When I was small, I learned that there is great power in words. Words have the ability to both uplift and to destroy.

Sitting in a circle, facing the librarian as she thumbed through the pages of Leo the Late Bloomer by Robert Kraus, I was enamored by that book. The message was timeless — that not everyone blooms at the same rate. In that banal children's book, a life's worth of hope awaited.

Growing up with the world telling you there is no place for you but hell is scary. It was only after I read widely, and met people who saw me fully, that I came to understand just how wrong that world had been.

The Sheppard Saga — beginning with Finding Eden — was born from that reckoning. The protagonists come from the margins too. They discover their own greatness when others have tried to shortchange them. You don't have to be LGBT to relate. If you've ever felt too small for the world you were handed, these stories were written for you. You are about to bloom.