The Life That Looked Right on Paper

If you had met me ten years ago, you wouldn't have pegged me as the guy who spends his mornings inventing witches and his evenings arguing with fictional vampires about their dialogue.

You would have seen a suit. A polished résumé. A tidy stack of academic degrees. You might have caught my reflection in the lobby glass of a very serious downtown tower, badge clipped to my belt, phone buzzing with calendar alerts and project reviews. I was a corporate banker, the sort who knew their way around a balance sheet and a boardroom. My life was measured in quarterly targets, performance evaluations, and an ever-climbing ladder to some hypothetical corner office.

On paper, everything looked exactly how it was supposed to. I'd done the "right" things, followed the "right" path, hit the milestones that are supposed to add up to success.

My Gay Job (and Other Off-the-Books Projects)

But there was another part of my banking life that never showed up on a performance review. Somewhere along the way, I became the person who built safe spaces - first at Union Bank of California, where I founded an LGBTQ+ employee resource group called UBProud, and then again at Bank of the West, where I started OUTWest from scratch. I worked with HR, Marketing, and Training to create programs, resources, and events that educated colleagues, supported queer employees, and connected the bank to the broader community. None of it was in my job description. I called it my "gay job" - unpaid, built in the margins of evenings and weekends, fueled entirely by passion and a stubborn belief that the people around me deserved to feel seen.

It wasn't the work that climbed ladders, but it was the work that made me human inside a system that often seemed determined to turn me into a spreadsheet. And it taught me something I didn't fully understand until much later: I had always been building spaces for people who didn't fit neatly into boxes. I just didn't know yet that I'd eventually do the same thing on the page.

But while I was smiling politely across conference tables, another part of me was quietly slipping out the back door. My imagination had already left the building. It was off roaming strange cities, chasing ghosts down cobblestone alleys, whispering about secret societies and queer love stories that refused to be small or quiet.

For years, writing was the thing I did in the margins: late at night, on weekends, in the white space between meetings. It was my pressure valve and my secret rebellion. Colleagues talked about spreadsheets; I doodled character names in the edges of my notebook. They dreamed about promotions; I dreamed about portals, haunted houses, and misfit heroes who refused to live in anyone's neat little box.

Then the World Stopped Pretending

Then 2020 arrived, and the world stopped pretending certainty was a thing we could count on.

In the middle of that chaos, my partner and I made a decision that felt both terrifying and inevitable: we left. We packed our lives into suitcases, said goodbye to the American version of security we'd spent decades constructing, and moved to Portugal. No, it wasn't a spontaneous, movie-style escape-in true recovering banker fashion, there were spreadsheets involved-but it was a deliberate leap into the unknown.

Suddenly, the things that had once seemed impossible started to feel…necessary. If the world could upend itself in a matter of weeks, then maybe the most responsible thing I could do was stop ignoring the one thing that had always been non-negotiable for me: story.

Where the Worlds Meet

Today, I live in a place where my days are no longer built around sales programs or project management timelines, but around pages. My partner tends a jungle of plants on our terrace and plans our next adventure; I sit at my desk wrestling sentences into shape and trying to wrangle the paranormal circus in my head into something resembling a book. I’m no longer just the banker who liked to write. I’m the writer who used to be a banker—and that difference matters.

This Substack is where those worlds meet: the old life that shaped me, the new life that saved me, and the stories that have been waiting-somewhat impatiently-for their turn on the page.

What Happens Next

So here we are. The banker who doodled character names in the margins is now the writer who occasionally has to Google "how do quarterly taxes work" because apparently leaving corporate America doesn't mean you escape all the paperwork.

I don't have a tidy ending tied up with a bow, because this isn't an ending-it's a beginning. The novels are in progress. The worlds are expanding. The characters are getting louder and more demanding by the day. (Seriously, the vampires will not stop arguing about their aesthetic choices.)

This newsletter is my way of bringing you along for the ride-the chaotic, messy, occasionally ridiculous journey from "I want to write a book" to "I actually wrote the damn book" to "oh god, now people might read it."

You'll get worldbuilding details, character deep-dives, behind-the-scenes chaos, and probably some essays about what it means to rebuild your entire life around the stories you can't not tell. There will be witches. There will be found families. There will absolutely be some mild emotional damage, administered with care and possibly a soundtrack.

If that sounds like your kind of adventure, stick around. Subscribe. Pull up a chair. I promise the coffee's strong, the stories are weird, and the paranormal chaos is just getting started.