Self-image, body changes, and social changes chip away at individual’s self-confidence. Withdrawal and hiding can often seem like the easiest escape. You cannot escape from life. An excellent student, our hero is ripped from his friends and everything he knows when his father is moved across the country for his job. Intent on re-establishing the mother’s employment, the parents appear to withdraw from their high school student as he is dropped into a situation where he knows no one. Everyone experiences physical and emotional problems but our protagonist is ashamed of his body and won’t even talk to his parents who seem oblivious. Wearing baggy clothes, coats and hoods, it is easy to hide his body and isolate himself since he knows no one. Others assume he is overweight, shy or has acne problems. The strangely dressed student is a magnet for bullies and everyone else ignores him. Teachers might have gotten involved or pushed him to participate in class, but as an excellent student, grades are not an issue. Life evolves into a strategy to be left alone and survive another day. Because of this, attacks are not reported. An accident at school will expose our protagonist’s secrets to a classmate. How that classmate responds will change our protagonist’s life. There are still bullying and attacks, but with newfound confidence, our hero will deal with things differently. Can this quiet, isolated person evolve into an example and build real friendships while accepting life’s little hurdles? This series of books contain examples of high school life that help the reader to identify and deal with bullying behavior in a high school setting. The books in this series are intended to be safe reading for teens and tweens. Thank you for reading on Daring Diane Disclaimer This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

    A delicate balance of rhythm and line, the haiku has provided countless readers with an appreciation of the changing of the seasons and the miracles of nature. Now, in Gay Haiku, readers can finally appreciate more important things—like the changing of boyfriends and the miracles of shopping.Irresistible and irreverent, this collection of one hundred and ten witty and wicked short poems captures the many dating disasters of first-time author Joel Derfner. In a wonderfully fresh and original voice, Derfner shamelessly mines his personal life to send up such broad-ranging topics as gay pop culture, politics, family, sex, and, of course, home decorating.Gay, straight, or undecided, readers will delight in Derfner’s dry sense of humor and unmistakable charm as he tackles the big questions of life.

    Afterlife is a journey from the darkness to the light again, and again, and again.This poetry collection discusses depression, anxiety, trauma flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, death, self-harm, suicidal ideations, strong language.Please practice self-care while reading this poetry collection.Please see appendix at the end of the collection for detailed page number content warnings.Also available for download on Payhip: https://payhip.com/b/hYbl

    He Felt Unwell (So He Wrote This) is a curated collection of poems and illustrations that create a therapeutic journey and visual experience through the ups and downs of love, loss, fear, and doubt.

    A texture of swift worldly-wisdom underscores the focus on freaks, but often leaves an invisible message of a reverse lens on the rest of the world. ~Rochelle Potkar, poet and Author of 'Arithmetic of Breasts and Other Tales' Aparna Sanyal Upadhyaya is one of those rare people who are just as funny on the page and in a poem as they are in person. I laughed aloud many times reading about the shenanigans in these charming and quirky twisted tales. - Chandrahas Chaudhary, Author of Arzee the Dwarf and Clouds Meet the beautiful people of the Circus, and the freaks who live in the Village next to them. Mangled, jangled, misunderstood, all find place in the rich tapestry of this book. Siamese twins separate to lose half a heart each, and find snake-man and tiger-taming lovers. A man bitten by a crocodile becomes a God, and a Devadasi woos the entire countryside with her culinary artistry. Fates intertwined lead sometimes to tragedy, sometimes happy summits of fame. A clown finds his place in Hollywood and mute animals break unspeakable chains. A twisted man falls in love with a mirror and a white man is unmade by the Indian sun. In this book are tales for every season and every reason. Tales of human depravity that take innocent lives, and of a murderers’ insanity that follows, a fitting revenge by nature, red in tooth and claw. These stories are told in the form of narrative poems in rhyming couplets. Look inside and you will find, you have been to this Village. Surely, you have been to this Circus too.

    Poems that range in style from starkly concrete to limber break down the barriers that prevent understanding of what it means to be racialized. Shraya paints the face of everyday racism with words, rendering it visible, tangible, and undeniable.

    With genuine caring and concern for her boys, Franny looks after the gay men of Provincetown with the ultimate goal of making a place in the world for those who don't belong and making the world better for all.

    In this much-awaited collection of forty poems - eighteen previously unpublished - she writes of the silky bonds between every person and the natural world, of the delight of writing, of the value of silence. Says James Dickey, "Mary Oliver works . . . a true spell, unlike any other poet's, the enchantment of the true maker."

    This was a world of self-invented characters, glamorous superstars, and strung-out sufferers—ground zero of drag and performance art. Still, no personality was more vibrant and formidable than iO's mother's. Rhonna, a showgirl and young widow, was a mercurial, erratic Glamazon and iO's fiercest defender, her only authority in a world with few boundaries and even fewer indicators of normal life. At the center of Darling Days is the remarkable relationship between a fiery kid and her domineering Ma—a bond defined by freedom and control, excess and sacrifice; by heartbreaking deprivation, agonizing rupture, and, ultimately, forgiveness.Darling Days is also a provocative examination of culture and identity, and of the cour­age and resilience of a child listening closely to her deepest self. When a group of boys refuse to let six-year-old iO play ball, she instantly adopts a new persona, becoming a boy named Ricky—a choice her parents support and celebrate. It is the start of a profound exploration of gender and identity through the tenderest years, and the beginning of a life invented and reinvented at every step.

    Young Kyle struggles to make it through the school day without being noticed, but others intend to make him the center of attention.

    At once witty and disconsolate -- formally inventive, acutely attentive, insistently alive -- this is a book of fierce vulnerability that explores the ways in which we are educated by the implacable powers of time and desire in a world that constantly renews itself.

    Moments after the clock strikes midnight, Veer calls his phone and is relieved when the driver answers. After they agree to meet the next day, neither has any idea that fate has just intervened in both of their lives. Veer is a graduate student pursuing his MBA. Raj is a native of Amritsar. Although the two men are vastly different in terms of their family backgrounds, values, thought processes, and beliefs, it is not long before they fall in love. Still, no matter how hard he tries, Veer cannot shrug the apprehension that haunts him from within. No one has a simple love story and neither do they. But when one of the men takes the other for granted, their bond is jeopardized. Will anything or anyone be able to save it before it is too late? In this romance, two Indians intertwined in a web of forbidden love must attempt to overcome several obstacles in order to move forward in their relationship.

    North Morgan's third novel moves beyond the confines of fiction to examine how homosexuality's acceptance into society has created a new breed of demons for a generation of men born as outsiders yet living at the forefront of popular culture. Heartbreaking but never far from humour, Love Notes to Men Who Don't Read confirms Morgan's place as the leading interpreter of gay culture on either side of the Atlantic.

    His wizard is long dead, and he works as a mercenary. He is carrying a message from a the most powerful sorcerer of Messaline to the Rajni of the Lotus Kingdom. With him is The Dead Man, a bitter survivor of the body guard of the deposed Uthman Caliphate, protecting the message and the Gage. They are friends, of a peculiar sort.They are walking into a dynastic war between the rulers of the shattered bits of a once great Empire.

    This distinct group, known as the Ñ Generation (as coined by Bill Teck), are the bilingual children of Cuban exiles nourished by two cultural currents—the fragmented traditions and transferred nostalgia of their parents' Caribbean homeland and the very real and present America where they grew up and live.