Poetry Collection: Aro and Loveless

Handdrawn illustration of a green meadow foreground with green and yellow pine trees growing against a mint-hued sky. Scene is overlaid with the grey gradient/green/light green/green/grey gradient stripes of the loveless aromantic pride flag. The text Aro Worlds Poetry sits across the image in a black, antique handdrawn type, separated by two ornate Victorian-style black dividers.

In my current queue and drafts for Tumblr, it feels like the majority of fiction and poetry is centred on promoting, celebrating and valuing the non-romantic ways aros still love. As much as I respect and support the need for other aros to tell their stories about love, I have to admit to feeling alienated. I’m struggling to find an equal number of depictions of aro identity and self-expression that don’t focus on an aro’s love.

So here’s a collection of reblogged aro poetry more welcoming for loveless aros and aros with complicated relationships to love. These pieces still reference love and discuss love, romance and amatonormativity. They’re not, however, focused on presenting or showcasing the author or narrator’s platonic or familial love. In other words, an aro narrator’s need to love or have their love seen and valued by others is not what these poems are about.

Continue reading “Poetry Collection: Aro and Loveless”

Hallo, Aro: Neuronormative – K. A. Cook

Banner for Hallo, Aro Allosexual Aro Flash Fiction. Image features dark black handwritten type on a mottled green background. Diagonal rows of arrows with bands, heads and fletching in the colours of the green/light green/white/yellow/gold allo-aro pride flag cross the image above and below the text.

Hallo, Aro is a series of flash fiction stories about allosexual aromantic characters navigating friendship, sexual attraction, aromanticism and the weight of amatonormative expectation.

Contains: An autistic allosexual aromantic struggling to deal with the ways alloromanticism and aromanticism alike are binary, neuronormative ways of looking at the romantic attraction spectrum.

Is there anything romantic not also non-romantic?

Continue reading “Hallo, Aro: Neuronormative – K. A. Cook”

Fiction Collection: Aromantic and Autistic

Handdrawn illustration of a green meadow foreground with green and yellow pine trees growing against a mint-hued sky. Scene is overlaid with the aqua/yellow/red stripes of the autistic aromantic pride flag. The text Aro Worlds Fiction sits across the image in a black, antique handdrawn type, separated by two ornate Victorian-style black dividers.

This is a separate list of all my works featuring autistic and aromantic protagonists. My other aromantic works can be found on my fiction page.

It’s also worth noting that my protagonists are like to be various combinations of trans, non-binary, multisexual and otherwise-disabled.

Some of these stories do not focus on the aromantic, and one story, Certain Eldritch Artefacts, is more an example of an aromantic not yet knowing it than an aromantic narrative. (Do the alloromantic usually build a successful romantic relationship with an inappropriate crush by first spending a year travelling around another continent?) The sequel, Love in the House of the Ravens, depicts the beginning of Darius’s finding this out…

What if it Isn’t

Cover image for When Quiver Meets Quill: Collected Aromantic Fiction by K. A. Cook. Cover features black handwritten type on a mottled mustard background. Cartoon images of arrows--in four different styles--sit in diagonal rows across the cover, the fletching and shafts coloured in the stripes of the green/light green/white/grey/black aromantic pride flag.

What if her love is a dull, flickering, rare thing, so insubstantial it makes better sense to disregard it as meaningful? What if her love is quiet and companionate at best while Keiko loves with fairytale passion, a woman who wants and needs to be wanted?

Pretending to be girlfriends while casing an art gallery with Keiko shouldn’t be a problem, but once Jessie realises things have gotten a little too real in the façade they’re showing to the world, the only thing to do is ask.

Contains: A stand-alone, fluffy, contemporary short story about a greyromantic autistic and the beginnings of a QPR.

Continue reading “Fiction Collection: Aromantic and Autistic”

Love in the House of the Ravens – Part Seven

Cartoon-style illustration of shrubs, roses and grasses growing against a grey stone wall. Scene is overlaid with the dark green/light green/white/yellow/gold stripes of the allo-aro pride flag. The text Marchverse sits across the image in a white, fantasy-style type.

After seven years in Rajad, Darius has fallen out of love with the unattainable and avoided falling in love with the companionate. If he lives at arm’s length from passion, isn’t that better than risking the abuse his fellow mercenaries so eagerly deliver to an autistic who can’t quite fit in? But when the right person suggests a romantic relationship, “yes” still won’t grace his tongue, and Darius hasn’t the least idea why. He likes Harlow. Shouldn’t he want to love her?

The only thing he can do is turn to his old friends and rescuers, the Ravens. They have an answer if he can stumble his way through asking the question … but it may upend every truth Darius thinks he knows about himself.

Content Advisory: Assault mention, discussions of romantic attraction and amatonormativity.

Length: 1, 104 words.

Links: Beginning | Previous | Next

The world doesn’t have common language for what it feels like not to feel.

Continue reading “Love in the House of the Ravens – Part Seven”

Love in the House of the Ravens – Part Five

Cartoon-style illustration of shrubs, roses and grasses growing against a grey stone wall. Scene is overlaid with the dark green/light green/white/yellow/gold stripes of the allo-aro pride flag. The text Marchverse sits across the image in a white, fantasy-style type.

After seven years in Rajad, Darius has fallen out of love with the unattainable and avoided falling in love with the companionate. If he lives at arm’s length from passion, isn’t that better than risking the abuse his fellow mercenaries so eagerly deliver to an autistic who can’t quite fit in? But when the right person suggests a romantic relationship, “yes” still won’t grace his tongue, and Darius hasn’t the least idea why. He likes Harlow. Shouldn’t he want to love her?

The only thing he can do is turn to his old friends and rescuers, the Ravens. They have an answer if he can stumble his way through asking the question … but it may upend every truth Darius thinks he knows about himself.

Content Advisory: Descriptions of wounds and blood, non-explicit sexual experience mentions. This chapter includes discussions of the way sexual experiences are shaped by autism, autistic modes of communication and the infantilising of allosexual autistic adults by allistics (non-autistics).

Length:  884 words.

Links: Beginning | Previous | Next

He ruined everything by freezing: unable to say yes, unable to say no, unable to keep from hurting her in his speechless confusion

Continue reading “Love in the House of the Ravens – Part Five”

Love in the House of the Ravens – Part Four

Cartoon-style illustration of shrubs, roses and grasses growing against a grey stone wall. Scene is overlaid with the dark green/light green/white/yellow/gold stripes of the allo-aro pride flag. The text Marchverse sits across the image in a white, fantasy-style type.

After seven years in Rajad, Darius has fallen out of love with the unattainable and avoided falling in love with the companionate. If he lives at arm’s length from passion, isn’t that better than risking the abuse his fellow mercenaries so eagerly deliver to an autistic who can’t quite fit in? But when the right person suggests a romantic relationship, “yes” still won’t grace his tongue, and Darius hasn’t the least idea why. He likes Harlow. Shouldn’t he want to love her?

The only thing he can do is turn to his old friends and rescuers, the Ravens. They have an answer if he can stumble his way through asking the question … but it may upend every truth Darius thinks he knows about himself.

Content Advisory: Descriptions of wounds and blood, bullying and the ableism targeted at people who can’t conform to neuronormative modes of speech. This chapter begins increasing romance mentions and discussions between alloromantic (Akash) and aromantic (Ila, Darius) characters.

Length: 935 words.

Links: Beginning | Previous | Next

You never give a family heirloom to a romantic partner before you’ve formalised the relationship.

Continue reading “Love in the House of the Ravens – Part Four”

Hallo, Aro: Existence – K. A. Cook

Banner for Hallo, Aro Allosexual Aro Flash Fiction. Image features dark black handwritten type on a mottled green background. Diagonal rows of arrows with bands, heads and fletching in the colours of the green/light green/white/yellow/gold allo-aro pride flag cross the image above and below the text.

Hallo, Aro is a series of flash fiction stories about allosexual aromantic characters navigating friendship, sexual attraction, aromanticism and the weight of amatonormative expectation.

Contains: A queer, pansexual, genderless person dealing with the historical inability to find recognition of hir aromanticism as separate from asexuality.

You don’t recollect how; you just cherish the word that shakes the world. Aromantic.

Continue reading “Hallo, Aro: Existence – K. A. Cook”

Hallo, Aro: Attraction – K. A. Cook

Banner for Hallo, Aro Allosexual Aro Flash Fiction. Image features dark black handwritten type on a mottled green background. Diagonal rows of arrows with bands, heads and fletching in the colours of the green/light green/white/yellow/gold allo-aro pride flag cross the image above and below the text.

Hallo, Aro is a series of flash fiction stories about allosexual aromantic characters navigating friendship, sexual attraction, aromanticism and the weight of amatonormative expectation.

Contains: A sapphic aromantic who fears that her interest in another girl may be best explained by a word she doesn’t wish applied to her–romance. This story follows on from the piece Friendship.

Have you never thought that what you consider romance is … arbitrary? Cultural? And bound to a particular way of thinking and behaving?

Continue reading “Hallo, Aro: Attraction – K. A. Cook”

Hallo, Aro: Friendship – K. A. Cook

Banner for Hallo, Aro Allosexual Aro Flash Fiction. Image features dark black handwritten type on a mottled green background. Diagonal rows of arrows with bands, heads and fletching in the colours of the green/light green/white/yellow/gold allo-aro pride flag cross the image above and below the text.

Hallo, Aro is a series of flash fiction stories about allosexual aromantic characters navigating friendship, sexual attraction, aromanticism and the weight of amatonormative expectation.

Contains: A sapphic aromantic who wishes to partner a dragon’s handmaiden without the complications of a romantic relationship, but finds comfort in her friendship with her own dragon. Continues in Attraction.

She fears speaking it, but she likes days spent with Azhra, likes nights spent with princesses, likes this unconventional life far from a home that never suited her. If freed of navigating her lovers’ romantic expectations and desires, what more can Elisa want but caves, treasure, dragons and handmaidens?

Continue reading “Hallo, Aro: Friendship – K. A. Cook”

Hallo, Aro: Unspoken – K. A. Cook

Banner for Hallo, Aro Allosexual Aro Flash Fiction. Image features dark black handwritten type on a mottled green background. Diagonal rows of arrows with bands, heads and fletching in the colours of the green/light green/white/yellow/gold allo-aro pride flag cross the image above and below the text.

Hallo, Aro is a series of flash fiction stories about allosexual aromantic characters navigating friendship, sexual attraction, aromanticism and the weight of amatonormative expectation.

Contains: A genderless allo-aro person contemplating the problem of how to tell hir best friend that ze wishes for a sexual queerplatonic relationship.

Is it “aay-romantic” or “arrow-mantic”? What if she hears “I’m a romantic” instead of “I’m aromantic”? What if she says “isn’t that just friendship” or “that can’t be real” or, worst of all, “I’m looking for something more”?

Continue reading “Hallo, Aro: Unspoken – K. A. Cook”