B Xen Osiris Zane

B. Xen Osiris Zane is an actor, musician, DJ, filmmaker, and — since you're reading this — an author too, usually writing in the genres of Supernatural Fantasy and Dark Comedy, with stories built around strong LGBTQ+ characters.

His first published book fell outside that usual lane: This Marine's American Dream, the ghostwritten autobiography of his former father-in-law, Arthur Talmadge Sr.

Zane's writing life started in elementary school, where he won awards for haiku about family love — poems the judges never realized were actually about his favorite 1970s show, Happy Days. The strict syllable count made the disguise easy. Since then, he's put his writing to work as a lyricist, poet, journalist, LARP plot developer, storyteller, and screenwriter.

That love of screenwriting led him to begin the screenplay Cursed — until a sudden genetic condition triggered a cascade of autoimmune responses that left him temporarily blind and unable to use his hands or legs. He paused writing to recover, but kept building the story in his head, and once he was stable enough, wrote its first three episodes.

The scripts were well received by his peers — less so by the film industry, which rejected them for either the concept or the lack of dollar signs. Every rejection came with its own conflicting notes: expand this role, make that character "juicy enough to entice big-name stars." Zane revised accordingly, only to have the next industry read hand him a harsher critique for the changes he'd just made. Eventually the scripts had been rewritten into something unrecognizable from what he'd started with.

Disenchanted with a process that kept producing stories with almost no real chance of ever being made, Zane scrapped the mangled screenplay drafts and adapted the original concept into novel form to self-publish instead — and the Cursed Worlds series was born. Although The Cursed & the Tall Man was actually written first, Zane chose to release Blood Elf as the series' true introduction.

Blood Elf is told in two parts (together, Blood Elf and the Order of the Stone, Parts One and Two) were originally slated for a 2020 release, pushed back to 2026. Part Two arrives this November, with The Cursed & the Tall Man following in 2027.

Also landing in 2027 is Obligations, his second book outside his usual genre — a memoir about uprooting his life in San Francisco and moving back to Boston to care for an adult parent he barely knew, and didn't especially like, simply because there was no one else who would, and why he would gladly do it again if he had to .

When he's not in the middle of one creative pursuit or another, B. Xen Osiris Zane enjoys making music with his husband, Wetzel, and their dogs, Gilligan, Tasty, and Fawkes.