One Year Later: What Trailer Park Prince Taught Me About Storytelling, Queerness, and Saying "Yes"

Exactly one year ago today, Trailer Park Prince landed in the world. I didn't know what to expect when I wrote that first line about smoke, about a burning cross and two brown boys staring out a trailer window. But I did know the story I wanted to tell: about survival and magic, about twinship and shame, about being queer in a world that wants to scrub you out—and choosing to be glorious anyway.

Since then, my life has changed in ways that still feel surreal.

From Afghan Heat to Georgia Magic

Writing TPP began in the most unlikely place: a Green Bean Cafe on a military base in Afghanistan, where I'd sweat over my keyboard in 100-degree nights, desperate to create a world "as fun and free and far away from Afghanistan as possible." What started as an escape—princes frolicking by a lake—transformed when I returned to DC and couldn't ignore the Trayvon Martin trial playing on screens even in the gayest bars. The story I thought I was telling about magical teenagers became something deeper: a meditation on power, oppression, and the choices we make when the world pushes us into corners.

That evolution taught me something crucial about storytelling: sometimes you don't know what you're really writing until the world forces your hand. Sometimes your escapist fantasy becomes your most political work. Sometimes the story you need to tell is the one that scares you most.

From Dream to Page to People

There's something wild and humbling about holding your book in your hands, and then hearing it echoed back to you in the voices of readers. In the past year, I've spoken at my favorite bookstores, libraries, and book festivals. I've flown across the country to sit across from teenagers who saw themselves in Noan's loneliness or Jormon's pressure to perform, who wanted to talk about shadow magic or why their own dads suck sometimes.

I've talked about my own dad and our mixed history and questioned whether he'd brag about the son who wrote a book about gay superpowered people, or if he'd avoid mentioning me at all. I've shared stages with Tony, discussing how growing up on military bases shaped my understanding of institutional power and chosen family. I've read that dark passage about Uncle Tobin's blood matting his hair to audiences who gasped and then asked for more.

Each event taught me something new about the story I'd written—how readers found hope in scenes I'd crafted from despair, how they connected Noan and Jormon's exile to their own experiences of displacement, how the trailer park setting resonated with anyone who'd ever been told their worth was measured by their zip code.

And I’ve read the reviews. Most of them, at least, from Kirkus Reviews and Foreword Reviews to KJ on Goodreads who said in an April 2025 review that, “I would definitely recommend this book to the right reader. A curious blend of sci-fi and urban fantasy, this book powerfully explores the themes of oppression and racism in a way that feels accessible.” In addition to the review, I was happy to see that, almost a year later, people continue to find this book, read it, and review it.

It's been a lot.

Community and Craft

I also got to meet—and befriend—some of the authors who inspired me to write in the first place. Writers whose queer joy, literary grit, and radical worldbuilding helped shape the tone of TPP. It's been overwhelming (in the best way) to be welcomed into a community that both uplifts and challenges me. These are people who see the work not just as entertainment, but as a kind of sacred storytelling—one that creates space where there was none before. I was thrilled to meet David R. Slayton, author of Trailer Park Trickster. I went through a whole trailer park thing, and this book caught my eye early on.

And when Politics and Prose requested my involvement in F.T. Lukens' D.C. stop on their Love at Second Sight tour, I was only too happy to say yes. I'd just finished reading In Deeper Waters, and I wanted to ask every question you've ever wanted to ask an author.

And while I'm on the subject of community: I landed an agent! One who gets me and the range of stories I write. After the rocky road to publication I experienced with TPP—all those rejections from agents who didn't quite know what to do with gay alien princes in Georgia—finding someone who shares my vision in storytelling feels like magic.

The Gifts of Going Public

This year taught me about the emotional labor of being a published author in ways I never anticipated. There's the obvious joy—signing books, hearing from readers, seeing your story take on a life of its own. But there's also the vulnerability of having your art dissected in public, of answering questions about your trauma dressed up as craft talk, of explaining over and over why representation matters while smiling through your exhaustion.

I learned to set boundaries around which parts of my military experience I'm willing to discuss, how much of my family's story belongs to me versus belongs to them. I discovered that saying "yes" to opportunities is powerful, but saying "no" to protect your peace is sacred.

Most importantly, I learned that every awkward panel, every event where I stumbled over my words, every conversation about the handling of the deep, dark topics present in the book—all of it was teaching me how to be the author I want to be, not just the one people expect me to be.

Beyond the Prince

A year ago, I thought I was telling one story. Turns out, it was just the beginning. Since publishing TPP, I've been pushing myself to branch out—exploring new genres, new narrative voices, even entirely new worlds (though Kayda still has my heart, and is still on my worklist).

There's Coy Callum and the Wings of Light, the middle grade fantasy I wrote for my son—a story about a twelve-year-old boy in the skylands of Jinaya whose disability prevents him from controlling his wings like everyone else. When Coy can't channel elemental magic during his Elevation Ceremony, his wings burst into a brilliant light, revealing a power unseen for over a thousand years. It's a story about a kid who discovers that what makes him different isn't something that needs fixing—it's something that makes him whole. Writing some of the scenes in this story felt like the most important work I've ever done. Every time my son sees me typing away at Coy's adventures, I think about him one day reading about a hero who moves through the world the way he does.

Then there’s For Witches, By Witches, the novel I’m co-authoring with Emily—a YA fantasy rooted in the raw history of resistance, but set in an alternate America divided by magic. In this world, pro-witch and anti-witch states mirror the fractures of our own past and present. The story follows a teenage girl forced to flee her conservative community after her powers are violently revealed, launching her into a harrowing journey through a hidden network of allies—a magical Underground Railroad. It’s our way of smuggling conversations about oppression, identity, and systemic violence into a fantasy that feels at once historical and urgently contemporary.

And there’s The Wild Wheelchair, the kid lit picture book that landed me my first agent.

All of them carry the same threads: identity, resilience, and defying expectations. All of them ask the same question that drives TPP: when the world tries to erase you, how do you choose to be glorious anyway?

Learning to Edit Like I Mean It

I've also spent the year honing my craft—learning when to follow instinct and when to edit ruthlessly, when to let a scene breathe and when to cut it to the bone. Some of that learning came from mentors, some from friends, and a lot from falling on my face and getting back up.

My biggest lesson? Stop being lazy with your revisions. For years, I'd write in bursts, then abandon projects for months, returning to characters I'd forgotten and plot threads I'd lost. Publishing TPP taught me that finishing is a muscle you have to build, that consistency beats brilliance every time, and that sometimes you have to make a scene darker—then darker still—before you find its true emotional core.

I'm still learning to balance my diplomatic writing (thanks, Government Job) with the flowery, duplicitous language that got my hand slapped in Iraq. Turns out, both have their place—you just have to know when to deploy each weapon.

And then there's the humbling art of proofreading and learning to live with mistakes. There's something both maddening and inevitable about reading your own writing, having your eyes pass over the same sentences a hundred times until you become blind to the dropped quotation mark, the missing word, the character name that somehow shifted mid-chapter. You think you've caught everything. Your editor thinks they've caught everything. Your beta readers swear they've caught everything.

Then your book launches and someone tweets a screenshot of "griped" instead of "gripped" on page 264, and you want to crawl into a hole and never emerge.

But here's what I learned: in a 105,000-word book, 5-10 mistakes constitute roughly 0.00952% error rate. That's not failure—that's being human. That's the beautiful imperfection of creating something real and putting it into the world before you've second-guessed yourself into paralysis. You draft a polite email to your editor asking to fix the typos in the next printing, you add "professional proofreader" to your writing budget, and you move on. Because perfect is the enemy of published, and published books change lives—even with their flaws intact.

Looking Forward

Writing TPP cracked something open in me. It gave me permission to be big and angry and soft and magical all at once. It taught me that representation doesn't have to look one way—it can shimmer, shift, bite, and glow. And it reminded me that stories have power. Especially the ones that center the kids we used to be.

The book also taught me about choices—the theme that readers keep coming back to in our conversations. How do you live with the decisions you make, especially when there are no clean options? How do you forgive yourself for doing good things that feel terrible, or terrible things that serve a greater good? These questions followed me from that first night sweating over my keyboard in Afghanistan to every panel where someone asks about my characters' moral complexity.

Maybe that's what a year as a published author really teaches you: that every story is ultimately about choice. The choice to write it. The choice to share it. The choice to keep going when the publishing world breaks your heart. The choice to believe that your voice matters, that your weird gay aliens and traumatized princes and magical kids with disabilities deserve to exist on bookshelves.

So here's to the next year of storytelling, of writing queer people with fire in their hands and grief in their bones, of pushing the genre forward and always making room at the table. Here's to the stories that scare us, the ones that heal us, and the ones that remind us we're not alone.

Thank you—each of you who read, reviewed, recommended, DM'd, screamed about the ending, or came up to me at a panel and said, "That part? That was me."

We're just getting started.

With love and shadow magic,

Andre L. Bradley