Author Interview: Oleander Blume

Let's talk about Caring for Your Clown

Dec 28, 2025

Today we’ve got an author interview with Oleander Blume. The first three books in the Caring for Your Clown series are out now, with book 4 coming in 2026. If you’re looking for a contemporary sci-fi series with alien clowns and loads of trauma, you’re in the right place.

Caring for Your Clown has
- largely queer cast
- alien clowns
- lots of trauma
- emotional rollercoaster
- lots of laughs
- hurt/comfort
- grumpy/sunshine

Oliver Tarsul is a mostly average 14-year-old kid; aside from being the unwilling roommate to an interdimensional space clown his step-father solicited to rebuild a portal designed by his recently deceased mother. Things are more than a little complicated. Regardless, dealing with a gelatinous slime monster in the shape of a clown girl named Dindet, while also trying to stay under the radar as the only trans kid in school, proves to be significantly harder than he imagined. But the fallout of his mother’s supposed death didn’t just bring into question what she was working on and who she was working with. It also brought along with it a part of Oliver’s past that he’d rather just forget. His biological father.

Thank you to Oleander for taking the time to do this interview with us!

Aliens Are Real is the first book in the Caring for Your Clown series. Did you always know this would be a series, or was it something that happened during the process?

I knew I wanted to write a very specific story where my two main characters would have somewhat inverted arcs, I had initially planned on it being one book, but realized quite quickly that the story had to be split into a series to encompass everything I wanted to do. It went from one book, to three, then five, now six books are planned for Caring for Your Clown and I’m just a little over the halfway point!

When did you first come up with the idea for Caring for Your Clown?

I am afraid of clowns, so I wanted to make something that would make me less afraid of clowns. I started with the original idea back in 2019, after finishing a weirdly successful fanfiction, haha.
Originally, Caring for Your Clown was a pitch bible for an animated series, but seeing as animation is more of a who you know industry, I decided to instead turn it into a series of novels.

Do you have a favourite line you'd like to share?

Honestly? I don’t really know, there are definitely lines I especially like, but I don’t know which is my favorite. One I particularly like is from Book 2: Trial and Error, “...and in that, for far less than any conceivable amount of time that was all so simultaneously at once—she was there.”

Who would you recommend Caring for Your Clown to?

I would recommend Caring for Your Clown to anyone who has experienced familial trauma, teenagers especially, and people who desire catharsis through characters. The story isn’t light, to say the least, but it’s the sort of story that I, as someone who grew up in a horrifically abusive home, would have wanted to be able to read during that time.
It’s not a pretty story, and I’m sure some would call it grotesque or in poor taste, but I also know many people who have directly told me that the scenes and way I approach uncomfortable topics like CSA and child abuse were incredibly needed and helpful to them in processing their own traumas, and that’s all I could ever ask for.

What is your favourite thing about this series? What’s something that makes it special or interesting?

Objectively, the Clowns. I had an absolute blast creating them as a species and building the greater world around them. The world-building is, I’d like to think, fairly subtle, but the Clowns as a species, their culture and class structure, society and politics within the greater Peace Zone Chronicles is just a hoot and a holler to write!

Do you have a favourite part of the writing process?

Probably world-building and structuring a scene. I am a very visual person, so I am imagining the scenes and chapters that play out in the series for hours on end, and once it’s marinated in my brain long enough, I write them down. So more than half my writing process is just *thinking* about it Real Hard. It’s very fun!

Do you know what your next project will be?

I have a ton of other projects in the works, Caring for Your Clown is one relatively small piece in a much larger timeline of stories I’ve titled The Peace Zone Chronicles, which has planned stand alone books and planned series, all of which take place in the same general multiverse, cataloguing major historic events of this world exclusively through key characters and stories that, on first impression, don’t seem to have much of a major role at all. It’s all very exciting, and quite an undertaking!

Have you always wanted to be an author? What inspired you to start?

Honestly, I love anything that involves creativity. I love art, music, animation, writing, poetry. I first began writing “novels” in middle school. I was twelve, and bad at it, but I was still quite proud of my silly werewolf stories.
My writing shifted into much darker territory during those years as an outlet for what I had been experiencing. I wrote about children my age experiencing the same things I had been, and eventually started writing poetry.
I had stopped writing recreationally for a good while until around 2019, when I’d gotten into fanfiction and gained confidence to write my own original works again.
I guess my inspiration really stems from the obsessive need to create, but through writing I am able to process a lot of the things I’ve been through and also provide an outlet for similar folks reading my works.

How long have you been writing?

Since I was about twelve, but professionally since 2019.

How much does your own life influence your work?

A lot. Though not necessarily intentionally. I almost always wrote from a perspective I am intimately familiar with, which is why my works focus very heavily on abuse, trauma, and healing. Originally I wrote thrillers and contemporary horror, but after reading contemporary teen literature in my high school years, I wanted to emulate that approach in my writing, but with a sci-fi twist.
Almost all of my works have incorporated real events I’ve personally experienced, twisted just enough to not be immediately recognizable, and those that are recognizable are mostly things I learned whilst in the process of after the matter and let me just say, that’s not an ideal for me. But, ha, it’s sort of par for the course for us deeply traumatized folks!

Is there anything interesting you’d like to share about yourself? A little author fun fact, perhaps?

I’m not sure? I don’t really think I’m all that interesting, other folks say I am, but I’m fairly certain it’s because I have a smorgasbord of hobbies. I draw, I animate, I compose and perform music, dance, juggle, and also write books!

What made you decide to self-publish?

I knew from the get-go that my books would not appeal to a traditional publishing house. Trad pub is first and foremost a business and they push books they believe will make the most money, and the books which are on trend. Science fiction is already a much smaller genre and demographic appeal than fantasy or romance, and on top of that, I am a trans author, writing about a trans main character with a sordid past and interdimensional alien clowns.
The discrimination or feeling like I had to tokenize my identity to gain any traction among the trad industry felt demeaning and just not worth my time.

Who was your biggest influence as an author?

It’s a combination of Lemony Snicket and Cheryl Rainfield. Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events has the narrative style of mild sarcasm, humor and just enough flowery language that it was something I very much wanted to emulate in my own writing, of course withy own take.
Cheryl Rainfield on the other hand, was a massive influence in me choosing to write about the topics I wrote about. I read her book Scars when I was in high school, in the throws of uncovering my own repressed trauma, and that book was transformative for me. Incredibly cathartic.
Her writing made me want to create works for people that did what her book did for me.
I wanted to take the humor and silliness of Lemony Snicket and morph it with the serious subject matter Cheryl Rainfield wrote of, and make something that could make you laugh, but also root you in the journey of the characters and perhaps even grow and heal along side them.

If you could recommend one book aside from your own, what would it be?

Obviously, Scars by Cheryl Rainfield!

What advice would you give to other writers? Is there anything you wish someone had told you?

My best advice is to never write for an audience. Write for yourself first. It’s easy to write what other people want, and easy to follow trends, but I don’t think that you will be very pleased with the end product. So I advise that you write the story that *you* want to read. Don’t worry about whether or not anyone else likes it, because there are thousands of books in the world, and billions of people. Odds are, someone else will like it too.

Anything else you would like to add?

Check out my books! They have clowns! And lots of trauma!

Thanks so much to Oleander Blume for joining us today, and for answering our questions! It’s been great to have you here and learn more about your book!

Content Warnings
✘ abuse (physical, emotional, psychological)
✘ childhood sexual abuse and assault
✘ miscarriage mentions
✘ bullying
✘ transphobia
✘ medical abuse
✘ suicidal ideation
✘ panic attacks and anxiety
✘ depictions of drug use
✘ death

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