My drive to write is returning along with my health. I'm not going to make any promises right now about the schedule because the last two times I did that, something bonkers went wrong and swept my legs out from under me, but I'm happily writing again.
Here's where I bitch about a small problem that maybe you all have a solution to: I write in Libreoffice because 1: it's free and 2: It doesn't have a pop-up every fifteen minutes. I tried using Word a year or two ago, and it was so gross...
2025-05-02 19:42:22 +0000 UTC
View Post
Whisper
Whisper trudged through the underground tunnel they had dug many years ago, more tired than they could remember being in years. Being on the run was a special kind of exhaustion they had only experienced once before. A little over sixteen hours had passed since they had pressed the panic button, over thirty hours since they’d slept. They had the early stages of frostbite forming on their fingers and ankles, having driven a motorcycle at suicidal speeds to make it back...
2025-05-02 19:32:29 +0000 UTC
View Post
One week later...
“I gotta say, Stanley, you make a pretty fuckin’ good poutine,” I said around a mouthful of gravy fries and cheese curds. I was sitting in the kitchen in a chair I had pulled from the office, using Stanley’s compatriot (whose name I didn’t bother to learn) as a footstool. Well, him and two others had the bad idea to be unhelpful when I was looking for information.
The thugs were piled up on each other in a cartoonish fashion, my heel digging in...
2025-04-30 03:42:00 +0000 UTC
View Post
“Eh,” I said with a shrug. “It’s a gift.”
Trix’s laughter echoed across the flat planes of North Dakota as the two other figures regarded me with far cooler reactions. Trix had shown up tonight as 1990s Salma Hayek, wearing a nice sundress that was plastered to her body by the rain. The being next to her looked like Vincent Price if Vincent spent his whole life chugging protein shakes and competing to be Mr. Universe. His irritated glare went from me, to Trix, back to me, ne...
2025-04-16 23:24:43 +0000 UTC
View Post
But I got hit with norovirus and spent a good long time hanging out with the toilet. The good news is that all that time being miserable meant I didn't have much to do except think about Colm and his many problems, so I got some good material plotted out.
Hope the bug missed you all and I'll see you again soon with another chapter.
2025-03-28 06:32:23 +0000 UTC
View Post
Chapter Five
Albright
Albright laid his glasses on the desk and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Run that by me again?”
He was in his office, which was seeing much more use this last month with the boss “indisposed” with his sudden inhumanity. His desk was covered in papers, folders, two laptops in addition to his desktop, open bottles of Pepto-Bismol, Advil, and Tylenol, as well as a fetish Dr. Skirrah gave him that was supposed to keep disorganized energies...
2025-03-28 06:29:46 +0000 UTC
View Post
Jager leveled his polearm at me. I tensed, but no more lightning followed. In the moment that followed I took a moment to look him over. His armor looked like a mix of Viking armor and English plate mail, with chain mail crammed in places that weren’t covered by steel. On his shoulders rested a cape made from the hide of a bear, the head of the beast incorporated into his helmet. Normally, I’d think a person in that much mismatched armor would look goofy, but Jager pulled it off. It was t...
2025-03-02 21:44:20 +0000 UTC
View Post
I shot forward just as they opened up. Both squads had two big men with belt-fed machine guns, filling the hallway with lead (or, more likely, copper jacketed steel). One fellow was prone on the ground and opened up with a fucking fifty cal.
Thirty-six tentacles sprang from me, twelve from my back and six from each limb. My clothes were so shredded I was basically wearing a loincloth. The tentacles shot forward, breaking four of the five machine guns and wrapping around their owners.
2025-02-13 09:56:15 +0000 UTC
View Post
I felt my perception of time expand as my precognition gift from Trix commingled with my expanded powers from Other Me. Instead of seeing what I now knew as the most likely outcome of the future in three seconds, I perceived the world in front of me like someone had overlayed an x-ray of possible futures in front of me.
Future sight is an incredible power, Other Me chimed in. It’s one of the abilities almost any being that transcends mortality pursues to one degree or ano...
2025-02-13 09:55:40 +0000 UTC
View Post
Some stuff happened that I won't go into too much detail. My body is doing an impression of the Blues Mobile pulling up to the Cook County building. One thing led to another and it made it harder and harder to write or post what I've written and here we are exiting month 4 so I'm saying "fuck it" and posting what I got and writing what I can.
These next few chapters will probably be full of errors as I am not in the headspace to edit as thoroughly as I normally do.
Hope you all a...
2025-02-13 09:54:11 +0000 UTC
View Post
“I’m nervous,” I admitted, putting my Accord in park.
“Why?” Asked Alice. “It’s Ida.”
I grunted and climbed out of the tiny sedan. I opened the trunk and dropped the Webley in the hidden compartment. Alice joined me after grabbing her sign from the backseat, leaving her chain in the trunk as well. I’ve never gone to pick someone up from the airport before and wasn’t sure if we’d have to go through security. Alice wasn’t sure either, so we’re leaving behin...
2024-10-27 02:31:49 +0000 UTC
View Post
Prologue—Part Two
Alice
Alice sighed as she stuffed her bag. Colm was working through books faster than she could provide new material. Elysium only allowed her to bring one bag, so every week she had to figure out how to best stretch the material. This week she’d settled for several thick history textbooks with small font and very little in the way of pictures.
In a moment of weakness, she wondered why she even bothered. Then she scowled at herself for th...
2024-10-26 04:22:15 +0000 UTC
View Post
Prologue—Part One
Kristy
“You don’t have to come back if you’re not ready,” Albright said distractedly as he typed out a quick email. Kristy resisted the urge to curse his laptop.
They were in Albright’s seldom-used office. This was probably the second or third time Kristy had been here. She could see from her seat a coat of dust on the sparse shelves lining the west wall, which held a single picture of Albright and his folks and a few knickknacks Kris...
2024-10-26 04:19:08 +0000 UTC
View Post
First, chapters incoming. Two right after this post and a third tomorrow.
Second: Fuck this month.
It's been shit, life's been rough, but it's smoothing out. That's the main thing I wanted to get out and tell you. I'll try to be more communicative in the future but I have a bad habit of turtling up when things are bad.
Anyway, hope you'll all have a fantastic Halloween. I'ma post those chapters now.
-RaReason
2024-10-26 04:17:23 +0000 UTC
View Post
Got two chapters done. Doing a new editing process this time around and want to hang onto the chapters for a little longer as there were times during book 2 that I wanted to go back and change things a smidge but held back because they were already up in front of readers.
Once they feel good (not perfect, because fuck perfection. I don't know where the quote came from, but "Perfection is the enemy of 'done'" is right on the money.) I'll throw them up in a bunch up here. Prolly be 3-4 ch...
2024-09-20 04:07:03 +0000 UTC
View Post
VERY sorry for the long absence. A lot of shit happened, but the main thing that I was having trouble with was the direction of the third book.
I have learned after trying to write a couple hundred aborted books that I need to have an ending firmly in mind before I really start the process so that the book doesn't peter out like a deflating balloon.
As I've mentioned, I started this whole thing one day because I had a dream and went "that'd make a fun book." I then put it on Royal...
2024-09-08 04:32:34 +0000 UTC
View Post
(Or Story Question as Jim Butcher calls them)
Perdition Embraced
By RaReason
Colm has been through a lot. Pirates. Cultists. Existential nightmares. Literal nightmares. The list goes on and on. After some reflection, he realizes that most of his problems stem from one defining moment in his past: the night the Doorman killed all his friends.
Thus, Colm makes a decision: the Doorman has to die.
There’s a few snags in the plan, of course. ...
2024-08-03 21:08:06 +0000 UTC
View Post
My mind finally caught up with my feet when I crested a ridge, the quarry falling away before me. It wasn’t a big one, maybe a few hundred feet across. To the right was an old abandoned foreman’s office, a loading dock next to it with an overturned crane. Wagons would have been loaded up there and headed up the disused trail, which was now blocked off by a rock slide. The ground sloped down towards the west, becoming a dark pond.
The goblins were all over the pond. Little islands we...
2024-07-29 10:15:11 +0000 UTC
View Post
If you weren't here or on RR last year around this time, you probably don't know that I am deathly allergic to mosquitos. This is a brand new thing that has manifested within the last two-to-three years, and each summer since has resulted in between one-to-three visits to the ER. It's a frustrating fact of my life that the older I get, the more allergies I pick up.
But this year is better! Kind of. A single skeeter got in my room and bit me six times. I initially thought it was just thr...
2024-07-25 05:21:15 +0000 UTC
View Post
I tried my best to mimic the bird call Dane taught me. I had just wanted to shout his name, but he cautioned against making too much of a ruckus in case the girl was in a less benign form of trouble than simply being lost or having a broken leg. The tracks in front of me made me glad for Dane’s caution.
Dane trotted up and I gestured wordlessly at my discovery. “Satan’s cock-flavored hooch,” Dane swore. I noted it down for future use.
“Please tell me I’m wrong and that...
2024-07-20 21:15:20 +0000 UTC
View Post
“So?” Layla prompted excitedly, two days later. “What do you think?”
We were standing in what I now knew was called her parlor, which means “living room,” but fancier. Layla had requested a full length mirror be brought up while I put on my new clothing. I stood in front of it, seeing the transformation Ulysses had begun now completed.
I was standing in a black suit made from a sturdy material that breathed better than wool. A leather vest, the same shade of maroon as ...
2024-07-20 21:13:47 +0000 UTC
View Post
I didn’t sleep soundly, but I slept. The unfamiliar noises of the unfamiliar town kept waking me up, and once I rolled out of bed and had my gun pointed at the door, having heard someone walking in the hall. I crouched, using the bed for cover, listening. When the footsteps receded, I lowered the hammer on the gun and stuck it back in the holster. I slipped back into bed and went back to sleep.
Now that I was more or less healed, I guess my normal sleeping patterns were resuming. It h...
2024-07-20 21:01:00 +0000 UTC
View Post
I couldn’t get comfortable in the bath with the door behind me, and turning around in the tub proved to be worse for different reasons, as the tub was sloped and had a drain on the other side that felt unpleasant on my rear. Eventually, I just got out and dried myself off.
It took longer than I’d like to admit to figure out that the robe was supposed to be tied closed. It was the first time I’d ever worn one, and I spent a bit looking for buttons or toggles before I found the rope...
2024-07-20 20:55:25 +0000 UTC
View Post
I wrestled a lot with this book. Unlike the first one, which came to me mostly fully formed in a dream, Book 2 was the answer to the question of "where does this go?" The ending changed multiple times, the first being because it was 2 books worth of content to make it make sense, then changed again when I didn't like the direction it was going, then changed again simply because my fingers sometimes are assholes and the story often shifts as I'm writing it.
I sat on this particular endin...
2024-07-10 23:02:19 +0000 UTC
View Post
Box room was boring. But I learned that if I hit enough things and made enough noise, they’d shove things through the little hole in the door. Well, first they’d shoot me until I couldn’t move anymore. But after doing that a few times they started to bribe me. The markers and Crayons were fun for a while, but I got tired of them quickly. There was only so much space on the walls to draw on.
I wanted to make noise to see what I’d get today, but today was visiting day. Visiting da...
2024-07-10 22:52:15 +0000 UTC
View Post
He kept laughing at me. Laughing as I struggled to breathe. I tried to think of anything I could use to escape him, but my attempts to push him away or hit him were pathetic. I tried to writhe, to buck and shake, to wrap what remained of the things coming out of my back around his arms, but they were so weak. Everything about me. I couldn’t—I couldn’t figure out how to do anything! AND HE JUST KEPT LAUGHING!
That was maybe the worst thing of all. I knew he was making all of this h...
2024-07-10 22:43:51 +0000 UTC
View Post
I backpedaled as quickly as I could, avoiding the pole that the old man whipped back and forth with speed that cracked the air. I attempted to grab it on a backswing, nearly losing two fingers. Instead, they were broken, maybe shattered. The pole, when in motion, felt like it weighed several tons. Trying to grab it had been like trying to grab onto a bullet train.
He used my moment of distracted pain to land a haymaker on my jaw, the blow sending me tumbling across the desert for severa...
2024-06-29 17:33:08 +0000 UTC
View Post
As I started walking back to the warehouse, I remembered I did kind of have something… clothing adjacent.
I had been avoiding the Limps of the Other Side because I had thought they were the cause of my transformation. They might have had a hand in accelerating it, but now that I knew they weren’t the cause—dare I not use them, with what was coming?
My transformation ability already made my skin tougher. Adding another layer of protection should be a no-brainer...
2024-06-19 08:46:40 +0000 UTC
View Post
I've been going down a rabbit hole of 1800s census data and the university of Missouri prices and wages archive to learn more about the nitty-gritty details of cowboy life. I wanted to clear my head before I start the final stretch of Unfathomable Power book 2 and kind of bit off more than I anticipated.
With that said, I have some edits to make to the American Eldritch chapters that I've put up. Basically I wanted to call elves "natives" because they are native to the new world America...
2024-06-18 00:52:17 +0000 UTC
View Post
