Fiction Round Up – February / March

Posted on March 27, 2020 by K. A.

In December 2019, I felt that Christmas was the worst time of year for a person of Dutch heritage to also be a coeliac.

In March 2020, with pandemic-fuelled grocery shortages and a constant fear of will I have enough food to eat if we’re quarantined for two weeks because ordering in gluten-free restaurant food in my region isn’t an option, I have been proved hilariously naive. I laugh at myself now, because sighing over not eating speculaas or pfeffernüsse seems ridiculous in comparison! Do I have enough GF (gluten-free) pasta to go with my rice? I don’t know, but I’m yet to find it again at the supermarket! And so many things are still impossible to get, like frozen vegetables; even fresh vegetables are becoming impossibly expensive.

What do I eat when I can’t get two weeks’ worth of frozen veggies and rice? What do I eat when everyone has stocked up on rice cakes as a cheap shelf-stable food, even though they’re my normal lunch staple? What do I eat when dried beans and lentils, recommended by the internet as a wonder food I should be pursuing during food shortages, all bear “may contain gluten” warnings? Are supermarkets going to prioritise GF replacement foods the same way they’ll prioritise restocking the gluten-containing ones? Can they even get those that aren’t made in Australia, like several brands of GF pasta?

(Why is barley deemed such an essential component in soup mix? Do folks realise how many more foods would be open to me if we stopped adding barley and malt flavouring to things not otherwise containing wheat, rye or oats?)

There are many other things to fear right now, yes. Far too many of my relatives are in high-risk categories, for one. I am privileged enough to be able to worry about continuing to avoid gluten, when some coeliacs have long forgone that option; I am privileged enough that grocery shortages this severe are new to me. Nonetheless, dietary restrictions add a real component of anxiety when it comes to a pandemic, and it isn’t something I see folks discuss or even acknowledge in mainstream conversations about grocery shortages and accessibility.

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Fiction Round Up – July / August / September

Posted on October 25, 2019 by K. A.

Clearly doing this on a regular basis is a pipe dream, but it would be nice to periodically gather my recent pieces in the one spot.

Most Fridays, I post one of my free books to Patreon. These posts are public, so you don’t need to be a patron or subscriber to access and download. Through Patreon, I have something I’ve been wanting for a long time–a public-accessible, no-sign-up needed post capable of hosting all my book files. This way, nobody needs to make an account with a vendor to download the file or files of their choice (PDF, EPUB or MOBI) direct to their computer, phone or tablet.

It should be noted that every narrating protagonist here is somewhere on the aromantic spectrum and experiences some shape of sexual attraction.

Hallo, Aro

Neuronormative: An autistic allosexual aromantic struggling to deal with the ways alloromanticism and aromanticism alike are binary, neuronormative ways of looking at the romantic attraction spectrum.

This is less fiction and more a slightly-creative take on non-fiction, but I wanted to give voice to the ways what is and isn’t romantic is tied to neuronormative assumptions. Even the construct of aromanticism itself feels neuronormative to me. I’ve long reached a point where I’ll use aro as a general term but my aromanticism is better described by words like arovague, nebularomantic and idemromantic. To not centre my neurodiversity as a component of my aromanticism is to fail to speak of my aromanticism at all.

If you prefer reading as a digital book, you can find the most recent PDF, EPUB and MOBI files on Patreon.

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Fiction: Loveless

Posted on August 14, 2019 by K. A.

When Paide ein Iteme says the words “I don’t love”, he doesn’t just refer to romantic relationships.

Content Advisory: Non-detailed references to war, violence, abuse, ableism, cissexism and suicidal ideation; depictions of heterosexism and heterosexist slurs/sex negative language.

Links: PDF | EPUB | MOBI | Patreon

(PDF, EPUB and MOBI files are also available for download from Patreon.)

Length: 1, 000 words / 4 PDF pages.

Note: I haven’t been posting all the Hallo, Aro stories here, but this piece takes place between A Prince of the Dead and The King of Gears and Bone. As it details a conversation important for events in The King of Gears and Bone, I wanted to be sure folks didn’t miss it.

I always planned to elaborate on Paide’s statement of love later in the series (and have done so in the drafts of the sequel novel, Birds of a Feather). The need for empowering, sympathetic fictional representation of loveless aros and aros with complicated relationships to love provoked me to tell this shorter version of the story now. Seeing the aromantic community’s excitement over posts and stories that stress all aros love in some way or are never without love leaves me fairly alienated from my own. I can’t seem to say it often enough or well enough in essay format for my fellow aros to remember that love isn’t what makes us human, so let’s try it in fiction.

(To be clear: aros who love non-romantically are great! Hell, I write about this myself! Aros who insist that we all love, on the other hand? Aros who write stories on the premise that loving non-romantically is an inherent part of being aromantic as opposed to being one of many shapes of aromanticism? Not so great.)

I wanted a character with a background of abuse and disregard wielded by those who love him, a character who is neurodiverse, a character who isn’t faultless but can’t be mistaken for an antagonist. A character telling the world something of what it can mean to be loveless–and why it doesn’t have to be a tragedy.

Little does this world hate more than a loveless man, save perhaps a loveless woman.

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Fiction: Kin of Mind

Posted on July 4, 2019 by K. A.

A dragon in need of a human attendant finds providence in the arrival of a magician in need of a library, but more than phalanges and history binds Azhra and Darius in companionship.

Setting: Several hundred years after the short stories Friendship and Attraction; several months before Certain Eldritch Artefacts, during Darius’s first year away from the College. Reading these stories isn’t required for comprehension, but this story is written with the expectation that readers will find enjoyment in Azhra being Azhra and Darius being Darius.

Content advisory: Casual references to fantasy violence involving fire, carnivores and dragons, ageism, autistic-targeted ableism and the medicalisation of the autism spectrum.

Length: 4, 047 words / 12 PDF pages.

Note the first: This short story is an exclusive for Patreon supporters. It’s also available in the Marchverse collection Bones, Belts and Bewitchments.

Azhra breathes the tart, acidic aura of magic for an hour before the sweating human makes it up the incline. With no attendant, ze can’t brush hir hide, but ze wipes hir emerald snout and copper claws on the closest patch of grass, hoping to appear presentable. Humans are more agreeable the more they can pretend dragons aren’t the ultimate apex predator. Even if this one has no interest in staying, they can still speak of hir to their family and friends.

Hope quickens hir breath and quivers hir tail.

What if ze can convince a human to remain?

A few centuries ago, no dragon lacked service. Nobles viewed them as an opportunity for their children to meet other nobles, sending more princesses than wanted by the most affable of dragons. Now, Azhra can go a year without speaking to even the census-takers, nervous scholars hoping to determine the number of cattle Rajad, Siya and Khaloun will lose to a dragon’s gullet.

Telling their few visitors that Council will pay fair wages for willing workers gets them nowhere. The town in the valley refuses to deal with any dragon after Heisa’s incident. What stories are humans now telling about dragons in Rajad and Khaloun? Surely there’s people in need of supporting their kinsfolk or leaving them, people who won’t object to magic and adventure? The Athenaeum sends the odd historian and academic to catalogue hoards, but none since Faiza show interest in the work of a companion—and Faiza’s family didn’t permit them to remain in Tierre.

Dwelling on the old days does no dragon good, but even quiet reflection brings envy and pessimism. The last human to stay for a lifetime was a duchess’s daughter from a Western country—a small province since swallowed up by the former Astreuch empire.

What was her name?

Keep reading at Patreon: Part One and Part Two.

Linkspam Friday: April 5

Posted on April 5, 2019 by K. A.

If all goes well, when this post goes up I should be escaping my GP’s office after another biopsy on my hand: an another adventure in our long-running quest to discover what is causing my dermatitis. I can’t say that I need this experience again, but at least I can write about wounds and blood with verisimilitude, and I’ve two characters for which this is quite important. Small mercies, right?

I am struggling at the moment in keeping up with everything in a consistent manner, which I think you know based on the the dust bunnies covering this blog. (I mean, I still haven’t updated my books with my new pronouns.) But, since I have written and made a couple of things, I think it’s worth gathering them here in the quest to appear accomplished.

Fiction

Hallo, Aro: Existence: For me, one of the more profound allo-aro experiences is the truth that it’s difficult to find information about aromanticism as separate from asexuality. This story adds a little bit of creative licence to autobiography and is in no way a complete rendition of my experiences, but the core of this, in terms of someone else’s inability to offer the word aromantic, is true.

(You can also read this on Tumblr or in PDF and EPUB formats.)

Love in the House of the Ravens: I’m posting the story of how Darius learns about the word “aromantic” in shorter snippets over April, Autism Acceptance Month. I’m quite excited at being able to post these stories about how autism and ableism impact his ability to come to terms with his aromanticism: it’s been a while since autism has been as central in my storytelling. This will become its own book, a sequel to Certain Eldritch Artefacts; I just thought I’d do something a bit different with how I initially post it.

(You can keep up via my tag on Tumblr and category on WordPress. I may do a proper linked master post when my hand heals.)

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Linkspam Friday: March 1

Posted on March 1, 2019 by K. A.

Last week was Aromantic Awareness Week! If you’d like to see my posts and the awesome content I reblogged from other aro-spec creatives, it’s on the @aroworlds Tumblr under the #aaw2019 tag.

I’m also working on a post to discuss changing my pronouns from singular they to ze/hir, because the why of feeling unsettled by my former pronouns is something that needs more than a paragraph or two. For the moment, while I’ve a great many book files to update, I’d like to state that I am going by the ze/hir set. I’ll accept “they” as an auxiliary pronoun for people who can’t use ze/hir in spoken English, but as I don’t feel this set describes me, I’d appreciate it if folks avoid this in written English.

I’m not being misgendered, exactly; they still positions me as outside the female/male binary. But it also doesn’t now describe my shape of genderlessness, and since I’ve reasons to regard they (in my experience) as a sort of compromise or concession pronoun, I’m becoming uncomfortable with it. But I’ll save more of this for later…

(Aside from Tes in Kit March, Hallo, Aro: Unspoken and A Gift of Naming show this set in use from the perspective of the narrating protagonist. If you want to know the spoken pronunciation, I’ve been referring people to this mypronouns.org article.)

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Fiction: Love Spells, Rainbows and Rosie

Posted on February 14, 2019 by K. A.

Lovers’ Day is good trading for a witch who deals in enchantments, ribbons and dyed flowers. For Mara Hill, it’s long been a holiday of tedious assumptions and painful conversations—once best handled by casting petty curses on annoying customers. This year, when a girl asks about love spells, it may be time to instead channel a little Aunt Rosie.

Contains: A sapphic, allosexual, lithromantic trans witch enduring the most amatonormative holiday extant–in a small town still in want of open conversations about aromanticism.

Setting: A year and a half after The Sorcerous Compendium of Postmortem Query and a year before Love is the Reckoning. It is readable if you haven’t read Reckoning, but I do suggest reading Query first. I spend little time rehashing the story of the night that Mara learnt about aromanticism from her great-aunt’s shade.

Content advisory: Much of this piece concerns the amatonormativity surrounding a real-world holiday, because unsubtle allegory is a wonderful thing. Please note that this story also includes a non-specific reference to an off-screen character’s suicide attempt and the ableism of the way people talk around mental illness. A character also uses the phrase “kill me” where we’d would use something like “fuck me” in keeping with the Sojourner’s followers’ regard of death. While I don’t explain it in text, it’s meant to be unholy awkward in keeping with the above. Dead Horse Hill’s religion is terrible at reconciling suicide with the way it frames and refers to death, and Esher talks more about this in the sequel to Love is the Reckoning.

Links: PDF, EPUB and MOBI editions are available for download from Patreon.

Length: 3, 429 words / 10 PDF pages.