Burned Cover Announcement

Erika Walker is a young woman with a bit of an odd family. Her little brother can coax minutes to stretch or snap like rubber bands and Erika has yet to come across something she cannot break. Erika has never seen her father before and her mother… Well, her mother isn’t exactly her mother anymore. The woman looks like Leah, sounds like her, but acts differently. She isn’t quite sure how and she isn’t quite sure why, but she knows her mother got body-snatched by something.

Follow Erika as she delves into a layer of Chicago that she never knew existed, one filled with strange creatures, curious allies, dangerous foes, and maybe—just maybe—some answers to the mysteries surrounding her family.

Burned Cover is an urban-fantasy mystery set in a supernatural mirror of contemporary Chicago. The kind of setting where spooky conspiracies run the cities, monsters lurk in the streets, and regular folk are somehow carrying on in ignorance despite the proliferation of phones and cameras.

Hello everyone! A new story has arrived!

Burned Cover is a modern supernaturally thing inspired by the likes of The X-Files, World of Darkness, and Dark City. But I think the blurb above covered most of all I had to say on it. Might be the best blurb I’ve ever written.

Like my other stories, it will be updating twice a week every week for however long it takes to complete. The first chapter will be out on July 2nd, 2025. From there, updates will be on Sunday/Wednesday nights. (Note that this might change as I should probably test post a few chapters before the actual release starts. We’ll see as we get closer).

The cover was drawn by Oxana Resh, and I absolutely love it. Make sure you go up and click on it, blow it up nice and big. You’ll probably have to open it in a new tab to see it in full resolution. It’s worth it.

New Site, New Toys

To go along with the new story is a whole new website. Everything is so much cleaner and nicer and there are all kinds of little details.

Up on the navigation bar (the three menu bars if you’re on mobile), you’ll find a handy link to the Discord server along with a fully functional search. Don’t really know how useful search is for this kind of site but hey, there it is anyway.

Just beyond that, if you hate your eyes, you can turn Dark Mode off with the little sun symbol. To the side of that is a big options menu allowing a lot of customization. I personally recommend leaving all the checkboxes default, but the little sliders down at the bottom will allow you to change the colors of the site, affecting hue, contrast, and all that fun stuff.

Then, on the Story pages, we’ve got even more features. Below the blurb and the share thingy and Support Me thingy, we’ve got a few little tabs there. These hold supplementary materials for the various stories, usually character lists and any extra things I made along the way. Further down, each story has its chapters listed, separated by book (or arcs in Vacant Throne’s case). If you’re logged in (more on that in a bit), you’ll see little checkmarks next to chapters you’ve read, showing your progress through the chapters.

I’m not sure if that logged in bit is server-side or client-side just yet. Meaning it might not remember the settings between devices. That’s something to test. [CHANGE THIS BEFORE LINKING POST?]

Chapters have even yet more customization. Don’t get overwhelmed. You probably don’t need to use anything I’ve said. I just want to make you aware so you have the option of choice.

Above the chapter header, you’ve got the font size selector on the top left, a formatting/fullscreen button in the center, and the chapter navigation on the right. THe formatting pane once again has some color options, but also spacing, size, font style, and whatever else all those little dials do. Play around, see what is comfortable for you.

Finally, logging in. I now support OAuth2 logins. Probably. I haven’t set it up at the time of writing this (and probably at the time of posting this to Discord, hello everyone!), but I would like to get it set up. It offers a few nice features, like the aforementioned reading check marks next to chapters. If you don’t know what OAuth2 is, it’s that “Log in with Google” thing you see on some sites. I think Google, Patreon, and Discord are supported. Maybe a few others.

Which is another thing. If I get this set up properly, I might see about putting some Patreon-only content on the site. That will likely come in the form of early chapters whenever I set them to schedule. I’ll ask my supporters on Patreon what they think about that if and when I see if I can get the logins and Patreon content working. No sense asking them before if I can’t get it working.

Anyway, all this is WordPress still, despite stating that I wished to move away from it. It just has a handful of features I really, really liked that, after investigating some alternatives, would have taken a lot of work to work-around. But the theme and all these author-centric features come from Fictioneer. So big thanks to them for making my life easy.

Right. That’s enough yapping for now. Probably should have made all this website stuff its own post. Maybe I’ll split it off later. Until then, enjoy Burned Cover! As usual, chapters come about a day later over on Royal Road if you prefer to read over there (though I won’t be asking their admins to approve Burned Cover until after it starts here because I never know if they’ll approve it in five seconds or five days). Regardless of where you read, I do appreciate reviews and boosts on Top Web Fiction (Link someday). Thanks all!

-TC