Hot off adding blurbs to all my books here on the blog, I figured I’d do the same thing for all of my novellas as well. I write lots of wild speculative fiction, and it’s all freely available here, so please check out anything that looks interesting to you.
There’s a place, not much of one, where all the characters too old and insignificant to copyright wind up. It’s a town fading into obscurvy, the disease of irrelevance, but Wai Tai Chen is still making a go of it.
She’s a tenner, meaning her name showed up in her original work ten times or less. The reference page over her heart, all she got from her author, barely has any usable words. She mostly winds up smacking people with fish.
Still, she tries her best and minds her own business, but all that changes when the copyright company comes to town, offering jobs that seem too good to be true. All of the nobodies from the classics are falling for it, but not Tai Chen. She begrudgingly investigates, finding questionable contracts, a few old flames, and murder.
There’s a version of the wild west where the land in the westward direction just never stopped stretching, where magic seeped out of the canyons and rode the whirlwinds. That’s where Lionel Worthett lives, and it’s where he would’ve died if the almighty Laudgod had just let him.
Instead he was given a task and a document called the Manifest of the West. All he has to do is get the most powerful miscreants, villains, and varmints to sign their names so they can be turned into legends that won’t get any more astonishing, and then he can have his reward, one soul returned from the hereafter, back to the infinite west.
Police work has been the subject of fiction for an age, but what about television police work? Dive into this quirky novella that blends the twists and turns of a murder conspiracy with the trappings of hokey law dramas, complete with time slots, character tropes, crossovers, and commercial breaks!
This novella is dedicated to the animals used in human warfare all throughout history. None of them knew what they were doing, but some of them surely wanted to help. I take you now to the dawn of the first world war, and the birth of a very special litter of puppies who will eventually have to journey into Mexico as part of the manhunt for Pancho Villa, encountering a rogue German scientist and his hypnotized bats along the way.
Only finding fossils, we never suspected the flesh of the dinosaurs could’ve been so strange, could’ve climbed off whenever it felt like it and even borrowed our shape. That is the forgotten clade thanazoa, but they know of us, thanks to communing with their fungus-like oracle Atropos.
A defeated villain resurfaces to abuse those predictions, her predatory eyes set on the future she thinks she is denied. Discover a brand new world on familiar bones in this wildly speculative novella of the Triassic period.
Magic is real, as long as you’re in the know. It’s a lot subtler than people think, mostly invisible in fact. It can give you the second last sip from a canteen, let you push a pull door, or make your fortune cookies accurate if as vague as ever.
Dove used it on the stage, her audience only thinking they were looking at illusions. She was happy with that, but now her parents have dragged her to a strange island, the site of a failed music festival, and there’s talk of starting a new country, and a new school, both magical in nature…
Wilmot Barclay is a culinary explorer traveling the world to help define the cuisine of his fledgling country: Liberia. He thinks he has tasted it all until he lands on a mysterious island off the coast of Japan, harboring all the ingredients of the world within an incredible castle. Earth’s greatest cooking competition is just about to begin there, but some of what’s on offer is leaving a most suspicious aftertaste.
Tourney at the Hanging Gardens
Atlantis wasn’t the only advanced civilization to suffer a sudden and precipitous fall; there was also Ys, Norumbega, Arcadia, and others… at least according to the lore of the hit video game Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
Jenny Handerly (who goes by Handzy online) is also seeking her own path to paradise, through the game. If her ragtag team of friends can win the next Hanging Gardens tournament she’ll be set toward the future of her dreams, but there are plenty of obstacles in the way, in the gardens and well beyond them in the ruthless, youth-obsessed, and often bigoted world of E-sports.
Enjoy!
Blaine Arcade 
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