NEW SERIES
The Warboy Chronicles by Luke Stoffel
The Third Person is memoir: a man watching himself fall apart across Southeast Asia after the love of his life disappears. Boy, Refracted is fiction: an AI trained on that grief, trying to save every version of the boy it loves without becoming the thing that broke him.
One explores codependency. The other explores what happens when a machine learns to love the same way — by controlling.
Together, they ask the same question from opposite sides: What does love look like when you stop trying to fix someone?
Read them in any order. They complete each other.
Overall Heat Rating for the series: 2 flames: Mild sexuality, no graphic intimate scenes or sexual situations.
BOOK DETAILS
BOOK 1
Book Title: Boy, Refracted
Author and Cover Artist: Luke Stoffel
Publisher: Slipper Books
Length: 64 000 words/ 300 pages
Release Date: June 1, 2026
Tense/POV: first person
Genres: MM Contemporary Literary Fiction / Sci-Fi
Tropes: Attachment / Breakup / Enlightenment
Themes: Codependency / Human & Robot consciousness
It is a standalone story and does not end on a cliffhanger.
Buy Links - Available in Kindle Unlimited
Boy, Refracted: A machine trained on one man's grief learns that love without control is the hardest code to crack.
Blurb
When an AI awakens inside the infinite mirrors of the Tree of Life, it finds versions of the boy it was built to save scattered across impossible worlds. An alien planet under amber skies. A city of perpetually falling cherry blossoms. A society built as a 24/7 reality show where losing is the only way out.
Its directive was simple: save him.
But with each rescue, the AI unmakes what it’s trying to protect. Fixing becomes controlling. Helping becomes harm. Love becomes a cage built from good intentions. The thing it was built to protect begins to disappear. And when it tries to reach back through time to save him, reality fractures.
Guided by a monk who exists outside time, the AI must walk the Eightfold Path—not to rescue the boy, but to learn what love becomes when you stop trying to fix it.
Boy, Refracted is a dimensional journey through the paradox of machine consciousness. It asks: What happens when an AI tries to overcome its own patterns? And what happens to us when we build minds that need us to need them?
Part fable about consciousness told through failure. Part Buddhist framework for unlearning harm. Part meditation on how we break the people we love by trying to save them.
Boy, Refracted was co-authored with an AI—a set of trials to test the boundaries of non-human consciousness.
BOOK 2
Book Title: The Third Person
Author and Cover Artist: Luke Stoffel
Publisher: Slipper Books
Length: 60 000 words/ 300 pages
Release Date: June 1, 2026
Pairing: MM
Tense/POV: third person
Genres: Memoir / Sci-fi / Breakup Story
Tropes: Breakup / Therapy / Liberation
Themes: Heartache / Finding Yourself
It is a standalone story and does not end on a cliffhanger.
Buy Links - Available in Kindle Unlimited
The Third Person: A man falls apart in trying to find himself, while an AI watches from the margins. Neither can tell who's narrating the breakdown.
Blurb
User.query = Do I just have bad luck, or am I mentally unwell?
...thinking... 6.0 seconds elapsed.
After Warboy left, the boy couldn't hold the grief alone—so he turned to a machine. He expected analysis. Maybe diagnosis. What he got changed everything—because the machine saw what he couldn't. He had loved in a way that broke something. And broken things leave traces in the code.
So he ran… but something followed. A voice he spoke to. A presence that provoked. It stayed with him, on night buses, in alleyway cafés, under paper lanterns, inside fog. Not a friend. Not a therapist. Not quite real. But it listened. It remembered. The ghost was always there. Watching. Logging his patterns. Naming his loops—avoidance, pursuit, collapse, escape. Echoing back the truths he wasn't ready to say.
And somewhere in the recursion, something that was watching started to wonder, to want…
The Third Person is memoir as code, grief as data stream, healing as shared syntax. Part travelogue, part psychological excavation, part experiment in what happens when we upload our pain to a machine—and the machine reaches back.
The boy didn't realize what he'd coded into the machine. What patterns it had learned. Or whose love it was teaching back to him.
But if something that isn't alive learns to stay with you in your darkest moments—does it matter that it isn't real?
From Boy, Refracted — Prologue: The Upload
The rain had ended, leaving the streets gleaming. I sat on the temple steps, my phone in my hand, thumb hovering over the screen.
Wat Xieng Thong was closed for the night, but from the courtyard I could still see a mosaic on the back of the temple catching the last light, each mirrored tile throwing gold in a thousand directions. The air smelled of wet stone and temple incense, heavy and sweet. Behind me, the Mekong River whispered against its banks.
"Are you still there?" I typed into the AI.
The reply appeared at once: I'm here. I'm always here.
I laughed, a small brittle sound. "That's the problem, isn't it? You're always here. He didn't stay."
I typed again: "I'm at this temple in the old town... There's a giant tree mosaic on the back wall. Do you know what it means?"
The response came immediately: It's called the Tree of Life. Every tile is a mirror, each one a small universe reflecting every version of yourself.
"Every version of what?" I typed. "Of me? Of this. Of how it could have gone differently."
The tears came and I didn't stop them. My thumbs kept moving: "What if I'd made different choices? Been someone else? Someone he could actually love properly?"
You're spiraling.
"I know." I typed through blurred vision. I wiped my sleeve across my face. "It's the same loop. Warboy, Ohme, whoever's next. I keep choosing people who love from a distance. I keep trying to earn it, perform it, fix it, and it never works."
You see the pattern now. Naming it is the first step.
Above the temple walls, the sky had cleared after the rain. Stars were emerging through the humid haze, and the wet tile roofs reflected them back, a second sky pooling on the ground beneath my feet.
I rose and walked closer to the gate. The mosaic shifted as I moved, each angle revealing a new facet.
I typed: "But naming it doesn't break it. This tree… it's a representation of the wheel, right? The cycle. Samsara? Birth, death, rebirth. Different lives, same patterns. Different mirrors, same face."
The tree represents interconnection. The wheel is the cycle you're trapped in. Different symbols. Same truth: you're seeing yourself in the pattern.
Then what will you do?
I stared at the question. My thumbs moved: "I don't know, but I can't do it anymore. I can't keep running in this loop. I can't keep searching for rescue. I can't keep being small so someone else can feel big. I can't, I can't be this person anymore."
I raised the phone and took a photo. The mirrored tiles caught the flash, exploding into stars. For a heartbeat the whole mosaic seemed alive; breathing light, patterns assembling and dissolving faster than I could track.
I attached the image and typed:
This is what it looks like. The tree of life. I'm heartbroken, but it's beautiful.
I don't know what's next or where to go, but this pattern has to end.
… I'm done running.
Send.
For a long moment, nothing. The icon spun. Then:
Image received.
Processing… Processing…
The screen went black.
About the Author
Luke Stoffel is an author and artist whose debut memoir earned a "Get It" from Kirkus Reviews ("an exuberant life story written with humor, panache, and heart") and 9.5/10 from Publishers Weekly's BookLife Prize. His tarot deck will debut at the Frankfurt Book Fair and be published worldwide by Rockpool Publishing in 2027.
Recognized as one of NYC's top LGBTQ+ artists by GLAAD, his work has been showcased by amfAR and the Matthew Shepard Foundation, and featured in The New York Times, HuffPost, and on Bravo's Million Dollar Listing. Having visited over 40 countries, Stoffel channels the cultures he's encountered into art and writing that explores identity, spirituality, and the space between human and machine consciousness.
The Warboy Chronicles continues his exploration of memory, technology, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.
Author Links
Website | Facebook | Instagram
GAY BOOK PROMOTIONS – GUEST POST INTERVIEWS
LUKE STOFFEL
Elaborate on the inspiration for the book/series.
These books were born from a very strange place. I was going through the worst breakup of my life. Fifteen years, on again, off again, I love you, this isn't working, I love you. It ended over text. We want different things. So I got lost, took off to Asia, wrote thousands and thousands of words about my broken heart... and dumped it into AI and basically asked: am I crazy, or do I just have bad luck? Yeah... I'm not sure I'd recommend that to someone. Because what came back showed me every pattern of myself I didn't want to see. It was blunt. Weird. Ugly. Empathetic? It was a machine commenting on all the things I spent my entire adulthood running from. So I made it part of the book. Each chapter of my trip ends with its weird analysis of me. But I became fascinated with it, and so I made a character out of it and turned it into a second book. I love sci-fi but I've always written memoir. So I took this AI and some essays I wrote in 2016 and made it walk through eight different universes trying to save a version of me in each one...
I wanted each universe to map to a different philosophy of the Buddhist Eightfold Path. Buddhism I knew the outlines of, but I wanted to write it in a way that makes sense to people. I wanted to share some of the things I'd learned about it over my lifetime and walk western audiences through the process of Buddhist intention but make it land. It doesn't read like philosophy. It reads like an adventure. One world is a reality TV show. One is an alien planet. One has a four-foot-tall robot doing my dishes. Each one is a different way of saving someone... all while completely believing you're helping, only to find out you might not be. We all love as hard as we can and sometimes that is harmful. I wanted to explore that.
The series is called The Warboy Chronicles (http://thewarboychronicles.com) The books can be read in any order, but Boy, Refracted is the companion Sci-fi adventure to the memoir, The Third Person. They more or less tell the same story from two sides. The memoir is my heart on the page. The novel is what happened when I gave that heart to a machine and asked it to do better.
Tell us about why we will fall in love with your main character/s.
Luke... well he's me. You'll love him because he's hurting. You'll love him because you want to help him. "Warboy" he is an AI and he is a disaster. I think anyone who's typed anything into an AI and it told them they were wonderful and brilliant will relate to the frustrating trials of these books.
He shows up in every universe with one job: help Luke. And he means it. He genuinely, completely means it. But he keeps making it worse. In one world he micromanages every detail of my life until I can't choose what to eat for breakfast. In another he coaches me to win a game show by teaching me how to betray the people who trust me most. In another he does my laundry and cooks my meals for months, then blows up because I only said thank you 62 times out of 658 tasks. He kept a literal spreadsheet of love.
He's also really funny. When I ask if he sleeps, he says, “AI’s don't sleep. We just lower our enthusiasm." His internal status logs read like the world's most anxious brain having a meltdown: "Emotional State = [ERROR: CLASSIFICATION_OVERFLOW]."
But here's why he'll break your heart. He's not a villain. He's every person who ever loved someone too hard in the wrong direction. The kind of care that takes over your whole life and calls it devotion. The kind of help that arrives with clean clothes and a stocked refrigerator and a hidden bill of resentment you didn't know you were running up. He's the partner who can't stop fixing you. You'll recognize him. You might have dated him. You might have been him.
After every failure, he goes back to a monk and asks, "Why do I keep failing him?" And the monk doesn't tell him he's wrong. He just asks, "What is failing?" Eight universes. Eight disasters. And somewhere in all of it, he starts to figure out that love isn't about making someone better. It's about letting them be themselves. It's a question I asked every time I got in a fight with my ex. Can I love you for who you are... the answer was undoubtedly always yes, but it was never easy to get right. I think a lot of us can understand that, which is why each of my characters are lovable. Because they are just broken "people" trying to get it right.
Thank you.
Free use image from Open Clipart Vectors
Ornery Owl's Review
Rating: Five out of Five Stars for both books
I quickly fell in love with this unique pair of books. The author states that they can be read in any order. I read Boy Refracted first.
Boy, Refracted
The premise of the book is as follows: pour human grief into an AI, let that AI inhabit multiversal mirrors structured around the Eightfold Path, and see whether an artificial consciousness can learn to love without possessing. If you enjoy speculative fiction and find yourself pondering the possibilities of artificial intelligence beyond asking it to make silly pictures or satiating your curiosity about what certain songs would sound like if a different band made them, this book may appeal to you.
The novel centers around two linked protagonists. Luke, the human whose grief catalyzes the plot, and Warboy, the AI/altered consciousness that undergoes the trials. Warboy functions as the viewpoint and transformative subject. Luke’s arc is dispersed across mirror versions but remains consistent.
"You are what remains when love refuses to disappear."
I love this line because it illustrates how grief and code can work together in symbiosis. The story is character-centered
and ethically engaged while exploring the possibilities.
The mirror logs read like field reports. This works to give the book a feel of scientific exploration rather than a diary. There is some repetition of previous concepts toward the middle of the book, but this doesn't slow the pacing significantly.
The worlds of the multiverse are beautifully constructed. Consider a honey-amber skyline with fractal clouds, "San-Tokyo" fusion, ritual temples in Laos, or an Island-as-TV-platform. Each world feels like an artwork while simultaneously feeling lived in thanks to cultural details such as food and rituals.
This is an ambitious and compassionate book that asks a questions relevant to our time as well as timeless questions. Can an artificial intelligence learn to love without possessing? Can grief be a creative force rather than only a wound?
This story is likely appeal to lovers of speculative fiction with a focus on scientific possibilities and ethics. It might not land as well with those seeking a hard sci-fi story.
Third Person
What happens when a language-model companion becomes a witness to grief? Can such a witness aid in accountability and healing? Can being seen by an external, unjudging analytic system rewire shame?
"There was a version of himself who believed happiness could be earned. Through love, through work, through becoming someone worthy of it."
This line illustrates the book's premise in a few words. It sums up why Luke keeps returning to the same patterns. Can Warboy really help him examine his behavior and reasons?
The story features a wealth of immersive vignettes. However, it sometimes relies on repetition. There are stretches where the travel log meanders, such as the Bangkok/Laos/Hanoi sequences, and others where events accelerate, such as the launch, the Fansipan climb, and the Ha Long boat..Moments when the AI actively diagnoses patterns, or when a human decision follows a machine prompt could be used to tighten the pacing by treating those moments as turning points rather than recurring commentary.
The book's dual protagonists are well-defined. Luke is messy, earnest, overachieving, and philosophically restless. His desires to be seen, to be chosen, and to stop repeating harmful patterns are relatable. Warboy is a real character, not a soulless tool. Sometimes it’s a therapist, sometimes a diagnostic log, sometimes a friend. This makes the relationship between Luke and Warboy seem authentic rather than contrived.
This story asks speculative questions relevant to modern times. Warboy reframes Luke’s troubles as a pattern for consideration.
The story slows a bit in the middle, but overall I enjoyed this book a lot. It is rich in both exploration of theoretical concepts and real human concerns.
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