(they/them) - Author | Illustrator | Infinite being | Writer of fantasy and horror. Sometimes I post art on my sideblog: @yveswithleaves Commissions open. (pfp by @raediay)
Hello Humans! I'm Airic, a queer author and illustrator (and infinite being) hailing from the Rocky Mountains.
Broadly I write speculative fiction, with a primary focus on fantasy and horror (always some flavor of queer, of course), and I've been known to dabble in poetry from time to time.
My illustrations tend to be character focused and fantasy in theme. I also enjoy drawing object-heads, designing book covers & maps, and painting vintage-inspired Christmas cards.
Please ask me about conlangs and foraging.
Directory of Work
The Arai Chronicles
The Dreamer and the Marked (Book 1)
A dark portal fantasy following a woman who, after discovering she’s part fae, follows a mysterious stranger into the faerish realm of Arai in hopes of finding her remaining family. TDATM features themes of grief, desiderium and redemption, among others.
Available for purchase at:
- books2read.com/tdatm (paperback, hardcover, ebook)
- https://airicfenn.itch.io/tdatm (ebook)
The Curse of Orias (Book 2)
Direct sequel to TDATM.
Currently drafting. Stay tuned for updates.
The Stars Are Drowning and other Stories From Arai
An ongoing series of short stories, eventually to be compiled into a book:
- The Stars Are Drowning (Follows the fathers of Draqa and Krystal, 24 years before the events of TDATM. Available through my newsletter)
- I Am Not Orias (Follows someone we meet in the epilogue of TDATM. Available on my website)
Lamb, Stag & Wolf
A folk horror novella following a priest and a woodsman in a secluded mountain village.
- Play the Game
- books2read.com/lambstagwolf (paperback, ebook)
- https://airicfenn.itch.io/lambstagwolf (ebook)
Poetry
"Unspoken Birdsong" - in Not/Coming Out: A Charity Anthology (2024)
"Pride for Sale" - (2024)
Other Short Fiction
"Waldeinsamkeit" - in BOREAL: An Anthology of Taiga Horror (Feb 2025)
Check out my Medium for occasional book reviews and my random musings about life and identity (all of my free short stories can be found here as well).
Art
Check out my portfolio here.
I'm currently taking commissions for book covers, interior illustrations, fantasy maps, character art, and then some.
Ko-fi Commissions Open! Click to see Airic Fenn's commission menu.
So! This is a perfect case study in situations where you should be wary of misinformation.
Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?
The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!
This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.
Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:
Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or
Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.
The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.
The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).
Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.
So yeah, there's actually quite a lot of places that would like these. Lots of people currently breathing in terrible quality air would much rather have their boring city benches replaced with really fucking cool algae tanks that clean the air and can be used to help create + sustain future green spaces in cities. I dunno about you, but I'd take that over a dumb metal bench any day. Put these at every bus stop and I'd be delighted.
Serbian here living in Belgrade! This is all true and I've actually seen some of these around the city a few times. They're amazing at what they do and really cool to watch up close because you can see pretty swirling inside them. It's not only functional but aesthetically pretty nice as well!
Pet owners, what kind of name does your pet have???
A food-item (Waffles, Peanut)
A color (Pinky, Hazel)
A real-life person (Marilyn, Paris)
A fictional character (Eevee, Simba)
A type of flora (Rosie, Willow)
Animal-like (Kitty, Gator)
A trait (Lucky, Buddy)
Something else
If you have more than one pet, choose the most applicable listed (ex: you have three pets named Cookie, Cream & Rocky, so you choose the “Food” option). Also, would be interested if you reblogged your pet’s name(s) in the tags and the reason why you chose it ^^
Pet owners, what kind of name does your pet have???
A food-item (Waffles, Peanut)
A color (Pinky, Hazel)
A real-life person (Marilyn, Paris)
A fictional character (Eevee, Simba)
A type of flora (Rosie, Willow)
Animal-like (Kitty, Gator)
A trait (Lucky, Buddy)
Something else
No pet
Voting ended onJun 11
If you have more than one pet, choose the most applicable listed (ex: you have three pets named Cookie, Cream & Rocky, so you choose the “Food” option). Also, would be interested if you reblogged your pet’s name(s) in the tags and the reason why you chose it ^^
Sorry for us politics posting, but we have until May 22, 2026 to submit public comment to the FCC:
More info from GLAAD:
https://glaad.org/fcc/
They have some good tips about writing a comment and protecting your privacy which, fuck it, I'll just paste here:
Providing an email address is optional. If you have concerns about privacy, you may use your initials or public address in your local area, such as City Hall. Do not use a joke name. It diminishes the comment’s credibility.
Your submission does not need to be long. A single, well-reasoned paragraph is sufficient.
Do not copy/paste a template comment. The FCC values unique perspectives, and an original comment carries significantly more weight in the public record. You can explain why this matters to you without revealing private or sensitive personal information.
Here's what I said:
“Free speech is a fundamental American freedom. I do not need a warning about seeing queer people, much like I do not need a warning about women, veterans, or any other group of people.”
taylor titmouse's guide for improving your itchio store page
(The Night Guest)
a few years ago i wrote a big angry post about how bad people are at marketing their own work and what they can do to be better at it. since then, the advice about twitter has largely become unnecessary and irrelevant, but the advice about what information you should be putting on your product page is still important and [through gritted teeth] nobody's fucking doing it.
so this post is going to be a step by step break down of what you can do to improve your itchio store pages to make them more informative and customer friendly. you're reading this because you 🫵 want to learn and improve. or you're just curious and/or like it when i yell. but either way taking my advice is your choice and if you don't feel like doing any of it you don't have to, much like nobody has to buy your books. if you've ever lamented why nobody buys your work but you're not making it easy for them to do so, it's 🫵 your fault and you annoy me immensely. take responsibility for your bad business practices.
anyway, let's make you better okay?
(and also note that all the store pages i'm using as examples are for adult works, but there's no explicit images in this post. you'll only see anything if you click through the links)
BANNERS
you probably already clicked and read through that image up there, because it was big and eye-catching and at the top of the post. i fucking Got you. that is, ideally, what the banner will do. while the banner is not strictly necessary, it's a "well, why not have one?" situation. it makes the page look more deliberately designed, and it's a great additional sample of what the customer can expect from your work.
if your product doesn't feature art, simply making an image with the title will also work well, as i've done here for A Hundred Hungry Mouths. that book didn't have enough interior illustrations to justify burning one for the banner, so i left the cover out of the "screenshots" field and edited it to be the banner instead. simple!
(if you don't want to figure out a good banner size yourself, mine are 1120 x 325 pixels with transparent, rounded corners)
BOOK COVER
i think this one is a no brainer. i hope to god it is a no brainer. if your book has a cover, make sure it's set as the first screenshot (if you're not doing the banner tech i mentioned above). i won't advise you on what a good book cover is, because that's a whole other post and wildly subjective. but you should have one. even if it's a sketch collection. even if it's just an illustration from the sketchbook with a title edited on. it will look so much better than nothing.
hopefully you also already know that though, so here's some itchio specific advice. what itchio considers the cover is actually the thumbnail that displays elsewhere on the site. you are much better off making a discrete edit for this rather than uploading the actual cover. compare the thumbnails i made by hand for r/l monroe's books vs the thumbnails for the early books i didn't bother with.
one of these looks professional. one of these looks lazy, and there's a reason that section is relegated to the very bottom of my page. if you don't want to go the length of a bespoke thumbnail, take your book cover (or whatever illustration you want to use) and set your square selection tool to a fixed aspect ratio of 6.3 W to 5 H. find a good crop, then resize it to 630x500. perfect thumbnail.
SAMPLES
this is the thing that makes me the angriest. it makes me SO angry. so many of you are out there making your store pages, trying to sell me prose writing or your comics or your artbooks, and then not showing me any of your work. i'm grabbing you. i'm shaking you. what is your fucking problem. what are you THINKING. have you ever bought a book at the store without reading a little first? would you buy a graphic novel without flipping through the first few pages to see if you like the style? no?
SO WHY DO YOU EXPECT ME TO? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
this is so basic. i should not have to keep telling people this but it keeps happening. PUT A FUCKING SAMPLE UP. TAKE SCREENSHOTS OF THE FIRST PAGES OF YOUR WRITING. GIVE ME THE FIRST FEW PAGES OF YOUR COMIC. SHOW ME AN ILLUSTRATION OR TWO FROM THE ARTBOOK.
they don't even have to be the full thing! with my artbook collections, i'll pick a few crops and make one condensed promotional image. or i'll take one good one and slap a banner over it. i put something. you can check out different examples/styles of this on The Womanulet, Poker Night with the Arizona Dogs, and Return to Shadow.
for all of my prose writing, i include at least the first 1-3 pages of the book. you are actually delusional if you are a prose writer and you're trying to sell your book on the cover and pitch alone. you have to show me that you can write, and give me a chance to tell if i'd like it. i cannot think of a good reason not to. if you're embarrassed to have any of the writing public, you should not be selling it. if you don't want to give any of it away for free, get your head out of your ass. who do you think you are. there is no good reason not to include a sample and i don't know why so many of you don't.
OKAY THINGS GOT A BIT HEATED THERE SO LET'S TALK ABOUT TEXT
we're going to cover sales copy now. it's hard to write. it is absolutely miserable to write. but you have to. if you're trying to sell me a story, you have to tell me what it is and who it's about. who is our protagonist? what challenge are they facing, or what are they setting out to do? who will they encounter, and what might happen to them? you don't have to tell me the whole story, but you should set my expectations. let's break down the example pictured above, from The Night Guest.
Ever since the death of her husband, Mrs. Arakawa has run her inn alone. There's never been a guest the seasoned innkeeper couldn't handle… but she's never had to host a hungry oni. It'll take all her wits and wiles to survive the night in his service--or else she may find herself in his mouth.
in three sentences, i've established who the book is about, the conflict, and the sexual hook. there's a sexy widow, there's a scary oni, and they're probably going to fuck nasty style by the end of the book. that's enough to get the idea of what this is and whether you'd like it. it can be difficult to know how to pitch a story without spoiling it, so this is something that takes observation from other books, and practice. it is hard! i hate doing it! but it's vitally important to getting the reader onboard with your work.
but mr. titmouse! you cry. i'm not selling a story! i'm selling an artbook!
okay. you can still tickle my balls about what's in there. here's another example from my hades 2 artbook Return to Shadow.
Sometimes there are games that, had we been born into a better timeline, would prominently feature awesome sex. Bad endings, romance scenes, flagrant eroticism. Hades 2 is one of those games--beautiful, fun, and with monster designs that deserve to be appreciated for the fantastic fuckmobs they are. Together, we can imagine this better timeline.
it's a bit more slick, a bit more sales pitchy, but that's fine. there is no narrative here beyond 'boy i sure wish hades 2 had porn in it'. i'm enticing you into a space. it's a book of hades 2 porn. don't you also want to look at hades 2 porn? wouldn't that be awesome? i think it's awesome. i want you to also think it's awesome. you (as author) should be convincing your potential customer that what you want to share with them is awesome.
THE INFORMATIONAL PARAGRAPH
whether you find this one necessary depends on the work. i think it's always a good idea to have somewhere to give contextual information about your thing, and if you're working in erotica you've got to have somewhere to put your features and warnings. this is also a good place to put your comps and inspirations--a good way to set your reader's expectations. basically, anything that doesn't fit into the narrative pitch, you'd put here.
here's an example from Chique: The Sunken City:
Chique: The Sunken City is inspired by RPGs and hentai games, and contains three short stories, each an encounter with a denizen of Sodden, exploring different associated kinks and fetishes. Books in this series have no reading order.
tells you what vibe the book has, that there are three different stories within the book, and that it can be read without reading any other books in the series. straightforward, easy to understand. no problem.
for adult books you don't have to be 100% thorough when listing out the featured kinks, it's okay to just hit the highlights. i've become somewhat agnostic about this in the era of "if you even mention a naughty word we'll Get you" internet. but i would suggest you put as much as you feel comfortable revealing, and what would be most attractive to a reader. you don't have to list every individual sex act, just remember that this is part of your advertising. you want the person who's really into what you're cooking to know that it's on the menu.
THE OTHER LITTLE INFORMATIONAL PARAGRAPH
this is self explanatory. please tell me how many pages there are of your comic or art book. tell me the wordcount for your prose. MOST of you are already good about this and don't need me to tell you to do this. but if you weren't already doing this, a) i don't understand you b) start doing it.
I THINK THAT'S MOSTLY IT
you've been so brave and tough for letting me yell at you this far down your dashboard. i hope you've learned something and will change your behavior for the better. i want you to make money. okay? i yell at you like this because i want you to make money. i want to GIVE you money. but you have to make it easier for me.
to wrap up, here are my other general pieces of advice to make your itchio page look and function better
if there are multiple books in the series, put a link to the rest of them somewhere on the page. i put them at the bottom, as you can see on this Roger book from the middle of the series.
i personally prefer itchio pages that are styled for dark mode. black always looks good in the background, and #232323 gives you a nice neutral gray for the text area. however, making the page match the palette of your book cover is also a good choice, so long as you keep it legible. no white text on light backgrounds and vice versa.
bare minimum, make the links the same color as your cover. it will immediately tie the page together and make everything look more deliberate. the less 'i made this in two minutes and left everything default' you can make your page look, the better. have some pride, you know?
not an itchio specific piece of advice but ohhhh my god put your links in your bio. put your links in your BIO. PUT THEM IN YOUR PINNED POST. PUT THEM SOMEWHERE!!!! you cannot expect me to scroll your account to find links you posted a week ago! or even an hour ago! put it in your bio or pinned post!! do not make me work to give you money! you are wasting valuable self-promotion space on DNIs that nobody cares about.
okay that's it. that's everything. you made it all the way to the bottom. i'm so proud of you. slaps your ass. now get back out there and fix your shit.
(if you found this helpful, how about buying one of my freakin' books?)
once you recognise the ubiquitous and inevitable fandom life cycle it becomes much easier to free yourself from it and just keep enjoying things in a more healthy way while still thinking critically about them
Decided to change my tumblr unsername back to youvereachedthevoid cause y'know what I missed it and I barely use tumblr for marketing my books anyway and honestly who the hell has heard of airic fenn lmao
Funny how people know how boycotts work until it comes to the Harry Potter TV series, at which point they all suddenly seem to believe that telling people not to engage with something is exactly the same as advertising it.
HBO is putting advertising all over the place, so it's actually pretty necessary to inform people why they shouldn't engage with the TERF show. (And that includes piracy, since they've got services to track that kind of thing.)
I think it's important to keep telling people to boycott, but we need to be cautious of how we do the messaging lest it backfire. There's three pitfalls we need to beware of the most:
"forbidden fruit" (e.g. making it seem rebellious and appealing and "counter cancel culture" which is exactly what its marketers want),
"allegation kitchen sink" (e.g. hitting everyone with all of its problems at once, akin to something like the worst intracommunity callouts that are guilty of both the "arson, murder, and jaywalking" and "burying the lede" where the person has done SO much wrong and it's all important and yet at the same time the hateful/predatory behavior gets buried under the "their writing is sick" or "they blocked me!")
the inverse of "allegation kitchen sink," which is basically either focusing on the content of the media or on personal actions/speech (which people can and do unfortunately write off under "I can gloss over that" for the media and "separating art and artist" for the writer)
We need to keep it a simple message (more simple than this long post, this long post is explaining the internal reasoning, not what we need to tell everyone) like:
"Rowling has officially stated all profits from her media will go to institutions that seek to violate the human rights of other people, specifically LGBTQIA+ people.
Sidesteps all of the debate and discourse that can go on forever about separating art and artist, about whether she MEANT to be TRASH in her depictions or not, etc. It makes it "here's why we need to boycott and nothing short of that will work." It's best in general, especially with people who have nostalgia for it or who are ex-fans/current fans etc.
"Oh, another one? When will she stop milking that franchise for all it's worth? Unless you really like Potter, you won't be interested. *follow up with how boring it's become/is and recommendations for better books/TV shows/etc"
Better for people who are more interested in social proof/not engaging with boring or "cringy" stuff etc, or with people who bring it up in passing. With them, they may not care about the bigotry or the history etc (and you can add the above if they're interested there etc) so emphasize the waste of time and money/utter nostalgia retread snoozefest her work is now.
[Also, for people who are trans themselves/ourselves and don't mind being a bit edgy - start referring to her as JRKOFF, as that's what her entire public image is now, akin to Narcissus in the mirror, or as Bobby Galbraith-Rowling he/him in an intentional throwing her love of misgendering right back at her. If nothing else, being called a man will get under jkr's skin, and if somehow he IS the most closeted egg in all of Narnia, well, at this point it's time to deploy the equivalent of a nuclear railgun at that closet.]
I think you bring up a lot of good points, although we have to make it clear that even piracy is off the table, due to the aforementioned piracy tracking services that HBO will certainly be using to decide how much merch they want to license and whether it's worth continuing the series. Also I think "JRKOFF" doesn't really work, because her initials are JKR, not JRK.
it’s interesting how upset some people have gotten over negative things like homophobia and fatphobia being present in my writing. unfortunately I’ve had a life where those have been huge, shaping factors, and I like to talk about it. I was deeply anorexic for a number of years, and have had friendships and familial relationships deteriorate because of my queerness. being able to say “hey, this exists and it really, really sucks, now watch the fatphobic person get punched by a dragon” is kinda just what works for me, personally. I have a lot of feelings with nowhere else to put them, so my writing is always going to cater to my own catharsis.
I also want to push back against the idea that you can depict negative things like bigotry, so long as you also depict it being punished. there’s no Hays Code, and your story shouldn't have to be a children's fable with a moral lesson.
there's another book I've written that draws a lot from my own life (including verbatim conversations), and in it, not all the people with -isms get punished. some go on to live happy fulfilled lives, unaware of the damage they've sown, because that's often how it goes in real life. you're aware of the damage because you're inside the main character's head, and can you see how they've been affected, but that's it. no bigots getting punched by dragons this time. just one person learning how to live in a flawed society.
God I love language so much. You mean these noises coming out of humans' mouths have all these intricate varieties nuances? & they not only can be used to communicate but craft all kinds of stories and tales & clever tricks of sound??
Literally all languages are so incredible and beautiful to me
I'm gonna say this, and it's gonna spark a defensive reaction within some of you, but I need you to listen to me and let it sit for a moment before I explain further. It is not a personal stain against your morality.
From both my experience reading works by white writers, and my experience running this blog, I have come to the conclusion that many white writers are too used to relying on Whiteness being understood as the default experience of both your characters and your readers, and it makes you weaker writers with weaker technique overall.
One thought I find myself having often is "well, what do you do for your white characters?" I've grown to understand... Many of you don't 😅 you don't actually understand or apply character design techniques because it is Assumed™ that the reader understands- that the reader has the white gaze. It doesn't need to be Said that your character is white, and will do familiar white things. It is Assumed™ that white characters fall under the Magicking It Away rules automatically, while Black characters have to have reality applied to them first. You don't actually have to... Well, write.
The brilliant Toni Morrison explained this in an interview of hers (here's another; watch her doc!!!) that there's this assumption that one's readers are white. So when she would purposefully- and there's a difference!- write stories for the Black gaze, that certain things didn't have to be explained because we Understood, it would get frustrating for white readers. They felt left out, unappealed to, hurt.
And yet, that's standard fare- and everyone's not writing such specific stories like Toni! To be "fair", we did understand y'all. We had to. But those same techniques, both in writing and in media consumption, I believe are atrophied from white viewers ("I don't watch this because I don't relate!" Or projection of ones own identity into Black characters to be "relatable") because it's not Socially Required for you to apply them.
It's why I'm always telling y'all to study Black creations about Black people. Writing is a craft, and a craft has to be honed!! You have to practice!! I had a whole lesson on this and I feel like everyone glossed over it lmao. I promise it'll make your writing of EVERY character better overall. 🙏🏾
Airic Fenn @youvereachedthevoid - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
