A fellow autistic writer worried...

A fellow Autistic writer, expressed their fears about being published:

Anyone here have autism? I’d love to hear some advice on what, if anything, is different about self publishing with ASD. I’m a little worried that my work will look a little off to readers. Do people with autism write differently? I’ve noticed that sometimes my posts on Reddit can be a little misunderstood. Also, I’ve been self-conscious that the way I speak is noticeably different and more monotone than others. So, I’m probably not going to be good at narration. But is there anything stopping me from learning how to write stuff that others would want to read? -SOURCE

Let’s talk about this.

I have Kanner’s Syndrome (the type of Autism aka Low Functioning Autistic Savant, seen in the movies RainMan and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape). I also have Selective Mutism and was born legally blind (meaning I have some vision, but not much; only a few inches).

It is extremely difficult for me to do ALMOST EVERYTHING. Literally everything. I need help with eating, using the toilet, getting dressed, brushing my hair, even just walking. Almost everything that normal people do without thinking about it, I am completely incapable of doing. But I can type.

I had to learn to type because, there is no other way to communicate with me. Because I am mute, you MUST read what I write, in order to “hear” what I have to say.

But it is difficult to find a person who can speak or see, who is willing to stop zipping around quickly, long enough to take the time to read my replies to anything they say. People say hello, how are you doing and are gone from the room before I can type hello back.

This had the result of me being very lonely, because no one who can speak or see is willing to spend time with a blind, mute, retard like myself. So I created a trio of fictional characters and started writing stories about them.

The main character, like myself has Mutism and is a Low Functioning Autistic Savant. His husband, like me is blind. I made them have the disabilities I have, so that unlike me, they could have friends who would spend time with them.

Since I published the first book 48 years ago in 1978, I have since published 138 novels, 423 novellas, and more than 2k short stories featuring this mute autistic savant main character and his blind husband.

And I have sold more ten million copies in those 48 years.

For the last 2 decades, I do book signings at cosplay/anime/geek conventions. The single most common response I get from people in line, waiting for me to sign my books is: “What’s the joke? Who’s this retard? Where’s the author?”

I have to point to a sign that says “I am mute, and a low functioning Autistic Savant, and yes, I am the author. Yes, I am retarded, but yet, I’m not stupid, my brain works, I can think, I can write, and I can perfectly understand what you say.”

People are always shocked to learn that someone like me, who spends most of my days sitting on the floor rocking back and forth for hours on end, has the ability to think, has the ability to type, and had to ability to defy the naysayers and publish 138 novels, 423 novellas, and more than 2k short stories, which went on to sell 10 million copies.

You don’t let ANYONE tell you that you can’t write.

I have low functioning non verbal savant autism (same type of autism as seen in the movies RainMan and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape) and so I was never allowed to go to school, and never learned anything like math or numbers or science stuff or time or money or whatever else they teach you in school. Not grade school, not high school, not college. However because I am mute, my grandmother taught me how to write when I was 3 years old. I never learned sign language because I am legally blind. So there is no ability for me to talk with you vocally with my mouth and if you want to talk to me you MUST read what I write on paper. This is why I always have a pen and notebook with me.How being a nonverbal Autistic mute, made me a very good writer.Why did you become a writer?

I became a writer as a toddler because I have non verbal autism and writing was the only way I could communicate.

I was writing at 3 years old, which I’m told most people don’t even know the alphabet until they are 5 and rarely write full sentences before age 8. Yet I published my first book at age 3.

And it was very simply the fact that the ONLY way to communicate with me was for you to take the time and sit down and wait for me to write my answer to you, then you had to read it.

Well, 50 years later, I still write to communicate.

But, in that time, I’ve learn that when someone says good morning, they are gone 100+ yards down the road, before I even have a chance to pull out a pen and paper, so I don’t even get a chance to start writing good morning back to them before they are gone.

It is frustrating being mute and never having been taught sign language (because in the 1970s the nearest sign language school was $20k per semester and my dad’s income was only $7k a year) because no one will take the time to slow down long enough to let me write an answer to what they say to me.

Verbal people do not realize how inconsiderate and rude they are to us nonverbal people. We go days, weeks, months, even years between finding a single person who slows down long enough to notice the mute is trying to write and answer to them.

Worst part is, they will get mad and yell at you and call you rude for not answering them, and be too busy being rude themselves to even look at the paper you are showing them telling them you are mute!

Well, end result is in 1996, I started blogging online because, I was fed up with not one single offline person spending time with me, because verbal people exclude mutes from everything. It’s like we are invisible because we can’t scream loud enough to be heard.

I took up writing daily online as a way to communicate because people online take the time to read my words and finally for the first time in my life I could have actual back and forth conversations with people who slowed down long enough to give me time to type an answer to them.

Now I have published 138 novels, 423 novellas, 500 poems, and over 3k short stories in addition to over 10k blog posts.

Being an Autistic mute offline left me isolated from society, but it made me a very prolific writer online.

Why did you become a writer?

Well because of this, I became good at writing. But not anything else. So when I write online it is just me haveing a conversations because I don’t know any other way to write.

Me writing is just me taking because I do not have the ability to talk any other way.

That is why my writing style has a “unique voice” and does not follow any sort of “writing conventions” — because I don’t know the grammar rules, as I was never taught grammar rules. I just write the way I “talk”, which in my case means the way I think, because I can’t talk.

There will be haters in your reviews. It very common for people to leave reviews that say: “Retarded books about retarded characters, written by a retarded author” — in fact, that exact quote appears on my Amazon reviews more then FIVE HUNDRED times, a single reader, created multiple accounts to spam that same phrase across all of my books.

Yes. I am retarded and so is my main character, because I write him to have the exact same disabilities I have.

The Pink Necromancer - Quaraun

My main character, Quaraun, dubbed by his haters as Quaraun the Insane, a title he hates. Bullies in the books, call him Quaraun the Insane, because he has Kanner’s Syndrome, and is a Selective Mute Low Functioning Autistic Savant. He loves pink frilly, ruffled dresses, silver jewellery, purple unicorns, and has a massive phobia of germs, OCD levels of cleanliness, suffers from huge fits of punding and stimming, spends hours cleaning his dresses and sweeping floors because of his obsessive germophobias.

Quaraun refuses to let scissors cut his hair, which is twelve feet long. While he can speak to his husband BoomFuzzy the Unicorn, he is incapable of speaking to others and taps out morse code with his rings on a metal plate which hangs from his belt. He is often bullied about his wearing of pink ruffled dresses, and falsely accused of trying to pass himself off as female, even though he is not trying to be female and has no ability to mentally comprehend why he, a male, is not allowed to wear pink dresses.

Though an elderly man, Quaraun often acts like a toddler. He suffers from an abnormal social approach when trying to interact with others, causing others to see him as rude, arrogant, and inconsiderate, much to his confusion. He has too a severe failure of using normal back-and-forth conversation. He sits silent when someone directly addresses him, often unaware that he is expected to reply, then struggling to do so when told he should say something. But in the company of BoomFuzzy or GhoulSpawn, his mutism “mysteriously vanishes” and he talks endlessly in a long pontificating monologue style, with thesaurus-like words, which goes on and on and on and doesn’t stop even when others leave the room and leave him sitting by himself still talk, now to no one.

Flashbacks to his childhood, show him as avoiding contact with children, spending time lining things up by rainbow colour, quietly sitting on the floor rocking back and forth, or being clueless in any ability to understand how to play or why adults think he should want to play.

He suffers from abnormalities in eye contact, avoiding looking at faces, often sitting in a way to not directly be in line with anyone who might speak to him. He prefers spending time with his blind husband, over anyone else, BECAUSE his husband is blind and does not demand Quaraun make eye contact. Quaraun has rigid body language and a deficit in understanding the body language of others. His use of gestures is limited and he is often frightened by “normal” gestures people use while talking. He has a total lack of facial expressions, never smiles, never laughs, and uses nonverbal communication, with everyone except for BoomFuzzy, GhoulSpawn, and ZooLock.

Quaraun and BoomFuzzy

Quaraun is seen spending hours on end sitting at his weaving loom, quietly weaving yard upon yard of endless pink silk. Only interrupted by sessions of dying threads, feeding silkworms, harvesting cocoons, sewing silk outfits, and embroidering silk.

Every night before bed, Quaraun spends several hours unpacking, sorting, then repacking, the same box. A fancy wooden box, filled with dozens of small coloured glass bottles. He careful removes each one, lines them all up on the floor, the carefully places them back in the box. He can not explain why he does it. And he has full blown melt downs, screaming hysterically and hitting himself in the head if anyone interrupts his nightly box unpacking and repacking ritual. *(With me it is Crayola crayons. the 128 Big Box. Unpack every night. Line up the crayons in rainbow colour. Then repack them. I have done it for five decades now and I do not know why.)*

Quaraun has no concept of deceit or telling lies or making jokes or using slang. This makes him incapable of lying, causing him to be seen as blunt and sometimes mean, because he simply states facts without any hint of emotion at all, causing people to think he is “telling on them”. This makes it easy for normal people who lie, cheat, have motives, and think devant thoughts, to gaslight him or take advantage of him. Because Quaraun does not understand the concept of lying, he believes everything everyone tells him at face value, and does not understand that evil people tell lies.

Quaraun can not do math or numbers. He does not know how to count, read clocks, read calendars, use money, tell time, or understand years and dates. Which also means Quaraun has no clue when he was born or how old he is.

In spite of being a merchant (silk weaver and tailor), Quaraun has no ability to do math and can not understand or figure out how to use or count money. This results in people often cheating him, as they will use trickery and deceit to get him to give them back more change then the amount they paid for an item. Quaraun relies on his husband BoomFuzzy and their live-in lover GhoulSpawn to handle money with customers.

While some readers mistake the series for “Medieval Fantasy” due to the fact that cars and electricity are rarely seen, the fact is the series is actually set in an alternate dimension of 1970s Maine, and so cars and TVs and hospitals and electricity do in fact exist. But Quaraun lives completely off grid. He can not drive a car, he gathers and grows his own food, he uses candles for light. He avoids cities and highways, so rarely encounters buildings with electricity or roads with cars.

Quaraun husband and lover both have cars. BoomFuzzy has a 1968 VW Bus converted to a food truck and GhoulSpawn drives a 1974 AMC Gremlin. Quaraun himself, has a Vardo (wooden covered wagon) that is towed by a pair of moose.

Quaraun is homeless, incapable of understand the logic behind living in a house, Quaraun lives in a pink silk tent that he sets up along roadsides.

When upset, Quaraun packs up everything he owns into a bag of holding, and starts walking. He walks hundreds of miles each week. Staying to the coastline, and walking all the way to the top of the continent, then turning around and walking all the way back to the bottom of the continent, repeating this, year after year.

Quaraun is hypersensitive to light, often sleeping during the day and doing everything at night, to avoid the sunlight.

Quaraun is hypersensitive to sound and avoids noises at all costs, especially music. He will allow no music or instruments near him.

Quaraun is hypersensitive to touch, and hyper allergic to most types of fabric which is why he only wears silk and fur pelts — the only two types of cloth which do not cause his skin to break out in blister rashes and hives.

He does all these things, because I do all these things.

I have Autism. Non-verbal low functioning Autism.

Additionally I have MS, and have extreme limited use of most of my body, as a result, including I have no grip strength in my hands, so I can not lift anything over ten pounds.

As for my eyes, I am legally blind in the daytime but not at night, and I can not see people’s faces at all. There are three disorders which I have, which cause this.

They are:

I have those 3 things. That is why I can not see in daylight, can see at night, and can only identify people by their hair and clothing

If you change your hair or clothes, I rely on how your voice sounds to recognize you. I can not see or identify faces.

Cones control day vision. My cones are what is damaged, causing me to be legally blind in daylight.

Rods control night vision. My rods are not damaged and I have more then is normal, causing me to have night vision similar to a cats.

I had a serious head injury when I was 9 years old about a year after Grammy Helen died. I’ve not been able to see faces ever since.

And these are the eye disorders I write the character BoomFuzzy as having, because I know what it is like to live with them.

BoomFuzzy young

Additionally:

For those who are not long time readers of my website (which has been updated daily about my health since 1996) :

• In June 2016 I was diagnosed with what the doctor said was: “probably ALS, but there is no test for ALS, it could be MS, but there is no test for that either”.

ALS is Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

While MS is Multiple Sclerosis, which is basically the same as ALS but has a longer/slower progression.

…while the diagnosis came in June 2016, the doctor started running weekly tests in October 2010, and ruled out 81 additional “MS-like” diseases first, until MS and ALS were the only 2 possibilities left.

• I had a stroke in 2010, which is what inspired the start of the tests, but I had the MS symptoms since the mid-1980s. They started showing up when I was 16 years old, after a 3 month illness that the doctor said “must be mono, but damn does this look like small pox”. Whatever I had when I was 16, it was never diagnosed, as the doctor said everything was showing small pox, but the doctor then said it wasn’t possible to be small pox. Whatever it was, it is was “triggered” the MS symptoms.

Because that ALS/MS diagnosis was a decade ago, the doctor is now saying “MS is more likely then ALS, but it could still be either”. There is no cure or treatment for either and no test to determine either, and it is a waiting game to see “is you don’t die in 10 years it’s likely not ALS because ALS kills most people within 2 years, while it takes MS 50+ years to kill you” (according to my doctor).

The only real difference between the 2 (according to my doctor), is ALS usually you die within 2 to 10 years, while MS you can linger on for decades. Though there are cases of ALS lingering for 50+ years as it did with Steven Hawking. In either case, be it MS or ALS — it means my muscles, ligaments, and nerves are deteriorating and overall I am losing use of my legs and arms..and the issue that is majorly impacting my going to PortCon, is it is also impacting my lungs.

• The act of standing up from a sitting down position, causes my lungs to seize and my heart rate to soar to 212 while my blood pressure rate drops to 60 — meaning the act of physically standing up, is so stressful on my lungs that I pass out-
• — which is why the last 2 years I was unable to attend PortCon alone, and why this year when no one could go with me, I was unable to stay for more than 2 hours each day.

PortCon 2024 was my 10th year attending, though life issues and health issues, caused me to only be able to attend 2 days this year, and only one panel each day. Unfortunately, my muscle and nerve deterioration has reached a point where I can now only stand up for very short amounts of time, and am only able to get out of bed for 2 or 3 hours MAX per day.

This means walking the vast halls of the Hilton Hotel, or trying to walk through the Maine Mall, have become nearly impossible. Each of the past 3 years, I’ve spent fewer and fewer hours at PortCon.

While I used to attend over a dozen conventions, festivals, and car shows every summer, PortCon is now the last remaining convention I still attend, and I’m not sure how much longer I am going to be able to do that.

• Additionally, I never regained use of my left hand after the stroke in 2010;
• while the ALS/MS is causing me to lose grip strength in both my hands and wrists, meaning I am now struggling to hold the cane, a thing I can not walk without since the 2013 golf club attack at SMCC
• The diagnosis is combined with an additional diagnosis of Psoriasis in May 2019, (which largly effects my skin, causing massive irritations for cloth and why I can only wear real silk, real cotton, or certain types of wool and rayon, but not any other type of fabrics). but also affects my lungs, heart, and liver as well.
• and Chronic tendinitis -a type of “muscle arthritis” not to be confused with tendinitis, which is a sports injury- a diagnosis from 2010, but I had symptoms of since the mid-1990s
• and Rheumatoid Arthritis which I was diagnosed with at age 4…the affects my pelvis, hips, knees, thumbs, and wrist joints…

While “regular” Arthritis affects your bones only, Rheumatoid Arthritis, affects your joints, cartalige, muscles, and blood vessels

• I have had hip dysplasia since an improperly healed broken hip that happened when I was 4, and this is why I have never been able to run my entire life, and from age 4 to 37 walked with a tall walking stick, that was shoulder height, but from 37 onward switched to a cane
• when I was 14, my jaw was broken from being beaten in the face with a cinder block brick; the bone fused my jaw shut, and I was fully 100% mute from the age of 14, until June 2016 at the age of 42, when, during an MRI, the doctor discovered the fused jaw bone and made the discovery “OMG! she’s not a dumb mute!”

… the following week, surgery to my jaw, removed the bone and 7 of my teeth, the who section replaced with a 3d-printed kiln fired ceramic bone and teeth… and from June 2016 to currently, I now have some VERY LIMITED ability to make verbal sounds….

• ….unfortunatly 30+ years of never having used my voice, my vocal chords grew incorrectly and are not wide enough or strong enough to make normal voice sounds.

This is why my voice is a “whisper” and an “extreme high pitch like a dog whistle”.

• What that means is, I am now able to “speak” but you MUST be stand face to face, looking at my face, in order to hear me. I can not speak ‘audibly loud” and can not do things like shout or yell at all because I can not raise my voice. The whisper sound of my voice is so low, that if you are beside me but facing away from me, you will not hear it.

Additionally, as I have been fully 100% mute for three decades, it was recently discovered I have no understand of how to sound out words. I have no knowledge of how to move my tounge or lips, to cause sounds to form, and while I know what the words sound like, I simply do not know how to make those sounds. Meaning I have an extremely limited vocal vocabulary, on par with a 4 or 5 year old child; though this slowly changes as I study how to speak. Unfortunatly, because I am bedridden, I am often weeks, months, sometimes years, between coming face to face with a person, and so have limited opportunities to practice speaking.

Attempts to talk to relatives, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbours, simply results in them calling me “a fucking retard”, saying I am “too retarded to live”, or yelling that “will someone just shoot that fucking retard in the head!”.

“You deserve to be shot” is the single #1 responce relatives and neighbours have to my attempts to try to speak verbal, which has further resulted in I simply stopped trying to talk to anyone at all.

Someone talked to me today.
Kind people are so rare.medium.com

• All of that is on top of the November 14, 2013 severed spine injury by the still unidentified Claire woman, who broke my spine at Southern Maine Community College, with a golf club, same day she murdered my 8month old baby, that injury left my paralized for 5 months, and 18 months relearning to use my arms and legs, and I’m now 11 years into relearning to use my legs just from that injury.
• Everything we are allowed to publicly release about the FBI murder investigation into my son’s murder, can be found via this link — — If you have any information about my son’s murder, please give it to FBI agent Andy Drewer at 207–774–9322 or at his office 1 Middle Street, 4th floor, Portland, Maine

If you have any information about my son’s murder, please give it to FBI agent Andy Drewer at…
If you have any information about my son’s murder, please give it to FBI agent Andy Drewer at 207–774–9322 or at his…medium.com

It is why I can not run away or call out for help when bullies attack, as well as why it is so easy for attackers to sneak up on me and me not see them coming.

For those of you online reading this, who do not know me offline. I am like this:

This is how I talk.

I am retarded.

I have Autism, I act like THIS:

THIS is how I talk and act:

And if you didn’t know that, then you fucking didn’t know me! So stop claiming you do!

Yes. I am retarded and so is my main character, because I write him to have the exact same disabilities I have.

And because of that, I also have hundreds of reviews from parents and siblings of Autistic people who say they are glad I made my character as I did, because seeing the world through his eyes, helped them to better understand how their autistic child sees the world.

There will be naysayers, there will be bullies, there will be bigots, but you ignore them, and you write your books, exactly the way you see the world. You don’t be afraid to be who you are. Don’t let them use your disability as an excuse to sweep you under a rug.
 
Don’t try to write like others. Don’t try to “be normal”. You are your own normal. There is no normal that applies to everyone. Everyone is different. You write what is normal to you.

You don’t need to try to write what “everyone” wants to read. Write what YOU want to read. Then seek out the people who want to read that same type of thing. That’s what I did.

More Info is on these pages:

Do people do that?
medium.com

It's like I could have written this.
medium.com

Speaking American English is much more difficult than writing it.
I have become very good at writing the American English Language, but I am terrible at trying to speak it.medium.com

Relearning to Walk
Edit descriptionmedium.com

Frustrations of relearning to walk
A look at how far I’ve come in 10 years of physical therapy, and how much further there is still to go before I can…medium.com

Is it true you are an alien abductee?
Amphibious Aliens — Medium Editionmedium.com

What even IS relatable content?
Does anyone really know?medium.com

Readers Who Engage With Hundreds of Medium Writers Each Day aka More Thoughts on Relearning To Walk
A look at life with a broken spinemedium.com

Old Orchard Beach & Biddeford, Maine, USA
Old Orchard Beach & Biddeford, Maine, USAmedium.com

On Living With Autism
On Living With Autismmedium.com

Character Creation Tips
Character Creation Tips-The Adventures of Quaraun The Insane💟🌸🦄| Cozy Short Slice of Life Dark Fantasy Furry Bara…medium.com

Wait, are there really 10 years olds who don’t know how to cook?
An unexpected rant.medium.com

Is kindness a lost art?
Writers Behaving Badly on Reddit…medium.com

US Coast Guard @ Old Orchard Beach, Maine (April 24, 2024)
Update: We found out what was going on.medium.com

On Writing Yaoi (Gay Hentai aka Gay Monster porn)
On Writing Yaoi (Gay Hentai aka Gay Monster porn)-The Adventures of Quaraun The Insane💟🌸🦄| Cozy Short Slice of Life…medium.com

What Is This Site?

 | Index |

How did you build your audience?
Not online, that's for sure.
aka How to sell ten million books
aka How I sold ten million books.

The Park Bench Method of Writing

(just the article)

or

The Park Bench Method of Writing

(with the list of 10k writing prompts - takes a LONG TIME to load - SEVERAL MINUTES!)

Why I am not proud of Disability Pride Month.
In fact, I think it’s deplorable and downright offensive.

Crazy Woman Just Attacked - No Clue Why or Who She Is

(August 14, 2025)

This page was written by Wendy Christine Allen of 146 Portland Ave, Old Orchard Beach, Maine.

All Rights Reserved.