Wayne Stroud

Books

Available on Amazon

Start with Wayne's debut novel, a Southern romance story about home, memory, love, and the impossible choices that define a life.

Front cover of That Old Yellow Light by Wayne Stroud — Available now on Amazon Kindle and Paperback

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Featured Book

That Old Yellow Light

Available Now Kindle Edition Paperback Edition

A Southern romance novel about home, memory, love, and the impossible choices that shape who we become.

Penny Chesney left home at fifteen. She learned quickly how the world worked—how to build something bigger, something better, something that made sense.

Now she's back. And everything she thought she understood doesn't feel as certain as it used to.

One man offers her a life most people never even get to see—a world of quiet wealth, effortless beauty, and the kind of future where every problem has already been solved before it begins. He lays Georgia at her feet on a silver platter.

The other offers her nothing she can hold. No plans. No promises. No easy answers. Just the same steady presence she's always known. And the moon.

Does she choose a life of dazzling luxury… or will she take the moon over Georgia?

View on Amazon Amazon Author Page

Southern Fiction · ISBN 978-1-963287-01-5

Projects

Upcoming Series

Wayne is currently developing two major series: a brutal dark dystopian romance trilogy and a six-book Southern Gothic supernatural mystery series.

Cover art for The Pain Trade: Borrowed by Wayne Stroud

Featured Upcoming Series

The Pain Trade Trilogy

Book One: Borrowed

Coming Soon Dark Dystopian Romance

She carries their pain. He feels nothing.

In the city of Velmora, pain is currency.

Mica Gentry survives by absorbing suffering for the wealthy while Daxian DeMarrow, a man engineered to feel nothing, serves the regime that profits from it.

When their lives collide, they uncover a secret hidden beneath the foundations of their world—one powerful enough to destroy everything built on stolen pain.

The Trilogy

Borrowed
Broken
Unbroken

Read Full Blurb

The Pain Trade: Borrowed is Book 1 of a brutal dark dystopian romance trilogy for readers of enemies-to-lovers, morally gray love interests, slow-burn obsession with teeth, and heroines who refuse to break.

In a world where pain is currency, she's the one who pays.

Mica Gentry was born a Bearer — branded the moment she could feel, sold the moment she could bleed. In the drowned slums of Velmora, the rich don't hurt. They pay people like her to hurt for them. Surgeries. Childbirth. Heartbreak. Every wound the elite refuse to feel gets routed through her body for the price of bread.

She has a secret. She can absorb more than anyone should survive.

Daxian DeMarrow doesn't feel anything. Not pain. Not pleasure. Not grief. They cut it out of him when he was a boy and made him the coldest enforcer in the Consortium. He has spent eighteen years watching Bearers break on his transfer tables. He has never noticed one.

Until her.

When Mica is branded to a private contract she can't refuse, Daxian is the man assigned to watch her bleed. He sees what no one else has noticed — she's lying to the meter. She's surviving what should kill her. And the more she bears, the more he feels — for the first time since they made him into a weapon.

Then she discovers the truth.

The pain in the Consortium's vaults isn't being traded.

It's being stolen.

She was born to carry their pain.

Now she'll make them feel every drop of it.

Also In Development

The Red Clay Covenant Series

Book One: Rootbound

Coming Soon Southern Gothic Supernatural Mystery

Some inheritances don't give you a house. They give you the lock on a door that should never open.

When Renee Hale returns to Briar Glen to settle an inheritance she never wanted, she discovers her family has spent generations guarding a secret buried beneath the red clay.

A secret that remembers.

A secret that knows her name.

The Six-Book Series

Rootbound
Bloodrot
Hollowbone
Blackwater
Ashfall
Reckoning

Read Full Blurb

Renee Hale never wanted anything from Briar Glen.

Not the old white house rotting on Hale Lot 9. Not the family name everyone in town seems to recognize before she says it. And definitely not the inheritance notice that drags her back to a place she barely remembers—one built on red clay, courthouse records, buried secrets, and doors that don't always open where they should.

The Hales have guarded something beneath their land for generations.

Or maybe they've been feeding it.

When Renee arrives to settle the estate, the town begins answering in ways no town should. Records rewrite themselves. Forgotten names rise from the dirt. Old debts come due. And Elias Turner—the dangerously unreadable man who knows far more than he admits—warns her that claiming Hale Lot 9 may cost more than walking away ever could.

But Renee has spent her life refusing to be owned by other people's choices.

As the truth beneath Briar Glen begins to wake, she discovers her inheritance is not a gift. It is a position in an ancient covenant built by six founding families, each bound to a role, each hiding a sin, each responsible for keeping something nameless under the red clay.

Something that is learning.

Something that remembers.

Something that now knows her name.

With the help of a loyal best friend, a relentless record keeper, and a man whose protection may be as dangerous as his secrets, Renee must decide whether to preserve the lies that kept Briar Glen standing—or rewrite the covenant before the thing beneath the town finds a way out.

Southern Gothic atmosphere, slow-burn romance, haunted family legacy, and rules-based supernatural danger collide in the first book of The Red Clay Covenant series.

Because some inheritances don't give you a house.

They give you the lock on a door that should never open.

Currently Writing

The Pain Trade: Borrowed

Wayne's current writing focus is Borrowed, the first book in The Pain Trade Trilogy.

Status

Drafting Book One

Series

The Pain Trade Trilogy

Also In Development

Rootbound, Book One of The Red Clay Covenant

About Wayne

Wayne Stroud spent more than thirty years working in IT security technology—a career built on logic, structure, and solving problems. Somewhere along the way, he developed a much stronger interest in creating stories.

Storytelling has been a lifelong obsession. Long before writing novels, Wayne spent decades both playing and DMing Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, building worlds, guiding adventures, and occasionally watching players destroy months of careful planning in under fifteen minutes.

Over the years, he also wrote a substantial amount of fan fiction inspired by games such as Motor City Online, EverQuest, Diablo, and many others. Looking back, the novels were probably inevitable.

Today, Wayne is the co-founder and lead story writer of Sabel's Library, an interactive storytelling platform focused on character-driven adventures where player choices shape the outcome. The experience reinforced something he has always believed: people may remember the plot, but they never forget the characters who made them feel something.

Over the years, the formats have changed—from Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, to fan fiction, to interactive storytelling, and now novels—but the passion behind them has remained exactly the same: telling stories people enjoy getting lost in.

Wayne is a U.S. Army veteran and lives in the Forney, Texas area with his wife, Michelle, three Boxers, three cats, and a growing collection of story ideas that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.

When he's not writing, he's usually reading, spending time with family, tinkering with technology, or trying to convince himself that starting another writing project is somehow a better idea than finishing the ones already in progress.