Introduction to the 2nd Edition
When Renley died in the summer of 2021, he left me the task of completing and publishing the anthology we had been working on together. I had spent nearly a year working to keep him alive and get him out of a dangerous environment. His death completely devastated me. Putting the book together and editing it kept me going for the first few months. I worked on it obsessively.
My plan was to publish the anthology along with Ren’s memoir, then kill myself. I share this not for shock value, but because this book literally saved my life, and I believe it might save you, too, if you are standing where I once stood.
Thankfully, my husband’s ceaseless dedication to keeping me alive, and my community of family and friends who surrounded me those first few years, are why I’m still here.
I poured my heart into the first edition, working with professional editors and formatters I hired on Reedsy. But I was deep in the throes of grief when I published it in 2021, just months after Ren died—unable to accept any changes beyond proofreading, unable to see clearly what the book needed to become.
It wasn’t until early 2024 that I felt able to revise the book again—this time to developmentally edit and expand each story. While I remain proud of the original edition, it wasn’t yet what Ren and I had envisioned. He’d planned significant revisions for his stories, and we intended all the stories to be set in a shared world: Reveria.
In a note Ren left behind titled, “Things I want Roo[1] to know just in case,” he wrote, “Roo, I hope you finish and publish our anthology. It would be really nice to have something out there like that. […] Live, please live. I love you, I love you, I love you. I love you so much.”
So here we are five years later. This is finally the book Renley and I dreamed of creating together. I hope I’ve done justice to his vision—and to the vision these stories developed on their own. Because this book transcended even us; it became a testament to the human spirit’s capacity to endure devastating loss, to the love that continues beyond death, to finding belonging when the world says there’s no place for you.
Come with me into these tales of broken and transcendent love. May they be tiny pricks of light piercing even the darkest night.
Tiffany Chu
November 2025
I called Ren, “Kochan,” which means, “beloved little one,” and he called me, “Roo,” a play on “kangaroo,” because I was his safe place. ↩︎
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