About Louis
Louis Flint Ceci has been a high school English teacher, a college professor of journalism and mass communications, a commercial actor, and a freelance science journalist. He was a software engineer before retiring in 2015.
His poetry appears in The Colorado-North Review and Impossible Archetype. He won the Gold Medal in the Poetic Justice Poetry Slam at the 2002 Gay Games in Sydney, Australia.
His short stories have appeared in Diseased Pariah News, Jonathan, and Trikone Magazine, and in the anthologies Queer and Catholic, Gay City Volume 4: At Second Glance, and Best Gay Erotica of the Year, #3. He has twice been a finalist in the Saints+Sinners short fiction contest. His four-novel series, The Croy Cycle, wrapped up with Leave Me Not Alone in 2022.
Ceci has published several scholarly articles on linguistics and poetics, and one on artificial intelligence, “Efficient Distribution of Back-Propagation Models on Parallel Architectures,” which he co-authored with Patrick Lynn and Phillip E. Gardner. It has not, to date, made its authors billionaires.
Ceci is an avid U.S. Masters swimmer, and he has competed in the International Gay and Lesbian Aquatics World Championships in 2020 and 2024, and in the 2026 Gay Games in Valencia, Spain.
He lives in Nevada City, California.
Louis Flint Ceci has been a high school English teacher, a college professor of journalism and mass communications, a commercial actor, and a freelance science journalist. He was a software engineer before retiring in 2015.
His poetry appears in The Colorado-North Review and Impossible Archetype. He won the Gold Medal in the Poetic Justice Poetry Slam at the 2002 Gay Games in Sydney, Australia.
His short stories have appeared in Diseased Pariah News, Jonathan, and Trikone Magazine, and in the anthologies Queer and Catholic, Gay City Volume 4: At Second Glance, and Best Gay Erotica of the Year, #3. He has twice been a finalist in the Saints+Sinners short fiction contest. His four-novel series, The Croy Cycle, wrapped up with Leave Me Not Alone in 2022.
Ceci has published several scholarly articles on linguistics and poetics, and one on artificial intelligence, “Efficient Distribution of Back-Propagation Models on Parallel Architectures,” which he co-authored with Patrick Lynn and Phillip E. Gardner. It has not, to date, made its authors billionaires.
Ceci is an avid U.S. Masters swimmer, and he has competed in the International Gay and Lesbian Aquatics World Championships in 2020 and 2024, and in the 2026 Gay Games in Valencia, Spain.
He lives in Nevada City, California.
Secrets simmer in a small town, longing stirs beneath the surface, and something wild waits to break through
Bradley Holt’s life is coming apart. His husband is gone, his Silicon Valley job is slipping, and the future he counted on no longer feels secure. Then, at Beltane, an ancient spring festival marking one of the cross-quarter days between seasons, he meets Daniel, a warm, enigmatic presence from a seaside monastery in San Lucca, Bradley’s old hometown.
Going back means facing everything he left behind: a homophobic brother, a sister in crisis, an old crush with secrets of his own, and a town where long-held grudges hide behind polite smiles. As the cross-quarter days approach, San Lucca grows stranger, as if some buried truth is pressing toward the surface. A meteor blazes overhead. Wildfires rage. A body washes ashore. Another person vanishes.
When the cross-quarter days arrive, everything tilts. Disasters stack up—an earthquake, a meteor blazing overhead, wildfires, a body washed ashore, and another person missing. Each feels aimed at Bradley’s heart, but is the driving force malevolent or mere chance?
Drawn to Daniel and back into the life he thought he had escaped, Bradley must confront the past and the forces gathering around him.