Emerging poet Emily Altizer’s forthcoming collection finds new meaning in a familiar season—with support from author and Literary Launchpad founder Roderick Von King.
Autumn can mean more than one kind of falling
For the speaker in Emily Altizer’s forthcoming poetry collection, The Fall, one autumn brings heartbreak. Another, years later, brings love. Between those experiences lies the emotional territory of the book: grief, attachment, memory, acceptance, and the gradual discovery that a season once associated with loss can hold something new.
The collection, currently bearing the working title The Fall, introduces Altizer as an emerging poet interested not only in what love does to us, but in how our understanding of it changes.
Helping bring that voice to readers is Roderick Von King, an award-winning author, songwriter, and emerging screenwriter whose own creative career began a new chapter after his retirement from the aerospace industry. Through his company, Literary Launchpad, King works with writers navigating the transition from a manuscript to a published book.
Their collaboration connects two different kinds of reinvention: a professional life redirected toward storytelling and a poetic journey through the aftermath of love.
A Season Revisited
The organizing idea behind The Fall is deceptively simple. The same season can carry radically different meanings at different moments in a life.
Rather than treating autumn solely as a symbol of decline, Altizer’s collection returns to it from a changed emotional perspective. Falling apart and falling in love become separate experiences linked by a common setting.
The book’s four sections—Withering, Drifting, Floating, and Turning—give that transformation its shape.
In Withering, the speaker faces heartbreak and the fading possibility of a shared future. Recognition does not immediately lead to release. Even as hope diminishes, attachment remains, placing the speaker in the difficult space between understanding that something is ending and being ready to let it go.
Drifting moves further into distance and uncertainty. Here, the speaker considers an enduring, or “twin flame,” connection: a bond she understands as persisting even as closeness recedes. That belief becomes part of the collection’s exploration of absence and the meanings people assign to relationships.
With Floating, the emphasis shifts toward acceptance. The sense of connection has not disappeared, despite no contact, but the speaker begins to live alongside it differently. Healing does not require pretending that the past never mattered.
Finally, Turning opens toward a changed outlook and the experience of falling in love again.
Together, the sections describe movement without suggesting that recovery is a clean break. Earlier experiences remain present. What changes is the speaker’s relationship to them—and her willingness to welcome a future that does not simply repeat the past.
The Storyteller Behind the Launch
King’s route into publishing offers another perspective on beginning again. Retirement from aerospace did not end his working life; it created room for a different kind of work. His subsequent career has brought together literature, music, screenwriting, and entrepreneurship.
His novels Why Didn’t We Love? and Altar Call – An Honest Depiction of a Path to Salvation earned International Impact Book Awards. Altar Call also received the Christlit Book Award.
The two books approach transformation through different concerns. Why Didn’t We Love? examines romance, emotional distance, and unresolved truths. Altar Call explores faith, redemption, and the search for salvation. Across both, relationships and choices shape the possibility of change.
King’s songwriting and screenwriting extend his storytelling interests beyond the page. Literary Launchpad brings those creative pursuits into a business designed to help other authors move their work into the world.
Its rallying cry is direct: “Stop Talking About It and Do It — Get Into Orbit.”
More Than a Finished Manuscript
For a poetry collection such as The Fall, publication presents a particular challenge: how to communicate the breadth of an intimate emotional journey without flattening it into a single theme.
A cover or description focused only on heartbreak, for example, would miss the collection’s movement toward renewed love. The public presentation needs to make room for both.
Literary Launchpad describes its role as a full-service publishing accelerator. Its services include guidance on self-publishing, publisher selection, and contracts, alongside book packages incorporating covers, blurbs, taglines, advertising copy, and ISBNs.
The company also coordinates writing credits and photography, offers optional audio transcription, and provides editing and proofreading supported by controlled revision processes and AI-assisted tools.
Other services extend beyond the printed book: audiobook production, compilation-book support, professional reviews, and the development of possible music, screenplay, or merchandise spin-offs. Those are options available through the company, not announced adaptations of Altizer’s collection.
The distinction matters. Bringing a book to market involves choosing the opportunities that fit the work, rather than pursuing every available format.
Finding the Readers
A book’s public life continues after publication, and Literary Launchpad’s offerings reflect that.
The company supports launches, signings, and book-club outreach, while pursuing awards and media coverage through an experienced publicist. Its platform-building services include social media, YouTube, email marketing, customer relationship management, brand strategy, and monetization funnels, including higher-priced offerings.
Where appropriate, it also assists with IMDb and Reddit presences. Live training at the Literary Launchpad Conference provides another setting for authors to learn about publishing and audience development.
For an emerging poet, however, the purpose of those tools is ultimately personal: to help the writing find people who recognize something of themselves in it. Promotion can create an introduction. The poems must sustain the connection.
Altizer’s collection offers readers a journey in which longing and renewed love do not cancel each other out. They belong to the same evolving life.
King’s reinvention and Altizer’s poetry meet on that ground. Both make room for a beginning that could not have been understood fully from the place where the previous chapter ended.
In The Fall, autumn returns. This time, it means something different.
Emily Altizer is a poet and writer from a small mountain town in Southwest Virginia who now calls Northern Virginia home. Raised among bluegrass musicians and generations of hardworking people, she grew up in a community that knows how to make something wonderful out of very little. Her mountain roots continue to shape her writing, as does her interest in the stories, traditions, and relationships that connect us.
Emily earned a degree in History from Liberty University, with minors in Education and Psychology, deepening her curiosity about how people’s lives intersect and influence one another. She began writing as a child and found her way to poetry in middle school. After the unexpected loss of a close friend in 2021, writing took on a new urgency—a way to navigate grief and a reminder not to postpone sharing her work.
Her writing on grief has appeared in Collective World, an affiliate of Thought Catalog. Her debut poetry collection, The Fall, is planned for publication by the end of 2026. Across four sections—Withering, Drifting, Floating, and Turning—the collection traces its speaker’s journey through heartbreak, distance, acceptance, and new beginnings. At its heart, The Fall explores the people who leave lasting marks on us, the selves we outgrow, and the courage it takes to begin again. It invites readers to recognize something of their own lives in its pages: a memory, a person they once loved, or a version of themselves they have learned to leave behind.
Sneak Preview Poem – A Familiar Haunting
The ghost of you still pays me a visit from time to time,
Sweeping me off my feet without warning.
The thing about ghosts is you never see them coming,
And never know if they’ve truly left.
Yours has been no different.
Drifting in and out freely,
Yet never really leaving.
