Claudie Arseneault's Blog, page 4

A Grey-Scale Cover

This is going to be quick.

Unforeseen circumstances have added some solid delays to my cover reveal. As in, closer to publication than I am comfortable with waiting. It sucks, but that is life, there’s no real way around it.

So while I will not have a cover finished in all of its glory for a while, I do have a nifty, grey-scale version of it! It is lacking finishing touches (I saw a bunch of them and they make a huge difference), but it’s already pretty glorious.

So I’m excited to share! At l...

Announcing… The Kraken Collective!

Are you ready for exciting news? I hope you’re ready for them.  I have been sitting on this one for such a long time, and it might be my biggest project of the coming year(s). Hopefully it will be.

It’s The Kraken Collective!

The Kraken Collective is an alliance of indie authors who have pooled resources to publish high-quality fiction while retaining complete creative control over our stories. We aim to provide a wide variety of science fiction and fantasy stories, all starring LGBTQIAP+ ch...

Cover Reveal: The Dwelling of Ekhidna, by Lauren Jankowski

I don’t talk about Lauren nearly as much as I should. In all the baby steps I took reaching out to the ace community and getting involved with representation, Lauren Jankowski and the Asexual Artist blogs was one of the most fundamental and important one. Heck, that very first interview (she has over 500 ace artists interviewed now!) was a coming out of sorts for me, and it allowed me to meet friends I still love today. That is how fundamental she has been.

Thus, it is with immense pleasure t...

Wings of Renewal Takes Flight Again

After a few months of absence, Wings of Renewal has returned!

I’ve worked on a great many thingssince first publishing Viral Airwaves, back in February 2015, but of everything I did during those two years, building Wings of Renewal might be the thing I’m most proud of. Solarpunk is a beautiful and budding genre, with too little canon works out there. While I touch on it with Viral Airwaves, I had never published something intentionally solarpunk before I set to work on this anthology. Now I...

The White Renegade is back!

It’s back!

Between bisexuality and albinism, Seraphin always felt like an outsider in his own town. He finally finds companionship in Alex, an agender and aromantic teenager who interns over the summer. With them he learns to trust himself and his instincts. It leads Seraphin to leave his town and join the army invading his country, but when his squad is ordered to raid his hometown, Seraphin finds his new life may come at the price of his old.

Viral Airwaves’s prequel novella has finally...

Asexuality and Death and Other Associations

I’m used to asexual and aromantic characters being the villains. Pegging down a lack of attraction or love as inhuman and evil is an old tradition still well alive in stories, especially SFF. We have for a long time painted villains as people unable to comprehend love and celebrated romance as a staple of humanity, in addition to describing a lack of interest in sex as robotic, cold, or lifeless. And it’s this last descriptive I’ve dwelled on recently, because I hadn’t realised how it would m...

Sex-centric Narratives, Microaggressions, and the Problems of Poison Kiss

Earlier today I finally posted my review ofPoison Kiss. You can find it here, but to get you in the beat, here’sthe start:

I came into this book ready to LOVE it. And gosh did it start well! At 25-30%, I was in love with just about everyone, rolling in the happiness of what had everything to be an awesome, action-packed, queer-ensemble fantasy story.

And then, and then it… floundered, I guess.

Before I go on, let me caveat that the author, Ana Mardoll, is a queer and otherwise marginalized au...

Five Asexual Protagonists by Actual Ace Writers

Let’s have a party. Today Tor reposted their April list of asexual protagonists, which not only doesn’t recommend books by ace authors, but actually sets forth pretty shitty rep. And to add insult to injury, they paraphrase Lauren Jankowski, an indie aro-ace artist that is very vocal and supportive of the community and its self-publishers as she states that several of us would rather publish our own stuff… only to then ignore us all entirely.

They obviously didn’t give enough of shit to do th...

Wings of Renewal Will Take Flight Again

QuickWings of Renewalannouncement!

Last October, one year after its release, Incandescent Phoenix Books decided to dropWings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology.The anthology has been a labour of love, not just by me but also by my co-editor, Brenda, and by the great writers involved. We decided it wouldn’t be over so soon.

Wingswill come back, there’s no doubt about that! I’m currently working with the authors to acquire reprint rights and put it back together.Some stories will go miss...

Viral Airwaves 2nd Edition is coming!

CW for quick colour-flashing gif at the end. Be careful if those are a problem to you

I am super duper excited tofinallyannounce this!

Viral Airwaves releases once more on November 22nd!

Last August my publisher reverted all of Viral Airwaves’s rights back to me. I decided to use the opportunity to revise a few things that had been bothering me. Nothingstory-shattering, but my biggest change is incredibly close to my heart, and I’m happy I had the chance to go back and do this.

So whatisthi...