Writing the Story That Wrote Back

I did not expect writing Ink & Saltwater to be therapeutic.

When I first started shaping the story, I wanted to write historical fiction. I wanted it to follow a transgender man aboard the Titanic in 1912. I wanted romance, danger, secrecy, class tension, and the emotional pressure of being caught between how the world sees you and who you know yourself to be.

What I did not expect was how much of myself I would find in the pages.

Ink & Saltwater follows Tom, a trans man traveling as his true self at a time when language, safety, and visibility were very different. He boards the Titanic carrying more than a suitcase. He carries fear, hope, shame, relief, a body he has learned to manage, a name he is trying to trust, and a future he is unsure he deserves.

Somewhere along the way, writing him became more than just creating a character. It became a way for me to understand myself.

There were moments while writing Tom when I had to pause because I finally articulated something I had carried for years. The self-image issues, the constant checking, the way you study yourself before the world can see you. The way one wrong glance, one wrong word, or one wrong assumption can send your mind spiraling. The way you correct yourself before anyone else can, as if you can somehow get ahead of the world.

Writing those feelings in a modern essay is one thing. Writing them through Tom, in another time, under another name, in another life, gave me distance. Somehow, that distance made me more honest.

There is something strange about writing historical fiction as a trans person. You begin to see how much of your experience has always existed, even when the world lacked language for it. The fear of being seen incorrectly, the ache to be called the right thing, the quiet joy of being recognized, even for a moment, and the grief of knowing your body may tell a story you never agreed to tell.

Those feelings are not new. They are old. Older than us. Older than our language. Older than the arguments people continue to have about us.

Because when I wrote Tom, I was not just creating a modern person and placing him in the past. I was exploring what it would mean for someone like him to exist in a time with no space for him, no easy words for him, and no guarantee of safety if the wrong person looked too closely.

That is where the healing started. I got to write down the fear. I got to write down the relief. I got to write down the small moments that feel nearly impossible to explain unless you have lived them. A stranger saying "sir." A shirt sitting right for once. The careful breath before entering a room. The strange loneliness of understanding yourself deeply while everyone else sees only the outline they expect.

Putting those moments on paper gave them shape. They stopped being heavy things swirling in my chest and became scenes, dialogue, silence, touch, weather, salt air, a ship hallway, a journal entry, a man trying to believe he is allowed to exist.

Maybe that is why this book has become so important to me.

Tom's story gave me a way to speak to parts of myself I did not always know how to reach. There is self-correction in this book because there is self-correction in me. There is body grief in this book because there has been body grief in me. There is hope in this book because I need hope to deal with the truth of it all.

Writing Ink & Saltwater helped me realize that some things I thought were too personal, complicated, or hard to explain were actually very human. Fear of being known, wanting to be loved honestly, and carrying old versions of yourself like ghosts. Wondering if being seen is worth the risk.

That is not just a trans story. But for queer and trans people, it resonates differently.

So many of us grow up without seeing ourselves in history. We are told, directly or indirectly, that we are new, modern, or just a trend, a debate, a headline, or a problem people recently invented.

But we have always been here. Maybe not always safely. Maybe not always openly. Maybe not always named in ways we would call ourselves now.

But here. In quiet rooms. In hidden letters. In chosen names whispered. In clothes worn with trembling hands. In love stories that history never cared to record.

That is part of what I want Ink & Saltwater to do.

I want it to give voice to the lives history overlooks. I want queer readers to open the book and feel that familiar sense of recognition. I want trans readers to see a piece of themselves in a place they were told they did not belong. I want people who have never thought deeply about gender to feel, even for a moment, what it is like to navigate the world while constantly weighing safety against truth.

Selfishly, I wanted to write a trans man into a story this grand: a story filled with romance, fear, beauty, tragedy, and hope.

Because we deserve more than side notes. We deserve full stories.

We deserve sweeping stories, messy stories, and tender stories. Stories where our bodies are complex, our hearts are real, and our love is not treated like an afterthought.

Writing this novel gave me something I did not know I needed. It allowed me to explore my own reflection without looking directly into the mirror. It gave me a character who could carry some of my questions. It created a world where I could express my grief, hope, fear, and longing, and watch them take shape outside of me.

That is the strange magic of writing. Sometimes you think you are creating a story. Then the story turns around and helps you understand yourself.

As I begin pre-launching Ink & Saltwater, I keep returning to that feeling. The excitement, yes. The nerves, absolutely. The wild thought that people may soon meet Tom, Nora, Clara, and the whole world I have been building in my mind.

But beneath all of that is something quieter.

Gratitude. Gratitude that this story found me. Gratitude for being able to write it. Gratitude that somewhere between ink and saltwater, I found words for parts of myself I thought might always remain unspoken.

If this book can do even a small part of that for someone else, then it will have mattered to me. To those history forgets. To those still trying to believe their stories deserve to be told.

Because they do.