Who is Coby Thinks?

Oh, god, what a question. Believe it or not, it's something I've asked myself about a million times. I'm just... some guy. I was born in Tennessee, and lived in the middle of the woods in a little redneck house until I was 5. Then I spent a handful of months living between my grandmother's house in Idaho and my other grandmother's camper RV in Utah. We settled in Utah eventually, and that's where I've had the majority of my life experiences up to now.

If you've heard this story before, you know that Utah Valley isn't the place most queer people want to be. In fact, my sheltered upbringing in the Mormon church kept the fact that being trans even existed out of my realm of knowledge until I was 15 or 16 years old. So in the years before I came to that realization, I felt terribly about myself and my body and my place in the world and I didn't even have the words for why. Because of that, most of my young life was spent trying to be anywhere but reality - and that's where fantasy books come in. I would stay up all night reading Spiderwick and Fablehaven and The Ranger's Apprentice, and every part of me wished to be there, and to be those protagonists (the boy ones, strangely enough...), instead of in the real world and myself.

When I got older, I found out I loved to write. I would write with friends, on my own, original stories, fanfiction, self-inserts... you name it and I probably have written it and loved to do so. During that time, like many queer teenagers in conservative religions, I avoided the fact that I would rather be a boy for years. Then I couldn't ignore it any longer, and I indulged in the terrifying concept that maybe I had a future other than the one I dreaded. In some moments, I wondered if I had a future at all.

Well, it turns out I did have a future, and I still do. I'm about to turn 24, I've published 2 fantasy novels and am about to publish a 3rd, I'm surrounded by people who love and accept me for who I am, an adorable dog named Popcorn, and I'm more comfortable in my body and the world than I ever was before.

But one thing always gets me.

I lived for a decade and a half with feelings about myself I didn't know how to describe, or explain, or understand. I didn't know that people could be transgender, I'd never heard of such a thing. I didn't even know people could be gay until I was 11 years old, and I only heard negative things about them. So I sit down to write as an adult, and I write trans characters. And gay characters. And all the other kinds of person I can. Good people, bad people, morally gray people... and I write them for a kid who never got to see them. Or a teenager who doesn't know how to explain how they feel. Or even an adult who'll undoubtedly meet a queer person in their real life, or has never felt quite right and still doesn't know why, or is simply trying to expand their own worldview.

I write stories about queer characters. I write stories for anyone who wants to read them. And, yeah, I include dragons and magic and swords in the stories because that's all cool as hell.