To me, breaking down barriers means bringing queer and trans experiences into genre spaces. My stories reflect the growing presence of queer narratives across multiple genres (grimdark, literary fiction, new weird). 

In the Black Rain Chronicles, you'll explore the world of Etherel through the eyes of an ensemble cast all preparing for the end of an era, and the rise of a new host of gods to challenge the old. They will shape this new era in their image, but will they bring about peace? Or will theirs be an era of destruction? 

In the Luckborn Series, the gods treat mortals as pieces in an intricate game. Having grown bored in their time in power, and with their jealousy for their elder kin worn openly, their game takes on a sinister twist when a soothsayer sings a song to shape the future, one which threatens their standing as mortal kind's overlords, and tears a tale of two lovers out of the histories forever. 

A standalone, Boundless leans into the literary, playing with unorthodox structure and nonlinear storytelling while unpacking the story of a nonbinary villain who's one great wish is to create a family of people as untethered to reality as him. There are those who would seek to stop him, but no one wins out clean in a world where superpowers come at the cost of untethering one from their concept of self. In the midst of it all, one man attempts to teach a class of college students, his own grandson among them, to avoid this power by find satisfaction in themselves. 

The works I publish as Holden Cummings provide sharp contrast to the bleak tellings and sprawling conflicts I write as D. A. Holley, but the worldbuilding and character development do not suffer. Wicked Hunger Iron Law centers two romantic entanglements in a sexually charged, gay fiction narrative set inside a hardline faith. In this and other planned works, the hypocrisy inherent in religious systems is interrogated alongside what it means to reach for the escape hatch, what the freedom to live our truths costs, and how love is ultimately a force of liberation. In a religion that condemns gay men while using their bodies as fuel to perform their miracles, three men find themselves questioning the teachings of their faith, and begin the process of deprogramming through tender moments, explorations of love and sex, and the warm embrace of truth.