Interstellar is important to how I explore themes in my books and in my life. It's the most important film I've experienced. Cooper and his need to fulfill his quest at all costs really speaks to me. His line, "We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt." That's another stellar moment that puts my life into perspective when I'm feeling down or upset. Just look up at the stars.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
An actor on film or Broadway. I also really wanted to be a lifeguard so I could look super cute in red swim trunks.
What is your favorite drink?
Cherry Coca-Cola, hands down.
What would people be most surprised to know about you?
I co-founded a fashion-tech startup called Cinderly with my best friend Laura in 2016. We pitched at the Collision conference in fairy wings instead of tech-bro vests. Caught a Saudi investor's attention. Failed against Instagram. I lost most of my savings. Then I made glitter pills.
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.
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