#marchverse short stories

[k-a-cook]

Fiction: A Gift of Naming

This story is set in a fantasy universe where everyone has a secret name given from birth, one shared with trusted kin both blood and chosen. This is seen as a way to lessen the risk of magical and eldritch binding by naming. Instead, most people have an additional common or use name used in general day-to-day interaction, a shroudname, which can be given by others or chosen by the bearer. People can change a heartname if consenting kin will gift them, in priestly ceremony, their new chosen name.

Ze looks down at hir muddy boots, mumbling the words. “I want, I need something different. This name isn’t...”

Me.

Names don’t possess inherent gender any more than pronouns, but even in Ajille they’re not free of historical assumption. Hir current name, meant to bind hir to the Sojourner, tastes of sawn wood, hot metal, the ring of hammer against nail, the bitter-salt smell of sweat. Qualities, too, that are no more gendered than any other, but there’s something ineffable and unique in how a name rings in its relationship to that person’s gender. Hirs doesn’t. Not to hir, and isn’t ze the only one able to judge?

Ma didn’t give hir a bad name at birth. Good or bad are boxes into which names shouldn’t fit, a reckoning both irrelevant and simplistic.

It just doesn’t speak to hir of a new life, one of hir now sidestepping gender as relevant to hir shape and sense of personhood. A new name, a new beginning, a new turning in the road. Ze wants a name that sounds like early morning dew, the soft drape of cloth over hir forearms and legs, the green vibrancy of an unfurling leaf. A name that feels like walking under dizzying cathedrals of mountain ash, their straight trunks exuding a strength indifferent to human concerns and fears.

Ze finds the Sojourner closest to hir when a distant canopy dapples the sunlight.

Priest Illa says a soul bears only their name from this world to the next, so shouldn’t it sing to the person that bears it? 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?

Names should be offered in generosity and kindness, taken back without resentment or bitterness. Does love truly lie in the giving if a child cannot return a present that no longer sits comfortably on their skin?

I love you, Ma. It just doesn’t describe me.

Names, in binding child to parent and soul to god, weigh more than shirts. Ze sees no mistake with the metaphor in theory, but sweat slicks the calloused skin of hir palms and fingers, hir nervousness putting a lie to the ease of comparison.

Ma, still in her chair, says nothing.

“I want,” ze blurts into the silence, “something that better matches me, now that I’m not... I...” Ze draws a breath, releases and wipes hir hands on hir skirt, the new one with the lace trim. Ze felt green the first day the soft floral fabric swished over hir knees and shins. Green in the sunshine and shade alike, loose and free. “I’m scared Ze ... the Sojourner, that They won’t find me, if my name isn’t...”

Me.

“Please.”

Ma rests her hands, a contradiction of narrow phalanges and swollen knuckles, on her knees. “My first name belonged to my grandfather. He wasn’t angry that I asked, but he never forgave me that I had Mother change it to something outside the family.” She lowers her velvety voice, echoing a man known only to hir by Ma’s memory. “‘If you’re going to change, have the decency to use another family name!’ I could see the anger in his eyes, every time I corrected him, as if I’d dismissed him.”

Ze stiffens, jerks a nod. An elemental terror has hir look to the closest door. How many people before hir, in asking to change a heartname or pronouns, needed to know the fastest escape from dismissal and denial? Names have a history of gender; that history was once deemed inflexible. Hir teacher spent lessons highlighting the differences, the damages wrought by a binary culture held up as an example of never again, but now ze feels that ze walks in the footsteps of transgender people not quite a hundred years past, their terror still hirs.

Sometimes it’s enough to know of the songs of hate, as though one can never be free of their scars until the lessons are so universal history needn’t serve as a warning.

Sometimes it’s enough to know that in the north, in Astreut and Ihrne, this conversation still can’t take place without rejection.

“Ma...?”

“I’m sorry! I was trying to think how to say it. I understand him a little better, now, but I promised myself that I’d never do that to my child. Never.”

Ze looks up to find Ma’s eyes fixed on hir face.

“You’re not dismissing me. How can it be your fault that I named you before you knew who you were?”

Relief dizzies hir. Ze steps sideways and leans against the kitchen bench, trying to steady hirself.

Ma brushes a strand of grey from her cheek, her fingers stiff and clumsy. Something ephemeral and sad, like regret or memory, flickers through her wavering brown eyes, but her voice rings sure and gentle. “Do you have a name in mind?”

Ze swallows, struggling to find hir voice. “Ash for the heart.” It feels sweet and loud on hir lips, good. Not enough to yet erase all doubt, but enough that ze thinks the name will become, given water and sunlight and room to grow, the right one.

“Ash. And?”

Ze nods, thinking of the pictures ze’s seen in books—the tree relying on another’s strength for its own immensity. One day, ze will see it with hir own eyes, touch it with hir own hands. The name, then, if not hir real one, will shape a promise between hir and the Sojourner. “Fig for the shroud.”

Ma’s lips curl into a laughing grin. “You would!” She stops, nods. “You would, Ash.”

The word sounds loud and stressed, raw like a scab peeled away from the itching skin beneath.

Tears still burn hir eyes.

Ma raises her hands, beckons. “Come here, Figgie. We’ll have Illa tomorrow, and then you can write out all the letters to the family.”

Ze creeps closer to her chair, entwining hir fingers around hers like a banyan around its host tree.

“Do you think Illa will complain overmuch if we walk her and a notary out onto the trails?” Ma’s eyes glint above a wicked smile.

“Yes!” Ze laughs, tracing the deep grooves of Ma’s palm with hir thumbnail. Ma’s ankles, thick and swollen, keep her in the kitchen chair most days, yet she won’t offer up such a gift, the naming made under the canopy, unwillingly. Priest Illa, possessed of unwavering health, dislikes any venture not held inside walls and roof and says as much with frequent enthusiasm. “She will. Thank you. I’ll lead your pony out. And I’ll promise to weed Illa’s garden to make up.”

“You’ll be weeding for months ... Figgie.” Ma squeezes hir hand. “I name you, now and tomorrow before the Sojourner, Ash Fig Walker, so that She will know how to find you.”

Fig sinks down to the tiled floor, resting hir head against Ma’s bony knees.

Ash Fig Walker.

Me.

[k-a-cook]

Hello! I’m K. A. Cook and I’m an indie ownvoices writer of queer speculative fiction--specialising in fantasy stories about trans, autistic, mentally ill and aro-spec characters. On July 1, I’ll be making changes to how I post my work online, and one of those changes means putting a price tag on some currently-free works. (I have a pressing need to buy food and medication, so I need my writing to help with this.)

Because I don’t want one’s bank account to be a barrier in accessing diverse stories, I thought I’d let as many people as possible know about this change in the hope that everyone who needs these stories can download them while they’re still free.

I write on themes of found family, platonic and familial relationships, identity exploration, ableism and fantastic politics. I include gratutious bacon references, verbose eldritch objects, an autistic prince with an emotional support dog, the undead, an irascible trans witch who says everything I feel on the subject of other people, an awkward autistic magician beginning the hero’s journey, an unexplained talking corn-cob and several cats.

Until July 1 2018, all works below are free to download:

The Amelia books (cats, small town witchery, irritating cousins)

Old Fashioned: [PDF] | [EPUB] | [Smashwords]

Conception: [PDF] | [EPUB] | [Smashwords]

The Darius books (alliterative magic, irritating royalty, irritating enchanted items)

Certain Eldritch Artefacts: [PDF] | [EPUB] | [Smashwords]

The Adventurer King: [PDF] | [EPUB] | [Smashwords]

The Eagle Court books (necromancy, politics, familial relationships)

Their Courts of Crows: [PDF] | [EPUB] | [Smashwords]

A Prince of the Dead: [PDF] | [EPUB] | [Smashwords]

The King of Gears and Bone: [PDF] | [EPUB] | [Smashwords]

I’ve also written the stand-alone short story The Wind and the Stars and the in-progress serial The Unnatural Philosophy of Kit March.

Thank you so much for reading. I hope there’s something here you’ll enjoy!

Image description under read more cut:

[image description: 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 “free books” 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.]

[k-a-cook]

Hello! I’m K. A. Cook, and I’m an indie ownvoices writer of queer speculative fiction–specialising in fantasy stories about trans, autistic, mentally ill and aro-spec characters. On July 1, I’ll be making changes to how I post my work online, and one of those changes means putting a price tag on some currently-free works. (I have a pressing need to buy food and medication, so my writing must help with this.)

Because I don’t want one’s bank account to be a barrier in accessing diverse stories, I thought I’d let as many people as possible know about this change in the hope that everyone who needs these stories can download them while they’re still free.

I write on themes of found family, platonic and familial relationships, identity exploration, ableism and fantastic politics. I include gratutious bacon references, verbose eldritch objects, an autistic prince with an emotional support dog, the undead, an irascible trans witch who says everything I feel on the subject of other people, an awkward autistic magician beginning the hero’s journey, an unexplained talking corn-cob and several cats.

If Tumblr is still making a mess of my links, please check out my book dropbox or my fiction master page. Tumblr pages with links to all my works are also available in the description and sidebar of this blog.

Most of my works are available in the Kobo and iBooks stores!

Until July 1 2018, all works below are free to download:

The Eagle Court books (necromancy, politics, familial relationships)

Their Courts of Crows: [PDF] | [EPUB] | [Smashwords]

A Prince of the Dead: [PDF] | [EPUB] | [Smashwords]

The King of Gears and Bone: [PDF] | [EPUB] | [Smashwords]

The Amelia books (cats, small town witchery, irritating cousins) 

Old Fashioned: [PDF] | [EPUB] | [Smashwords]

Conception: [PDF] | [EPUB] | [Smashwords]

The Darius books (alliterative magic, irritating royalty, irritating enchanted items)

Certain Eldritch Artefacts: [PDF] | [EPUB] | [Smashwords]

The Adventurer King: [PDF] | [EPUB] | [Smashwords]

I’ve also written the stand-alone short story The Wind and the Stars and the in-progress serial The Unnatural Philosophy of Kit March.

Thank you so much for reading. I hope there’s something here you’ll enjoy!

Image description under read more cut:

[image description: 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 "free books" 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.]

[k-a-cook]

I’m drafting a “this is what I’m working on” post for my website, to let folks know what will be forthcoming (a Darius short story called One Strange Man and a short story about a new Marchverse character called Love is the Reckoning, entirely about platonic and familial love). Because I’m writing this post, I’ve gone off in tangents about other things, including a little chatter about The Adventurer King sequel I’m working on, The Performance Magician.

(I can’t say anything without explaining in detail everything you need to know before I get to the point. It drives my family up the wall. Hi, autism, how you doing?)

I described it as “more autistic than The King of Gears and Bone”, because while there’s other goings-on, including two men on a rocky path to a QPR, it’s mostly about being an autistic magician in an allistic world and the ways Darius performs allistic, abled, neurodiverse, disabled, and autistic behaviours to conceal and emphasise his skills (which is something I’ve never seen in fiction).

I don’t know if folks are going to understand what it feels like to say something like that so casually. I don’t know if I can explain it. I’ve written a story that is so centred on Ein’s experiences as an autistic, to the point where even his experiences of cissexism are tangled up within it, that I don’t know how I’d tell the story without it. Here I am now, though, blithely saying that this other story is even more autistic. I know that there’s actually no ranking of what is and isn’t “more” autistic (in The Performance Magician Darius actually spends a page talking about the uselessness of “more” as an evaluation for things that cannot be counted, much to Efe’s frustration--oh do I love laughing at Efe in this book) and that’s not what I mean by the saying. I just mean that here’s another story that’s built around being autistic. Here’s another story that revels in its autistic protagonist. Here’s me being gleefully autistic.

Yes, I have doubts. Writing autistic aro characters terrifies me as an aro, given the stereotypes the community faces, the way these stereotypes use ableist assumptions to hurt us and the lack of not only visibility but also existence of aro characters, especially since I don’t want to write allistic aros to provide a more diverse representation of what being aro is. (It also sends a message likely to be misread by alloromantic autistics, another anxiety.) The fear of how others might misread silences me more than it should, since I am so conscious of the fact that aromantic and autistic characters occupy such a tiny fragment of the world’s storytelling. I don’t want to pretend that I don’t struggle, because I do, and I don’t always find the intersection of being autistic and aromantic a comfortable place to occupy when both things are at the same time central to my creativity.

A few years ago I didn’t have this word, autism, or acceptance for it. I didn’t know it was this genuinely mine. I didn’t know it would explain so much about some of the things I’ve struggled with. I didn’t know I could revel in it, write stories about it, have it become such a significant part of who I am. I didn’t know that one day I would become a person who describes my current in-progress work as “more autistic” than the old one even though the old one is pretty damn autistic.

One little comment, something I wrote in the midst of a rambling post, says so much about a shift in how I know myself and how I tell stories about myself.

Being autistic is frightening, difficult, stressful and alienating, but I am so damn glad I finally--if many years too late--managed to have people give me the word in ways I couldn’t reject or ignore.

[k-a-cook]

I feel like aromanticism has among the lowest amount of representation, media and community of all my identities while, simultaneously, being the identity that makes it harder for me to connect with readers--and these things are not unconnected. Alloromantic LGBTQIA+ readers and autistic readers don’t want stories about gay, trans autistics leaving lovers; they want stories that provide the romance and the happy endings they have been too long denied in mainstream media, a wonderful and valid want. In writing stories that don’t have a romance or write about its dissolution, I feel I’m writing against the social expectations for what constitutes a happy ending, but I’m also writing narratives that can be too easily seen as denying a happy ending. That mirror in some ways the stories that long denied humanity through denying romance.

A happy ending with a gay, trans, autistic or disabled person in a romantic relationship where they are loved, respected and cherished is a powerful, healing thing. It is therefore harder for alloromantic people, I think, to find that empowerment and healing from a story that operates on a very different definition of happy ending.

In fact, what is an aro happy ending? When is this ever discussed? In a world where romantic relationships are held up as happily ever after, what do we strive for in writing if we are eschewing this? What do our happily ever afters look like?

I too need the empowerment and healing of a happy ending. I just need it without the assumption that all humans feel romantic attraction in alloromantic ways and seek to have romantic relationships.

For me, speaking as only one aro, an aro happy ending is about community, platonic relationships, found family, pride in my identity, knowledge and language and acceptance. The happy ending I’d love to read involves a protagonist’s connections with other characters in a story that acknowledges, supports or celebrates aromanticism, be those others aro or alloromantic, although the best kind of aro happy ending to me has an aro character getting support from other aros more than they do from alloromantic characters. It gives us the connection, community and understanding we don’t reliably get in real life.

(I dislike “one aro in a cast of many alloromantics” stories, not to mention “alloromantics supporting an aromantic with no other aros to do the same” stories. Is this true to real life? Unfortunately, yes, especially if one lacks online community. But that’s why fiction can be better: we have the chance to paint the world as it should be, not the world as it is. Stories with happy endings, even if they are still difficult or unlikely in real life, give us hope. Hope keeps us alive.)

A narrative that has a character end the story in a platonic relationship isn’t the same thing as an aro happy ending. An aro happy ending must be, it seems to me, about the identity and experience of being aro, not simply the experience of not engaging in romance.

I recently wrote Kit with a complicated ending, that of his leaving his partner. It is about the confusion and self-hate I think aros can experience, not to mention the difficulty of negotiating relationships we fell into, not understanding.

Now, I want to write him what I think of as an aro happy ending. I want to show him finding words, finding community with aro people, learning from aro people, having identity as opposed to confusion. I want to see him with that swordsman daring to build a platonic and sexual relationship, armed with knowledge, in the wake of the last that ended badly. A relationship that honours him as an aro man. I want to show him being gloriously, wonderfully aro ... so he can then, later, give that beginning to Amelia.

I know there must be more types of aro happy endings, and I’d love to see more aro creatives showing them to the world. But it is a beginning; it is what I want to write towards now, and I hope it’ll be part of a fabulous canon of aro creatives showing the world the many different kinds of ways aros can have their happily ever after.

[k-a-cook]

If you’re after free-to-read stories about a grumpy, demiromantic, autistic trans woman who pretends to be a witch and doesn’t much like people, or a chronically-overwhelmed autistic trans man who finds himself owned by a talking strip of leather that is both eternal annoyance and disability aid, or a genderless aro-ace autistic struggling to find hir place in a world that might not entirely disregard hir, or an undead aro prince seeking to survive the reality of what it means to be disabled, you might be interested in my writing.

I write character-centric, introspective-leaning fiction, so you won’t get many descriptions of battles or Game of Thrones style plots. You will get weird and witchy settings, bacon references, a character who steals books, a woman who says everything I feel on the matter of other people being ridiculous, stimming, lots of autistic characters, lots of trans characters, lots of aromantic characters, general queerness, cats, necromancy, little to no romance, a talking corncob called Susan and the curious case of roof-breaking giant rhubarb.

Blurbs and download links for the above short stories and web serial are available below:

Their Courts of Crows

A Prince of the Dead

The Unnatural Philosophy of Kit March

Old Fashioned

Conception

Certain Eldritch Artefacts

As a physically disabled writer who struggles just to write, format and design covers, I don’t have the spoons to manage the vast majority of the things recommended for promotion. So, more than most indie writers, I am reliant on word of mouth for people knowing that my work exists. For this reason, reblogs are very much appreciated!

Thank you for your time, and I hope there’s something here you enjoy reading.

Image descriptions under read more cut:

[image descriptions: six cover images for books by writer K. A. Cook.

Their Courts of Crows: A Tale of the Eagle Court: Cover has a waterstained paper background with grey line drawings of a crow sitting on a branch, a tree, three falling dandelion seeds, a feather and an arrow, with the title written in alternating serif and handdrawn type. The effect is something like a sketch in an antique journal.

A Prince of the Dead: A Tale of the Eagle Court: Cover has a waterstained paper background with grey line drawings of a sparrow sitting on a branch, a knife, a falling dandelion seed, two leaves and an arrow, with the title written in alternating serif and handdrawn type. The effect is something like a sketch in an antique journal.

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.

Old Fashioned: an Amelia March Story: Cover has a vector image cartoony style picture of a bedroom with rough-made furniture--bed, stool, chest of drawers, a shelf. Magical items like bone amulets, glowing mushrooms and spell bottles are hanging from or sitting on the shelf. The title and author credit are written in red and white handwritten type.

Conception: An Amelia March Story: Cover has a vector image cartoony style picture of a lounge room with rough-made furniture--mantel, rocking chair, stool, table--in front of a stone fireplace. Magical and household items like bone amulets, glowing mushrooms, spell bottles and a glowing capsicum sit on the mantel, books and flowers sit on the table and a loaf of bread sits on the stool. A round brown rug covers the stone floor, and laundry hangs from the roof. The title and author credit are written in a red and white handrawn type.

Certain Eldritch Artefacts: Cover image shows a cartoony, stylised vector image scene of a market scene with hanging peppers and fabric above the text and rows of corked potion bottles sitting on a wooden counter display surrounded by vegetables and sacks. Title and author name are written in a dark brown handdrawn type.]

[k-a-cook]

Fragment: Conception

Conception is the prequel to Kit March and the sequel to Old Fashioned, taking place thirty-nine-and-a-half years before Tes arrives at the College. It tells us a little more about the events of March’s time in the Greensward, not to mention how Amelia went from village witch to College doctor.

I should mention that while I grew up reading The Lord of the Rings like many other fantasy readers and writers, and I still adore it despite its many flaws, I loathe the idea that the privileged elves got to go off to Valinor, taking a few rare, special non-elf people with them while everyone else just dies. It’s a narrative in the background of Kit March that will become less and less background, but Conception gives us a little more than I’ve shown thus far.

My work-in-progress blurb is something like this:

With Kit gone to the Greensward, Amelia March is content with her faked witchery, the ailments of her villagers and romance confined to a novel. She isn't pleased, therefore, to find her cousin again darkening her doorway--her cousin with two feet, a belly, a sword of some distinction, a story, a young girl named Osprey, a beaming smile and an undying hatred for the elves. Still, Amelia thinks she can survive the chaos, at least until Kit announces a grand plan to start a school for divergent magicians...

And a snippet:

The more important question, she thinks, lies in the identity of the sword Kit wears. A myth too pervasive to be a lie, and, in her time, she’s heard it told several different ways. In Malvade, they claim the Sojourner gifted hir avatar with the blade and sent hir marked to fell so that even immortals learn the art of impermanence. In Greenstone, the Crone, the Third and Last face of the Goddess, gave a rock fallen from the stars to Her first worshipper as a gift and Her dying curse, the galactic sword quenched in divine blood and sent in vengeance. Grandmother never told it, never spoke the stories cradled in the hearts and minds of the invaders that scarred the stolen earth, but in her tales, Crow and Magpie gave to and took from humans with equal abandon—which the giver and which the thief depending entirely on the teller. The name of the god differs, but it is always a god of death, journey or trickery, gifting a human a weapon to refuse the immortal elves their route to a heaven denied all others. Everything that matters to humans is granted by the gods or spirits in one tale or another, so why not a sword?

An act so long ago that it has become myth to humans still must ache in the heart of elves, slow to age but now cursed to an alien death nonetheless.

She is yet to hear the tale that pities them for that.

I am lightly trying (as in if it happens, that’s good, but I’m trying to not hurt myself by making this happen) to see if I can publish this before Christmas. (My thinking was to give everyone suffering Family something free to read on their phones. I know I’ll need something.) If it doesn’t happen, before 2018, probably.

[k-a-cook]

Fiction Round Up: July / August / September

Fiction Round Up: July / August / September

You can tell my updates here have become infrequent at best: I’m using the same header title as I did for a fiction collection post spanning the same three-month period last year. I’m also posting this at the end of October…

This is, in part, what’s lead me to rework my online presence. Most of what I’m writing/creating is connected to my aromanticism, so it goes up on Aro Worlds. That’s also the…

[k-a-cook]

Update: Love Spells, Rainbows and Rosie

Update: Love Spells, Rainbows and Rosie

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…

[k-a-cook]

Fiction: Love Spells, Rainbows and Rosie

Fiction: Love Spells, Rainbows and Rosie

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…

[k-a-cook]

Fiction: The Sorcerous Compendium of Postmortem Query

Fiction: The Sorcerous Compendium of Postmortem Query

Summary: On the night of the Thinning, necromancer Mara Hill goes to the village graveyard to ask a question she can’t risk sharing with the living. The meddling dead, however, speak more than Mara expects about their once-living experiences of love and attraction.

Theme:The story features an a sapphic allosexual akoi/lithromantic woman, with a non-amorous aro-ace man and a bisexual aromantic…

[k-a-cook]

Linkspam Friday: November 30

Linkspam Friday: November 30

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 Crewchapter:…

[aroworlds]

I’ve written a few more aromantic stories since I last linked my fiction post! Most of these pieces are available for free (and those that aren’t help me survive in a capitalist hell where medication and gluten-free replacement foods aren’t cheap). I generally write flash fiction, short stories and novelettes, as I’m finding shorter works easier to manage and produce within my disability-caused limitations.

Allo-Aro Stories

Hallo, Aro (fantasy and contemporary collected allo-aro flash fiction)

* Note: all these stories are listed on my Hallo, Aro Tumblr post.

The Mara Hill stories (fantasy, lithromantic and idemromantic)

The Sorcerous Compendium of Postmortem Query

The Mundane Progression of Premortem Colloquy

Love Spells, Rainbows and Rosie

(The Sorcerous Compendium of Postmortem Query does have an aro-ace side character and references to a wide diversity of aros.)

Ringbound (fantasy)

The Darius Liviu stories (fantasy)

Certain Eldritch Artefacts

Love in the House of the Ravens

One Strange Man

The Adventurer King

* Note: Darius is abrosexual, and his abrosexuality does include periods of asexuality. Certain Eldritch Artefacts doesn’t focus on the aro, but the following two stories do ... and there’s more of this to come.

What if it Isn’t (contemporary, greyromantic)

The Rowan Ross stories (contemporary, frayromantic)

The Vampire Conundrum

The Pride Conspiracy

(Both these stories feature aro-ace side characters.)

General Aromanticm / Non-SAM Aro Stories

When Quiver Meets Quill (fantasy)

What Makes Us Human (fantasy)

(No protagonist in either story makes reference to an orientation identity that isn’t their aromanticism.)

Aro-Ace Stories

The Wind and the Stars (fantasy)

Old Fashioned (fantasy, demiromantic/demisexual)

Love is the Reckoning (fantasy, greysexual/aromantic)

* Note: Love is the Reckoning is best read after the Mara Hill stories listed above.

Many of these stories are available in the When Quiver Meets Quill collection. It should also be noted that most characters are some additional combination of not-heterosexual, transgender or non-binary, autistic and mentally ill.

Folks may prefer to look instead at my Marchverse page, which lists in chronological order all the fantasy stories in that setting.

[k-a-cook]

I don’t know if other mentally ill and/or autistic creatives feel this way, but I never feel good after having completed a project. In fact, what I feel is usually more akin to loss, displacement, depression and suicidal ideation. I don’t know if it’s because my brain latches onto the thing I was doing and then doesn’t know how to handle life without the thing, or if it’s because I have no idea how to feel accomplishment for longer than ten seconds, or both, or something else altogether. I don’t know, but it makes being a creative incredibly difficult when I don’t get much in the way of positive emotion at the end.

I have come to some grudging acceptance that the day or days after finishing a project will involve self-care because I won’t be bouncing around in excitement and satisfaction or pride the way society says I should feel. I’ll just be trying to hold it together until my brain settles a bit and I can move on to the next thing--and trying not to hate myself for feeling the way I do.

For me, it often means writing for the sake of writing or fooling around in Photoshop making graphics for sidebar widgets. Not the piece I’m editing. Not the 140k word manuscript I need to read over and then rework in places because I would like to submit it to a publisher this year. Not a cover or actual design work. Something unnecessary, just because I can. It keeps the habit of doing things going with less pressure.

So I started writing the “aro happy ending” to Ringbound. A couple of thousand words, Kit’s getting the word he needs, nothing complicated. I’ll post to my website at some point and move on, right?

I’ve got an aro-ace swordsman waltzing in and telling the word he is so damn tired of everyone assuming that acts of kindness for a stranger are based in sexual or romantic attraction for that person and can the world please stop assuming him to be a Dark Lord in the making? Can’t he just offer up his coat to somebody shivering and crying, someone he turned down a few moments earlier, without having to make this explanation?

Two things: one, I have a lot of unprocessed hate for Garth Nix’s Clariel (not so much in the context of the book itself but for the context of her character arc over the series, given that she steals the bodies of young women for her own) and similar works that combine aro-ace coding and antagonistic characters, and I want an aro-ace character who knows he’s seen as evil/inhuman in the same way I have to know it.

Two, I‘m enjoying this character despite feeling otherwise horrible. He’s kind and a little weird (speaking as someone who is generally weird myself) and openly aro-ace even if it means the explanations. He has no damn to give about being masculine enough and he cares about people, openly and enthusiastically. He’s quite fun to write.

The first is fine. I see nothing wrong with stories that address how we aro-ace folks are seen in the media, especially those of us with no alterous or queerplatonic relationships. The second ... damn it, I do not need another character to write about. I have enough of them already.

Except that he’s walked into the Word doc and stolen the story from Kit, and since he’s gathering a crew for a quest into a magically-dangerous part of the Marchverse, there’s already some degree of plot, and ... and I read a book last week about a hideously cishet masculine hero adventurer and his hideously cishet masculine companions written with hit-you-in-the-face cis-masculine supremacy overtones. (No point in naming; there’s many fantasy novels like this.) It would be so nice to have a story in the same adventure/quest style about queer characters of many genders, non-genders and orientation identities who care about each other and face monsters and dangerous magic, minus the misogyny and cisheterosexism, with an aro-ace man in the same role. I’m thinking something along the lines of L-J Baker’s Promises, Promises with less absurdist humour and romance, but more trans/gender diversity.

This wasn’t supposed to happen, damn it.

[k-a-cook]

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...

Length: 11, 350 words / 40 pages

Genre/keywords: fantasy, novelette, transgender, autism, multisexuality, aromanticism, queerplatonic relationship

Download and vendor links: available on the Marchverse Short Stories master page.

Please note that this will be best read after Certain Eldritch Artefacts (also available at the above link) which details how and why Darius met the belt and decided to become a mercenary. I don’t expect the theme of reaching a sense of adulthood will ring quite as true without seeing what came before it.

If you want the beginning of a story about an adult autistic, aromantic, trans man who goes off to save the world with a bisexual cis man who is a thoughtless arse at times, needs to learn how to say sorry but will spend the next installments learning to figure this out, this might be for you.

Image description under read more cut:

[image description: 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.]

[k-a-cook]

With Kit gone to the Greensward, Amelia March is content with her faked witchery, the ailments of her villagers and romance confined to a novel. She isn’t pleased, therefore, to find her cousin darkening her doorway—her cousin with two feet, a belly, a sword of some distinction, a story, a young girl named Osprey, a beaming smile and an undying hatred for the elves. Still, Amelia thinks she can survive the chaos, at least until Kit announces a grand plan to start a school for divergent magicians…

Genre: fantasy, short story, queer, trans, autism, aromanticism, asexuality, free

Length: approximately 7 500 words / 28 pages

Series: [Marchverse Short Stories] / [The Unnatural Philosophy of Kit March]

Previous Book: [Old Fashioned]

Formats/Vendor: [PDF] | [EPUB] | [Smashwords]

This is dedicated to @transcoranic who has been an absolutely amazing trans-and-autistic reader in understanding what I'm doing and why. I am still not over (and will never be over) the fact that he reads my stuff.

Please note that this story operates in the context of a marginalised character who has experienced discrimination at the hands of the elves (who are positioned here as a multiply-privileged community, one violently unwilling to share the benefits of their privilege save when it benefits them further). There’s a theme of autistic-targeted ableism and eugenics running throughout Kit’s story in addition to the isolation Amelia feels in being disconnected from allistic (and alloromantic) narratives.

If you want a fantasy story with three autistic characters who stim all the way through and just happen to be trans, with two of them also being a-spec, here’s a story about that, the difficulty of living as autistic in an allistic world and the beginning of a school designed to change it.

Image description under read more cut:

[image description: cover image for K. A. Cook's Conception: An Amelia March Story. Cover has a vector image cartoony style picture of a lounge room with rough-made furniture--mantel, rocking chair, stool, table--in front of a stone fireplace. Magical and household items like bone amulets, glowing mushrooms, spell bottles and a glowing capsicum sit on the mantel, books and flowers sit on the table and a loaf of bread sits on the stool. A round brown rug covers the stone floor, and laundry hangs from the roof. The title and author credit are written in a red and white handrawn type.]