Tag Archives: series: the unnatural philosophy of kit march

Change One: Books and Availability

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This is the first announcement of several that I’ll be making over the next few weeks as I work to make my writing contribute at least a little to good causes like food, medication and therapy.

So, to this end, I’m going to be making some changes that can be summarised thus: fewer books available for free but wider availability.

A cartoony-vector-style image of a somewhat-overgrown garden against a grey stone wall, with a wooden signpost embedded in the grass just in front of the wall. Three wooden picture frames are nailed into the signpost, enclosing the cover images for Conception, The Adventurer King and The King of Gears and Bone. A wooden plank nailed above the sign post bears the text "updates" in white. Two bushes--one with orange tulip-style flowers and the other with yellow roses--sit in front of the sign, and a pink rose climbs the wall behind it. Trailing ivy and brambles climb over the edges of the signpost and hang down over it, slightly obscuring the covers in the picture frames.

From July 1, the only free complete works will be Old Fashioned, Certain Eldritch Artefacts, Their Courts of Crows, The Wind and the Stars and Crooked Words, plus any assorted side stories I post for fun. Everything else will have a price tag, unless you wish to provide donations or patronage (the method of how you might go about this will be the subject of another announcement post). If you do seek to support me outside of buying books directly, everything I self-publish will be made available to you for free.

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Fiction: The Adventurer King

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Cover image for The Adventurer King by K. A. Cook. Cover features a red leather-bound journal sitting on a wood panel background, like that of a tabletop or floor, with the text sitting on top of the book image in a gold fantasy-style handdrawn type. Objects sit on top of the book cover: a blue pen with a gold nib dripping ink, a screwed-up piece of white paper, a cream scroll with a green seal, a cream and silver compass, and a piece of rope. A grey single-edged sword blade sits underneath the book, and black handdrawn type atop the blade reads "an efe and darius story". The images have a cartoony, vectory feel.Seven years ago, Darius Liviu met a talking sword belt in the Great Souk, an eldritch being who changed his life forever. In that time, he has learnt something of the sword, mastered strange magic and survived dangerous jobs, but while he has friends in Rajad, he still feels out of place—too divergent to be welcomed and accepted as mercenary and magician.

When an unexpected meeting with potential employers goes wrong, his first instinct is to flee. But a wandering monarch, Efe Kadri, has an offer that might provide the certainty for which Darius has been searching, if only he has the courage to say yes…

Vendors: [Smashwords]

Formats: [PDF] | [EPUB]

Length: 11, 350 words / 40 pages.

This is the last of the Marchverse rewrites, aside from, eventually, Kit March itself. At the moment, I have the bones of a story that comprises the first half of Darius and Efe’s doings in Ashad, and an earlier story, now called Blood and the Ravens, that will cover Darius’s beginnings with Eren Adalet and show his connections with the Ravens, because that is going to become more important later on. There’s a wealth of story material in Darius’s years with Efe and Aysun should I ever find myself at a want for more to write, but I see The Adventurer King as the first in a rough trilogy of novelettes that form the beginning of Darius and Efe’s relationship, and then I’d like to stop for a little while.

In terms of timeline, The Adventurer King takes place seven years after Certain Eldritch Artefacts and seven years before Tes arrives at the College. Darius has been six years a student and one year a mercenary.

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Short Fiction: Ringbound, a Kit March Story

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Cover image for Ringbound by K. A. Cook. Cover shows an eight-pane window set into a cream brick wall above a stone and wood table or bench, with various items sitting on the table--candles in vases, bottles, a large shell, a white vase filled with flowers, two gold rings propped against the vase. The text is written in brown fantasy-style handdrawn type. Through the window, scrubby green trees and a blue-green sky is visible. The subtitle "a marchverse short story" is written in white handdrawn type.Kit can’t find anything unfair about the contract or the man, so why is the ring so heavy?

Kit March is a signature away from marrying the man who loves him. He should be delighted, but for reasons he doesn’t understand and can’t explain, his future with Lauri weighs upon him. What is a magician to do when no script extant has words for the confusion he feels?

It’s Aromantic Awareness Week, and it was bothering me that I wouldn’t have anything new for it. Two of my current projects feature aromantic protagonists (one pansexual aro, the other aro-ace) but there is no way I’ll get either done this week. I’m usually up for some absurdity when it comes to trying to do things impossible, but even I know my body won’t allow for that.

Then I remembered this line Kit said to Amelia in Old Fashioned:

It explains so much about the time I panicked and, uh, climbed out the window to escape a Malvadan merchant who wanted to introduce me to his parents. I admit it wasn’t the most well-thought-out decision I’d ever made…

If that isn’t crying out for a story, I don’t know what is.

Links: [PDF] | [EPUB]

Setting: two years before Old Fashioned, making this the earliest of all Marchverse stories so far.

Word count: 1871 words.

Content advisory: This is about the pain of an aromantic man trying to deal with being aromantic while possessing no understanding of it, who makes a questionable decision in abandoning his partner. Other than that, I don’t think there’s anything worth advising for.

Note the first: This is an experiment for me in producing flash fiction, in that I wrote a completed first draft a few hours after beginning and gave myself time limits for all the steps that followed—forty minutes for cover design, half an hour for formatting, etc. I wanted to see what I could make if I shifted my focus to efficient production instead of agonising over appearance and presentation, and I’m quite proud that I’ve been able to do this. Twenty-four hours after having the idea for this piece, it is a very short ebook, however imperfect.

Note the second: This scene isn’t quite the way Kit described it above, but it isn’t in Kit’s character to speak the unedited truth. It is in his character to cut the pain and heart out of past events to make of them a lighthearted story.

Note the third: I have been in a situation where there is no reason by the mores of society that I shouldn’t date, other than the confusing, bewildering feeling that I can’t. In hindsight, I see my aromanticism writ large, but at the time I had no comprehension of what I felt or why, and nothing society had to say about being human gave me an explanation. This story, in a way, is voicing that past me—the me that didn’t have the language to say why.

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A Project of Threes

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Does anyone want to know what projects I have settled on for the next couple of months?

I have decided to take more time over All The Trees in the Sky, but I still want to try having two more stories – with autistic protagonists – available for April, because there is no such thing as too many stories about trans, autistic characters being trans and autistic.

I would also like to post the next Kit March chapter in the next few weeks. I don’t know how consistent I will be with this, because pain leaves me a liar every time I try to put a date or schedule to my work, but I am trying to post a chapter every two months or so.

The Adventurer King

Cover image for The Adventurer King by K. A. Cook. Cover features a red leather-bound journal sitting on a wood panel background, like that of a tabletop or floor, with the text sitting on top of the book image in a gold fantasy-style handdrawn type. Objects sit on top of the book cover: a blue pen with a gold nib dripping ink, a screwed-up piece of white paper, a cream scroll with a green seal, a cream and silver compass, and a piece of rope. A grey single-edged sword blade sits underneath the book, and black handdrawn type atop the blade reads "an efe and darius story". The images have a cartoony, vectory feel.This is getting a re-write, but more from a matter of consistency and character/setting development than anything else. When I wrote this, I had the idea of following it up with a story or two showing Darius’s progression from thinking himself alloromantic to realising that he’s an aro trying to be alloromantic, but I’ve realised that this isn’t a narrative I wish to draw out. (This was why Darius didn’t respond to the belt, incidentally – that and it’s pretty obvious that the belt has narrow views on the nature of human sexuality.) There aren’t enough aro protagonists in the world (especially trans, autistic, allosexual aro protagonists) to make aro readers wait, and I find the idea of a following story where Darius is just aro and dealing with the allo Efe far more entertaining than the “shades, am I aromantic” or coming-out story.

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Updates and Anticipatory Ramblings, v2

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Image of a wooden sign with the word "updates" written in brown fantasy-style handdrawn type. The sign sits on a grassy rise surrounded by scrubby bushes and low trees with twisted branches, looking something like tea-tree or paperbarks. The image is surrounded by a tan brown wooden frame.

This is the “periodic whenever I remember to do it” ramble about what I’m working on, just to give folks some indication of where I’m going and what I hope to be producing. Right now, I’m pretty much neck-deep in The King of Gears and Bone, but I really should switch to the next Kit March chapter for a bit. I also have daydreams of getting All the Trees in the Sky done for a sometime-in-April publication date, as it would be cool to have a story that is so bound up in what it means to be the autistic shape of human to publish in Autism Acceptance Month. We’ll see what my chronic pain has to say about this, since it’s generally quite loud on this sort of subject!

I also want to write a personal essay about my experiences last year with regards running a daily-updating blog, conversations on accessibility in disability spaces, how the pressures to be as accessible as possible have resulted in my becoming more disabled, and why I think we need to change how we talk accessibility when talking to other disabled people. The truth is that I stopped having the spoons for doing something I love–fiction writing–by throwing all my spoons into trying to make my blog accessible for others, and I’ve gained new chronic pain sites in the attempt. I’m not sure when I’ll have the spoons for this, but it is something I very desperately wish to explore and articulate.

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New Year, New Look, New Books

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Image of a wooden sign with the word "updates" written in brown fantasy-style handdrawn type. The sign sits on a grassy rise surrounded by scrubby bushes and low trees with twisted branches, looking something like tea-tree or paperbarks. The image is surrounded by a tan brown wooden frame.

It doesn’t look like I’ve been doing much, but I’ve actually spent most of the last month in a fluster between trying to get two books formatted and posted, redesigning my blogs, redesigning covers and dealing with my ongoing shoulder, wrist and thumb pain.

So, in order of most to least important:

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The Unnatural Philosophy of Kit March: Maker

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Cover image for K. A. Cook's 'The Unnatural Philosophy of Kit March'. Vector/cartoon styling of a creepy folly/shack/treehouse with various gothic accoutrements and a crow or raven perched on the roof. Folly is surrounded by more vector images of trees, bushes and scrub set on a cartoony green-hill background. Typeface for author and title credit is white stroked with black. The whole thing is very flat/one-dimensional and looks like a still from an 80s cartoon.Tes Alden, collector of words, rescuer of books and counter of objects, knows ze isn’t like everyone else. This wouldn’t be such a problem if everybody else didn’t struggle with it. Hir mother prays a run-down school in the middle of nowhere may be the best place to stow hir brand of peculiarity, and Tes has nowhere better to go.

Darius Liviu lost a limb and his lover in the hell of Mul Dura. He spent the last three months as a guest of the Greensward, crafting a jointed hand from elf-sung wood and trying to ignore the mutterings of the ghost that haunts him. Now, he returns to the College to take up the second-most dangerous job open to a magician: teaching.

Tes just might be a magician in the making, if ze can survive adventures in alliterative magic and hir own lethal curiosity. Darius, though, keeps a secret that makes the usual problems of overgrown rhubarb, basilisk hordes, verbose eldritch objects, shrieking purple monkeys and cauliflower explosions look like nothing at all.

The elves are coming, and nobody fears elves more than Kit March.

[PDF] | [EPUB] | [Master Post] | Beginning: [Welcome] | Previous: [Interlude – Resonance] | Next: Curiosity

Maker: Darius chose Tes’s presence over his health, a gift for which books, stones and homewares are no just recompense. How can ze repay a magician when ze isn’t sure, despite his words, that ze still belongs at the College?

Chapter count: 10, 415 words.

Content advisory: Darius uses the word “cripple” to describe himself in a way that’s more self-hatred than reclamation and “crippling” to describe the loss of his hand. Tes thinks hirself wrong for being aro-ace, which is debunked in non-subtle references to the stereotype of autistics being perceived as incapable of love by allistics. Both use “broken” to refer to themselves. There are also discussions of blood magic, sacrifice and the gnomes used as weapons/torture devices. It’s implied over several paragraphs that the Lord mutilated Darius as a means of imprisoning a multi-disciplined magic worker via limiting his ability to pay for magic. Tes’s statement about Darius no longer being a soldier is also cruel and ableist to say to a disabled man, but ze doesn’t realise this. Also, I reference sexual assault, ableism and allosexism in my first note.

Note the first: These days, I’m ace. Pan aro-ace. I suspect I feel aesthetic attraction, miscategorised as sexual because that’s what society says you’re supposed to feel. Unfortunately, being a-spec, autistic and otherwise disabled is an uncomfortable thing with activists using the words “desexualisation” and “dehumanisation” to deny me representation and the visibility/knowledge it gives. If I’d known I was aro-ace, I wouldn’t have found myself trying to perform the cisheteronormative and amatonormative relationships that put me—an autistic who struggles to communicate no in ways allistics hear and respect—in violating situations. It matters to me that Tes gets words sooner rather than later, and it matters to me to be able to show a journey through Darius that isn’t immediate recognition of one’s aromanticism, a belated recognition coloured by an autistic’s position in navigating social norms.

Note the second: Yes, the words “asexual” and “aromantic” don’t fit the linguistic approach used for other terms in narrative. (Although there is a point in the construct of “same” (cis) and “similar” (allistic) as used by trans autistics, namely that autism and gender for us are inseparable; I haven’t yet had the space to show how this language is seldom used by allistic trans people.) I find there is some awareness of “autism” and “trans” (for all that we autistics know the dangers of awareness) when I speak them to others, but “asexual” was only recently added to the dictionary. Hence, I decided to use the real words, representation over consistency, as they’re too seldom spoken even when we do exist as characters. (Although “autism” as a word does exist in Amelia’s medical texts, and should my shoulder let me work on Conception, you’ll find out why Amelia and Kit don’t use it.) In the rewrite, I probably won’t use fantastic terms at all: if a horse is called a horse in fantasy, and a sword a sword, a trans person can be called a trans person. It says something about being trans (internalised cissexism) that I did feel, on starting to write this, that it is too modern a word to work, but why should it be?

Maybe you’ll know, one day, that memory names.

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