Have you ever felt like you just don’t fit?
I have. Always.
I figured it out early, which helped. If you know you’re not going to blend in, you stop wasting energy pretending otherwise.
Grade four, for example. My grandmother, Mummu (already a red flag, nomenclature-wise), made me a navy-blue pea coat with big wooden toggle buttons and a matching beret. Not a retro revival. A proper old-world European coat. This was the early 1980s. In Whitby, Ontario.
If you didn’t grow up in small-town Canada, here’s the dress code for boys at the time: toque and hockey jacket. Preferably an Edmonton Oilers jacket (if you’re Canadian, you know why).
So, picture this. A schoolyard full of toques and Oilers jackets. And one kid in a pea coat and beret.
Yes, I stood out.
Yes, I got mocked.
No, I was not surprised.
I sympathized with the other kids, honestly. I knew it looked weird. But I was already an odd duck. Dressing like everyone else wasn’t going to change that. And I liked the coat. I wasn’t going to let a little ribbing dictate what I wore.
That was a recurring theme.
While other boys traded hockey cards at recess, I curated a cat collection. Figurines. Books. Art. All carefully arranged in a cabinet inherited from my other grandmother, Bubbi. Yes, I had a Mummu and a Bubbi. And a cat shrine.
I also had a pet monkey. His name was Ignace. I brought him to school for show-and-tell.
At this point, the pattern should be clear.
I was never destined to blend. In elementary school, while other boys played with blocks, I played Barbie and house with the girls. In high school, while my peers worked grocery store jobs, I manned the door at my parents’ nightclub and DJed in their strip club.
Yes, I love rom-coms, musical theatre, art, and literature and was a grade 3-4 elementary school teacher. But, before you think you know my type, let me add that I grew up working as a bouncer in my parents’ biker bar, competed in full contact martial arts from the age of nine and run a CrossFit gym. Yes, I still listen to Disney tunes AND I throw around heavy weights while I sing along.
A former girlfriend once complained that I defied easy categorization. She liked neat boxes. Publishers do too.
That’s not a moral failing. It’s logistics. Bookstores need shelves that make sense. Publishers need to know how to market what they sell. Nobody wants to gamble millions of dollars on a book they don’t know where to put.
Who buys a romance written by Stephen King? Maybe it’s brilliant. Doesn’t matter. His horror readers won’t touch it. Romance readers won’t trust it. The problem isn’t quality. It’s categorization.
Those boxes exist to solve marketing problems, not to describe reality.
And my stories refuse to stay inside them.
That’s why platforms like Substack exist. Why Amazon exists. They’re not the first choice for tidy, genre-compliant authors. They’re the escape hatches for misfits writing off-kilter, genre-bending stories that don’t behave.
Stories like mine.
I once asked that same girlfriend whether anyone truly fits cleanly into a single box.
“Most people do,” she said.
I still don’t believe that.
I think most people perform a category. For convenience. For social friction reduction. But if I got to know you well enough, I’m willing to bet you’ve got some uneven edges. Some quiet peculiarities. Some interests that don’t line up neatly with the version of you the world thinks it understands.
Maybe you celebrate those things.
Maybe you hide them.
Either way, they’re there.
Which brings me to why I write what I write.
Because I don’t think you enjoy being flattened into a single label any more than I do. And I suspect you might be the kind of odd duck who appreciates stories that resist tidy classification. Stories that zig when they’re supposed to zag. Stories that trust you to follow.
If that sounds like you, you’re in the right place.
I’ve got stories for odd ducks.
Stay tuned.
