I came to fiction through a fairly unconventional path. My professional background is in technology and marketing, but I've always been interested in how things work, why they fail, and especially the people who keep them running.

A lot of Beneath the Cloudline grew from that perspective. I was raised near Kodak Park in Rochester, New York, in a skilled-trades family. My father was a plumber and steamfitter, and many of the people around me worked for companies like Kodak, Xerox, and Bausch & Lomb. I grew up around people who built things, repaired things, and usually understood the machinery better than the people making decisions about it.

Those experiences helped shape Halidom, a city of towers, ropes, pulleys, gardens, forgotten technology, and people divided by where they live and how they see the sky. The story combines my interests in engineering, nature, old technologies, environmental systems, faith, and the unintended consequences of supposedly good ideas.

My influences aren't limited to books. They come from movies, places I've lived, machines I've worked around, things I've seen in nature, and questions that tend to stick with me: Who actually keeps a society working? What happens when experts become so certain they can control a complex system that they stop questioning their own assumptions?

Those questions eventually became Beneath the Cloudline, a hopeful science-fantasy story about fixing what is broken, including ourselves.

Author of Beneath the Cloudline, published in 2026.

Google Local Guide Level 8 and Master Photographer, with more than 58 million photo views.

My long-term goal is to continue expanding the world of Halidom. A city of towers rising from a damaged world, where survival depends on systems no one fully understands. At its center is the Cloudline, a manufactured rain that feeds the land while protecting it from what came before. An engineered divide between ground and sky. Beneath it, a kinship shaped by love and grit. Above it, a collective shaped by efficiency. The first book in the series follows the unraveling: systems failing, people caught between choosing to fix what's broken or fighting over what's left. This isn't a story about tearing things down. It's about showing up with purpose and doing the work. But Halidom was never the entire story. Old voices hint at others who survived the Great Weathering. Somewhere beyond the dead ridgeline. Somewhere past the reach of the harmonics. Somewhere across the driftline. The second novel, Across the Driftline, will follow that thread outward, exploring what has became of those who chose a different path a century ago... and what happens when worlds separated by time, and distance, begin to reconnect. There are always more stories waiting beyond the horizon.

Patrick LaJuett - Author Website
Author website for Patrick LaJuett, with information about Beneath the Cloudline, current writing projects, background, and updates.

Beneath the Cloudline
Official home of Beneath the Cloudline, a hopeful YA science-fantasy adventure about a divided city, forgotten technology, and the people trying to repair what has been broken.