I’ve been going through making some crummy placeholder covers for my writing so they at least have some kind of face. This one’s for my Dark Crystal and American revolution inspired duology ‘Declaration’, the second of which will be posted here soon. You can give the first volume a read if you’re interested.
My series of crummy placeholder covers for my free books here on the blog continues. Say hello to the Porce series: four high fantasy novels infused with lowbrow humor. Join the guileful Captain Kilrobin Ordr and his rowdy crew of sink pirates as they traverse their colossal public bathroom world, battling monsters, ornery gemstone skeletons, and whoever they just stole from. They’re all free to read, so please check them out if you’re interested.
I can’t afford any fancy pants ‘actual artist’ as far as making cover images for my free books, but I can throw together lousy placeholder ones with the best of ’em. Today it’s my post-apocalyptic big magic animal brawlfest epic Invoke the Bloody Mouth. Please check it out if you’re interested.
This story takes place in our cillimorphs universe, the team of monster buddies and the broad strokes customized by Screamingecho over on our interactive fiction writing Twitch stream. Head on over there and give it a follow if you want a team and a story of your very own!
Skipper Eden’s Big Break
by
Blaine Arcade
Cheerleaders are always in the wrong place. Somebody keeps putting them on the field, during the game, when they really belong in the preamble, in the lockers and dressing rooms, motivating the people who aren’t quite sure if they can get themselves out there and perform their best. Luckily for Skipper Eden, he had five incredible cheerleaders with him before he even entered Club Nosering:
In his particular future, on his particular planet, along with the other habitable worlds and realms, it helps in most situations to have cillimorph friends. Skipper was a cillikeeper in addition to an announcer (he’s getting to the announcer part), so had plenty such friends. His cheerleaders were his closest. And they were, in random order, just the way cillimorphs like it, a Tictuttle, a Mudaub, an Egvelope, a Rimeroot, and a Puckerluck. Continue reading
Hey folks, just a quick post to let you know that my longest novel ever, Invoke the Bloody Mouth, is now available on Kindle for $2.99 or free on Kindle Unlimited. (Psst, it’s also free in its entirety here on the blog). Please give it a look if you’re interested; the blurb is below.
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…
Welcome to Helens, where books (looking an awful lot like people) show up to have their genres assigned by the publishing courthouse. The gorgeous and vivacious Valentine Lots appears, claiming to be a contemporary romance, but the sour soggy publishers say she has to be labeled as erotica.
Enter her representative Austentatious Punk: passionate, funky, and wearing as thin as her home. Valentine’s public defender will stop at nothing to see her get the genre label she deserves, but there might be time for a few breaks to get to know each other, bake a decent dessert, and talk love lives in this metafictional courtroom procedural slice-of-life novelette!
(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 37 minutes)
Austentatious Punk
Attorney-at-Genre
by
Blaine Arcade
The Valentine Case: Public Reading 1
Double doors burst and the works flooded in. None of them had any idea where they were going, hence the guides with their red sashes and gold calligraphy titles. ‘Right this way please’ they say, polite as a first time flight attendant, white gloves beckoning in slow motion: the flight of serene and knowing doves.
Using cues only they have memorized, the guides split the new works based on one glance, into different tributaries of shuffling feet headed for their very own doors. The space was tall but tight; you had room to breath but not to run. Wooden doors were stapled into buzz cut carpets. New works never brought any odors along from the imaginary places that spawned them, so despite the crowds the publishing courthouse always smelled like office printers breathing their last and spine glue.
A pair of dovely gloves fluttered in her face, momentarily nonplussed, then grabbed her and pulled her into another line. Nobody else was so much as touched. She couldn’t catch the plaque on the door before she was pushed through into a dimmer room, quieter too, so much quieter that it left her stunned. Continue reading
(estimated reading time: 55 minutes)
Tame the Cock
The Wicky Sticket heard many bad ideas over the course of those two days, concentrated in the empty ballast tank where the challengers made camp, guarded at most hours by some of the collaborating eggties.
Suggestions swirled about the tiny table quickly cobbled together from scrap wood. The representatives of the Death-or-Glory gang suggested they kill Zamshy by dropping directly onto him knives in hand, hoping that one went deep enough into the neck. There wasn’t much confidence in the idea, as they recalled dragon slaying being a rather rare skill, and Zamshy was at least half dragon. His serpentine flailing could buck them all off before they’d found a good spot to stab. Too many variables, the Wayfarer and Vesperos agreed. Continue reading
(estimated reading time: 52 minutes)
Study the Cock
“They call it the Dreamtime, far more south than I’ve ever coasted,” the Wayfarer said, guiding Vesperos through the quietest alleys of a worker’s district. It was just the pair of them, and a little distance from the boisterous toads was something of a relief. Not that the bee didn’t like them, or feared their insectivorous nature, it was just that his cell back in the hive had been such a perfect sort of peace, not silent, alive with the hum of all the other bees and wasps, but free of conflict. It had been the sound of harmony, of vibrating on the same wavelength as the planet. A symptom perhaps, to enjoy such a thing this far into his divine degradation, but no matter. It was closer to Psyche.
“Dreamtime,” he repeated, only to keep the Wayfarer talking. The sanded grain of the rat’s affable voice was almost as good as the hum, and he hardly seemed aware he was a font of incredibly varied knowledge. ‘Coasting’ as he described it had taken him from Constantinople to near the summit of the world, but never far inland. Continue reading
(estimated reading time: 1 hour)
Flash the Cock
Vesperos only missed the flash because he had eyelids, which was curious because the man was a bumblebee. Svelte for a bumblebee, upright for a bumblebee, rather four-legged for a bumblebee, far too intelligent to be a true bumblebee, and also far too eyelidded. Aside from these many anatomical anomalies he could also be identified by the pinkish shimmer in his thick collar-mane of thatched bee fur, also found in his otherwise black eyes and the transparent panels of his delicate wings.
His stinger bore pink fletching that shaped it like a heart, but he tried to draw attention away from it with his dress, including long wide coattails perpetually crimped at the end. Something about him tended to draw people in, and the people of Minimil were no exception, so he kept himself sequestered in the hive neighborhood of Dauber’s Comb, accreted and situated on the barn’s ceiling in the crook of a beam: the only living complex higher than Loftplace and its sprawling sand castles that drowned half the old buildings. Continue reading
In the barn-city of Minimil, small creatures from all across the literary canon live as one people, from Lilliputians and Shakespearean fairies to myrmidons, homunculi, and Wonderlanders. Their lives are tenuous, valuable as they are as pieces in the proxy game of Little Wars, where conscripting countries can use them to spill thimbles of blood rather than buckets.
Worse still, someone has petrified their goddess, Hestia, and it falls to her nephew Vesperos, the god of love reduced to a mere bumblebee, to find out how and why. He’s joined by a ragtag group of woodland critters who have heard the wind in the willows, and wish to help him rescue the reputation of their good friend Mrs. Toad, who is somehow caught up in the hatching of a cock’s grand scheme.
This is the beginning of The Challenge Obscene, the second novella trilogy of the Challenging universe. It’s best to start with the first, which can be found here: The Challenging Handful, The Left Challenging Handful, and Challenging Applause.
(estimated reading time: 24 minutes)
(estimated reading time for entire novella: 3 hours, 11 minutes)
The Challenge Obscene
Challenging Cock
by
Blaine Arcade
Tease the Cock
Only one creature found themselves caught out in the rain, but it should have been zero, scheduled and announced thoroughly as the precipitation was, the notice posted all over the city and found in the weather & events section of the Minimil Minutes: the only newspaper circulating in the entire barn.
Just under an advertisement for the concert of Fadfid Paganinny, the world’s smallest violinist, itself just under, and in fact cutting off, a complaint letter to the editor, the announcement was printed thusly:
On Monday the 18th of October 1926, on the hour of seven until one in the morning, there will be rejuvenating rainfall over the neighborhoods of Banker’s Dozen, Hopalong, and Tin Junction, graciously provided by the cloud, water, and wind nymphs of Bonsai Park. The cost of enjoying the rain and its spiritual benefits is nothing, afforded to us once again by our lady and master Hestia of the hearth-throne. Continue reading
Blaine Arcade 