Category Archives: essay

Linkspam Friday: April 5

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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

Cover image for Hallo, Aro: Allosexual Aromantic Flash Fiction by K. A. Cook. Cover features dark pink handwritten type on a mottled green background with a large line-drawn peacock feather, several sketch-style leaves and swirly text dividers. Green arrows sit underneath each line of text.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

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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

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Summary: 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.

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

Word length: 2, 991 words.

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.

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. It’s also worth noting, if you haven’t read Reckoning, that Mara did use her sorcery at Sirenne to enable her brother’s medical/physical transition without first asking Esher about it, because that would mean revealing the whole becoming-a-necromancer thing.

Note the first: I had two days to write and attempt to edit this, between the pressures of real life and the want to post something aromantic-themed on Valentine’s Day. So here’s another pre-emptively posted story I mean to come back and polish later.

It’s a terrific exercise in redundancy, but some people find the words “no love spells” to be a bewildering subtlety.

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Fiction: A Gift of Naming

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Cover of A Gift of Naming by K. A. Cook. Cover shows cartoon-style tall-trunked trees growing on a green mountain slope with a high green canopy before a blue and grey clouded sky. Brushes and small green shrubs grow at the base of the trees in the foreground. Text is written in a white, handdrawn, fantasy-style type.Summary: Even in the best of circumstances, it’s no easy thing to tell the parent who named you that your name no longer fits.

Word count: 1200 words.

Content advisory: References to cissexism, particularly as it surrounds a change of name, both historically and from the protagonist’s great-grandfather.

Setting: A village in the lower Crackenbush Ranges, on the border of Greenstone and Astreut, approximately a hundred years before Kit March. Please check the digital book editions if you require an explanation on the Marchverse’s handling of heartnames and shroudnames.

Links: PDF | EPUB

Note the first: Mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) is common in Victoria and Tasmania’s highlands, the world’s tallest flowering tree. By “fig” and “banyan” I mean the Moreton Bay fig (Ficus macrophylla), found in New South Wales and Queensland. I’ve seen both in the flesh, and, in my opinion, no human structure will ever match the awe inspired by the overwhelming immensity of these trees. There’s something intensely spiritual about walking under a path crowned by mountain ash that remains beyond my ability to describe or encapsulate.

Note the second: For Briar, chosen kin, who gave to me my own heartname.

If one’s parents provide a shirt that tears when tugged over their child’s shoulders, isn’t it cruelty to force the wearing, however well-intended the gift?

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2018 Fiction Master Post

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Despite veering from periods of no writing to periods of all the writing, I have managed to end this year by posting or publishing twelve new fictional pieces. A master post collecting all pieces seems appropriate, both in the sense of allowing me to talk a little and making all these pieces easy for readers to find and access.

It seems to me that aromanticism has become an irrevocable presence in my fiction, as central to what I write as being trans and autistic: every single piece features an aromantic-spectrum protagonist (although some works don’t focus on this). For me this sense that I do not have to include something alien to me feels liberating and empowering. It’s frustrating, yes, to struggle to find my place in the literary canon; it’s disheartening to know that eschewing alloromantic experiences is a unrecognised barrier between me and a good many readers. Yet I have this year made an online space that is more receptive of my work, and I can only hope that this keeps on growing.

Thank you to all the folks who have supported me and my art in some way this year, be it through likes or reblogs, linking my work to others or sending me messages: I am truly grateful for your interaction and encouragement.

If you like what I do and have the ability to help me survive in doing it, I’ll remind you all that I have a ko-fi. All digital beverages are gratefully appreciated (although I am baffled by the thought of imbibing real coffee).

Please find below a variety of flash fiction pieces, short stories and novelettes, featuring a collection of queer, disabled, trans, non-binary, autistic and aromantic characters. All these works are free to read!

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Links, Updates and Tumblr

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I was planning to post new fiction today, but I never had the chance to edit. Between scrolling through thousands of posts on Tumblr to check for erroneous “NSFW” flags, making alternate accounts, backing up blogs and general unhappiness, my hands and shoulder are horrible. Stress, unsurprisingly, is a pain trigger, and I put my hands through hell in trying to catch Tumblr’s mistakes.

(Until last night, I didn’t even have a functioning chronic pain tag in which to post about said chronic pain flare. I am pleased that it has been returned to us; I am not pleased that Tumblr hasn’t acknowledged the damage caused by denying disabled people access to this tag.)

Mermaid sequin pillows, pencil cases, slime, squishies, chew pendants, text posts about aro autistics discussing our creativity and a post advertising Their Courts of Crows were flagged as NSFW. Everything flagged as explicit, despite being worksafe content, was for or about queer, autistic, aromantic, disabled and trans people. My posts seem to have become unflagged since I reported them, but I have no reason to trust that Tumblr will remain a safe space for marginalised content creators.

People who haven’t violated Tumblr’s new restrictions can’t trust Tumblr as a reliable host for our content. Where does that leave everyone else?

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Linkspam Friday: November 30

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Does anyone remember that I do this? I can’t blame you if you don’t. It’s been a while.

After a flurry of posting fiction, I’ve been updating book pages. I’ve now got cover art up for The Sorcerous Compendium of Postmortem Query. (Self, use a less unwieldy title next time.) I’m currently trying to focus on finishing the third Mara and Esher story because I can’t post the second Crew chapter: there’s just too big a revelation for the events that happen in A Quest of Spheres and Phalanges for those two pieces to be read out of order. (Self, that title isn’t much less unwieldy and you damn well know it.) After that, I’d really like to finish Love in the House of the Ravens (so unwieldy) so I can put that and One Strange Man up: together with The Adventurer King, they form a kind of trilogy in Darius’s identifying as aromantic. I have to admit that between Darius, Mara, Kit, Amelia and a little bit of Tes, I’ll be glad to put to bed the “discovering the word” genre of aromantic writing.

It’s a shape of storytelling that needs to exist, given how much it normalises our experiences as aromantics. I’m just so used to now writing characters who are trans or autistic with little explanation on their gender or neurotype that I’m feeling the need for a similar approach with aro-spec characters, too. I like writing about aromantic characters mentoring new aromantics because I can show folks already at that point, but I’m starting to yearn for a story that mentions a protagonist’s aromanticism, has no reaction from anyone else beyond casual acceptance and then concerns itself with everything but aromanticism.

In unrelated news, Tumblr decided that “chronic pain” is a porn-related tag and now has given folks with chronic pain no way to search for each other or find related content. Disabled people like me are collateral damage in their rush to delete dangerous and illegal content that shouldn’t have been allowed to flourish in the first place. Tumblr, if there’s porn in the chronic pain tag, the problem is the porn bots who shouldn’t be putting it there, not a community of chronic pain patients trying to find support and connection.

I know that there’s never been a purge of anything that hasn’t caught up innocent (most often marginalised) people in its wake, but surely by 2018 there’s enough historical precedent to realise that a little care is needed before hitting the wipe button?

(And I hate, I hate that I have far too much of a following to be able to walk away from a platform that thinks it acceptable to silence me as a disabled person.)

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