Tasha K. Rookswater

The proofs copy of "The Nominal Hero" has arrived, and it's everything I hoped it would be. I'm going to be launching the book officially this Monday, April 8, and the cover artist, @Messhup , will be putting out an open edition of the cover art on Zora at the same time. I'll be making PDF and ePUB versions of the book available here for free download; like Nouns themselves, this book is in the public domain, and I encourage everyone to share it, remix it, do all kinds of cool things with it, and tell me about them! The paper book will be for sale on Amazon - sadly, not free, since paper and printing cost money and we do not yet live in a Star Trek world, alas. But I will probably give you a copy if we run into each other in person somewhere. :) This is so exciting!

As I get myself organized to put out the ebook of "The Nominal Hero" -- it's getting there, I swear! It's just been quite the month with my day job, and the holidays, and this unseasonably miserable weather, and the suspiciously large flocks of ducks I keep seeing everywhere, which I begin to think may be following me around... Ahem. Anyway, as I was saying: as I get things organized for the ebook, it belatedly occurs to me that I don't have an index post, which a more organized person would definitely have put together sometime before they finished their entire book . Let's all pretend I did this earlier, shall we? Much appreciated. The Nominal Hero: A Nounish Tale Chapter 1: Specially Marked Boxes Chapter 2: Situation Nominal Chapter 3: Words and Rules Chapter 4: Something Fishy Chapter 5: Verbing Weirds Everything Chapter 6: Beyond the Fields We Know Chapter 7: Fungi-ble Chapter 8: The Revolution Will Not Be Randomized Chapter 9: A Council o

Everything had gone quiet. An expectant hush lay over the crowd of Nouns, and over the human audience as well. A few flakes of snow drifted down. And out of the woods came the witches. They should have looked silly, Caden thought: twelve identical people with heads like cartoon toadstools, gazing out from behind square glasses like the ones Caden--(he touched his face)--like the ones Caden used to have. But instead the witches only looked otherworldly, their strangeness adding to their dignity somehow. It was Mushroom who broke the stillness. They jumped down from the stage and strode to the border of the trees, and spoke rapidly and urgently to the witches, in a low voice that Caden couldn’t hear. The witches swayed in unison, listening, and then a few of the closest inclined their heads in what might have been agreement. Mushroom bowed, and came back. “What was that about?” Caden asked quietly. Mushroom shook their head. “Later.” “Okay, but what--” Masami began, but then sto

“Once upon a time,” Caden said, “there was, um. There was a world.” He stood to one side of a stage that was made from boards laid across haybales. The woman running things had given him a microphone. That was it, as far as sets and equipment went. Presumably most people brought their own. Two other stages flanked his. One of them held a crew in the middle of building some sort of complicated scaffolding. On the other, a line of women in Santa hats and short skirts did a dance routine to recorded Irish music. They looked cold. There wasn’t really much of an audience for any of this. People passing by looked curiously at Caden’s stage and at the dancers, but mostly didn’t slow down. The Winter Carnival’s main shows were in the evening, Mushroom had explained. Right now was for a grab-bag of amateurs, just to have something going on so there weren’t a bunch of empty stages dragging the ambience down. The Noun had seemed miffed at that. Well. Maybe they’d surprise people. “Um,”

The city was covered that day in a layer of new clean snow. Caden spent the morning at the kitchen table, making notes, going back and forth to the bookshelves all over the house to look things up in his favourite stories. At eleven-thirty he ate a banana-and-cheese sandwich, put on his coat and boots, and headed out the door, Paz trailing behind him. The seven of them had agreed to meet in the parking lot on the east side of the university campus. It was near enough to Ruth’s school that she could walk there easily, it was close to where the Nouns had been spending their time, and it was spacious enough for Caden’s plan--his old plan, that was. But his new plan would need lots of room too. Masami and Hunter were already there. Ruth turned up a few minutes later. They waited. Duck and Mushroom were nowhere to be seen. “Could they have gotten lost?” Hunter wondered. “Or gotten the time wrong, maybe? Can Nouns tell time?” “They managed it yesterday,” Ruth pointed out. “I think they

Caden woke, thrashing, tangled in his blankets. He was breathing hard, and he thought he might have cried out, but he wasn’t sure. The nightmare was already fading at the edges, in the usual way of dreams, but the last image stood out sharp and clear in his mind. Craters in the ground, huge and black, their edges melted into glass. Ruined buildings on the horizon like broken teeth. A setting sun, red in a smoky sky. And there’d been somebody with him, standing behind Caden’s shoulder so he couldn’t see them. He’d asked: “How long has it been like this?” And the answer had come: “Since always.” His breath was steadier now, and he could look around the room in the dark and see the safe, familiar shapes of his furniture, and the outline of the window, and the bar of orange light from the streetlight that shone across the foot of his bed--but none of it was reassuring. Caden knew it had just been a dream, but he also knew, or felt like he knew, that it could easily be real. If they we