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 →