In doing a little reorganizing around here I realized I don’t have blurbs up for my work. I’m adding them in order to put my best foot forward, and collecting them here in this post along with links to the work.
Please give them a read, and if any of my speculative fiction nonsense sounds interesting you can check out the whole works here and free of charge. This post is all my novels and my gamebook, with novella blurbs, novelette blurbs, novella/novelette series, and short story descriptions found here.
A pact struck in the distant future, after mankind has colonized dozens of worlds and diversified into engineered subspecies, saw the death of guns and missiles. With the new stigma of ‘farcoward’ weapons comes a return of the sword, shield, and bow.
Dana Rudolph is a grumpy travel writer hopping world to world, keeping to himself until date of publishing, when he is pulled into a vast, and surprisingly icky, conspiracy where he must do his best to protect the ‘appearl’, an anomalous learning gem that formed on its own inside a supercomputer.
Follow him and his sword as he teams up with an amazon and a leprechaun to dismantle the supposedly divine, forcing him to confront his traumatic past.
The Caloric Kiss: A Pseudoscience Tryst
Mankind has always had a lot of wrong ideas about science before stumbling to the truth, but there’s a place where many of the first guesses just happened to be right. Welcome to an alternate early twentieth century where the Earth is flat, eyes see by emitting beams, caloric is the very stuff of heat, and bigfoot is our closest relative.
A plague of spontaneous human combustion has struck Two York City, and it’s up to an eclectic band of experienced scientists to find the cure and claim the glory before the charlatans and hucksters get to it first.
Join Rosamin the microscopist, Bill the meteorologist, Wallace the geo-engineer, and Janet the primatologist on their disastrous stumble through a hollow in the Earth, a backward swollen town of watermelon seed swallowers, and Transylvania: the technological capitol of the world.
There’s even more at stake than their fair city, for there’s a certain Modest Proposal that isn’t so satirical in this world of living pseudoscience.
The Captain Rob Series
(Captain Rob Fights, Captain Rob Sinks, Captain Rob Robs, and Captain Rob Deals)
Born from ridiculous contrasts, high fantasy and lowbrow humor, one note jokes and epic book series, comes the four volumes of Captain Rob!
Rich with lore and odors, the world of Porce is much more than a gigantic public restroom to its many races and monsters. In the waters of Third Sink a maligned vessel is commanded by Captain Kilrobin Ordr, fierce pirate, slightly undead warrior, and gentleman scholar, well… man scholar.
The Captain and his crew face many challenges on their journeys, from graffiti worshiping Toil Papists who praise their god’s glory at Glory Hole to monsters engineered by the world to defeat them, along with bloodthirsty reflections, sewer-sea monsters, and tornado spewing hand dryers. Do you have the courage to peek behind the bathroom door and find out what’s making all those terrible sounds!? Then barge right in and partake in the plumbing of new depths!
As time plodded along the artifices of man crumbled, leaving only one city. Colduvai, still standing in a region of Africa near human genesis, survives because of the might and devastating beauty of Queen Magthwi. She stands as the center of the world.
Something lurks, not daring to show its face to her, but it eats at her kingdom nonetheless. Citizens are disappearing, or worse, giving up, even dying from the anxiety of sitting in their own homes.
The queendom resists, but it does not appear they can hold out against the mysterious scourge. The diplomatic envoy doesn’t return. The zookeeper goes mad and unleashes his flock. A traitorous girl dabbles in the royal fluids, engineered by generations long past, and seeks a throne of her own. Still the queen stands and does her best to cradle a thrashing people until the end.
Behold the United States after an economic apocalypse; inflation has run wild. Life is nearly choked out by mountains of coins and dollars in the breeze. Crazed robots, rogues with coin-shooting guns, and many other strange things roam. One man, a rare surviving specimen of optimism, journeys across the wasteland of wealth in search of a place good enough to be his home.
The Green Knight and his Guests
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a classic Arthurian tale of bravery, hubris, and honesty in which the titular knight must willingly go to his death at the hands of an otherworldly knight who is not inconvenienced by the loss of his own head.
This is a retelling, enriched with even more adventure and magic, designed to get at the heart of the man who foolishly accepts any challenge. Even centuries since it was originally put to paper, Sir Gawain’s struggle grows ever more elaborate, like the winding ivy locks of the green knight himself.
Through the Bottom of the World: A Choose-your-own-Speed Run
A speed run is an attempt to beat a video game as fast as possible, for glory and personal satisfaction. Speed reading a book has never carried quite the same appeal, but perhaps that can change, with the addition of choice.
Here is a challenge, set in a fantasy world based on the principles of the speed run, where you the reader must guide the protagonist to her destiny, and perhaps a world record time. At crucial points you will have to make her decisions, and you should do so quickly, lest she careen into the void while waiting for you!
Y2K threatened to destroy the world, all computers to go mad when the year ticked over to 2000, but a solution was found! Now the nineties play over and over again, and things just keep getting better! The guns are off the streets, the ozone hole is patched, the cops are tough on drugs, and competitive recycling is the number one sport in the world.
Life should’ve been perfect for one of its star players, Joey ‘Kanga’ Reuben, but after his best friend was taken from him in the middle of a match he could think of nothing else. It was all the work of those superhuman terrorists, the dastardly Millennials…
Twenty-four Days of Ringworm and Religion
Welcome to what is likely your first advent calendar fantasy novel! Each day is a chapter, and should be read as such, but who am I to stop you from catching up? What follows is the story of one Marzipan Ridner, a young trans girl aching for the fulfillment of the holiday season. When a mysterious wooden Advent calendar shows up she opens the first door, and finds herself whisked away to a world-tree of contrasting deities and binding bureaucracy. She has less than a month to find someone willing to be her spiritual patron, but the denizens of the tree don’t seem very hospitable…
The Planet in Theory Series
(Pluto Takes the Stage, Funeral March to Gothic Rock, and Riverboat Without a Captain)
Past the facts lies a realm where your guess has to be good enough: probable space! Its places and peoples have their own odds, from 2to1 on down, getting less substantial all the way. All the planets there are the ones merely theorized here, from tiny Vulcan, to Counter-Earth, to Phaeton, and now beyond to… Pluto?
The poor orbiting body’s downgrade from planet to dwarf shoved it into the realm of theory, so it popped up in probable space, complete with an adult population shocked to find themselves alive! This series starts from that cold dot and moves closer and closer to reality, following the crazy 8to1 swashbuckling somebody called Long Odd Silver as they make their way back to being.
Watermelon Peak is a unique ski resort, and fun for the whole family! The algae in the powder dyes the whole mountain a lovely pink, and we even have an exhibit for the movie studio that used to take advantage of this unique color for many of its special effects!
Only the resort is closed for the weekend. One group makes the trip anyway, to relive their glory days of movie making, leaving crimson trails in the disturbed snow. Behind them comes another figure, clad in black, with sharpened skis mounted on his back. His glory days are ahead of him.
It is the age of the beity. The animals of the world have grown in size and intellect, and in their wake humanity is reduced to meek servitude. They say the humans did it to themselves, shying away from the chaos they created. Loric Shelvtale says that, and much more in the course of his duties as a storyteller in the court of the great bear: Krakodosus the thundercoat, Scion of the Salmon Run.
Until one evening, during a key performance, he violates one of the ultimate rules, meant to keep his kind in check. Fleeing for his life, he seeks the only human power left, a secret reserved only for dentists, who are still allowed to forge metal to keep the giant teeth of their masters clean. That secret is the Bloody Mouth, an oath that turns a dentist into protector and warrior, and the tool of their trade into a weapon.
And so begins their struggle, to flee the beities, and perhaps learn how the world could have reached such a state, though they would be shocked to find it all started long ago, on a place called the internet, where their forebears could not stop obsessively staring at photos of adorable animals…
Blaine Arcade 
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