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Eight stories by Austen Tucker

This is what I do for fun

Changing bodies. Hidden selves. People reaching into the dark for somebody else.

Eight stories across twenty years, rooted in the furry writing community that raised their author. Androids and monsters, maps and locked chests. People splitting apart and people trying desperately to remain whole.

Available now on Kindle · $4.99 USD. Eight stories, ready to read. Paperback submitted to Amazon for review · $12.99 USD.

Buy the Kindle edition · $4.99 Read the foreword excerpt Read the individual stories
This is what I do for fun. Eight stories by Austen Tucker. Eight black ink emblems in a two-column grid.
Science fiction, fantasy, and queer transformation.

The bookshelf

Find your next read.

The current collection and earlier books by Austen Tucker, including work published as Austen Crowder.

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Inside the collection

Eight ways to become.

  1. Carl

    An android janitor discovers what loyalty costs when the company decides his useful life is over.

  2. Butterfly.exe

    A branching upload story about memory, love, and the terror of surviving someone who may forget you.

  3. Our Hope Chest

    Two siblings find a childhood costume chest that grants transformations—and exposes the fault lines between them.

  4. Cleanup on Pod Six

    A space janitor, a hypersleep pod, and one terrible cleanup job with consequences far beyond the mess.

  5. La Ligne du Marais

    A gambler finds Paris’s smallest casino, where the house offers a game stranger than chance.

  6. Mr. Trout's Slide

    A suicidal man follows a mysterious map toward a slide that may make him someone else.

  7. Foxtails

    A man dreams himself into a fox, then discovers how much of his waking life depends on staying hidden.

  8. Parts of the Whole

    Hypnosis awakens hidden selves, forcing friends to confront desire, identity, and the dangerous urge to define each other.

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From the foreword

“I learned to write from strangers on the internet.”

I thought I had found people who liked the same weird shit I did.

What I had found was a place to grow up.

We like the myth of the lone writer. One person in a room, wrestling a story out of the dark through talent and suffering. Put one name on the spine. Call the voice singular. Pretend the whole thing sprang fully formed from somebody’s head.

It’s bullshit.

Writing is a communal act. Nobody invents a language alone. Every writer grows up somewhere, and every community teaches its writers what to notice. What counts as danger. What kind of kindness is believable. Whose transformation is a tragedy, whose is a joke, and whose is a homecoming.

Austen Tucker · This is what I do for fun

A fiction imprint of The Arcades

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We publish stories that stay with you.

Austen Tucker is a queer arcade cryptid in the Chicago area who loves to write stories about the heart and never turns down a chance to play pinball.

Meet Austen Tucker