After a bit of thought, I dedicated Project Heartless to the aros who love to kiss.

Rain, despite losing his heart and thus losing his capacity for romantic love, is still a bisexual person. He still gets attracted to people. He still wants to kiss them, still wants to have sex. Becoming aro didn't stop that. He's an allosexual aro. And I think we rarely see that in stories. Even more reason for me to write it.

A beta reader once called Rain 'gross' because of his attractions. I don't know what to make of that. I respectfully disagree.

This is not to say that you need to be allosexual to love kissing! I don't think its an inherently romantic or sexual thing.

Samantha "Sam" Small is a 14 year old high school freshman and superhero-in-training, recruited by the Delaware Valley Defenders to protect Philadelphia. Her powers let her bite through metal and smell when people bleed. Her interests include soccer, women, putting herself in danger, and Shabbat dinner with her Pop-Pop Moe.

Chum is a slice-of-life/action web serial, currently around 400,000 words. It has been described as "good enough to spend hours organizing info on it", a "beautiful coming of age story", and "a superhero story to rival worm". It's got dinosaurs in it. *jingling keys*

Go read it on Royal Road or Wordpress and consider joining the Chumcord!

LINK ROT / TRANSMISSION 001 / APRIL 3rd, 2024

Link Rot is a multimedia webserial following those within a research station. Once dedicated to the study and containment of a newly discovered life form, complications arise following its unexpected merge with the station's AI. TRANSMISSION 001 - In which you survive the unthinkable, and the world is worse for it.

General warnings can be found in the 'About' section. Any videos will have flashing warnings if applicable.

additional rambling under the cut

wow!!! it's been (checks archive) almost exactly a year since i originally conceptualized Link Rot, and since then it's grown into a beast of a story i cannot wait to tackle.

currently i'm aiming for updates once every month/month and a half (with occasional vacations to work on bite-sized projects). i'd like to do more, but i have a job and don't want to burn myself out. for now, i will take things slow B) maybe this will change in the future!

i hope you all enjoy reading my story as much as i enjoy creating it. there's a couple of hidden things on the website, so if you find anything fun let me know

and lastly,

take this

So is Worm good from what you have read

"Yes" doesn't begin to cover it but yes. Worm is a brain-rewiring mobius strip disguised as a bible disguised as a superhero web serial that either cured your cancer or shot your dog or both depending on who you ask, and it has many extremely dedicated, brilliant scholar priest surgeons publicly dissecting it on this platform on the regular to the point I don't think I have much to add to the conversations surrounding it, even if I do have some The Thoughts about it. I had never even really seriously thought about superhero prose before and Worm isn't a thing I go back and reread frequently but it did a complete and total 180 on the way I think about superheroes and even fiction, and I've never stopped thinking about it since I've read it.

It is a monumentally impressive story with completely absolutely incredible characters that I cannot stop thinking about. No matter where it was going, even past stretches that were less interesting or more of a slog to read or worse, I could not put the story of Taylor Hebert down for one minute. Tattletale fascinated me every step of the way, I had to keep up with her. Rachel Lindt was a character I feel like I'd been waiting my whole life for. What was I gonna do, not see them through? I feel like Worm easily loses you if you don't particularly connect with the characters enough to justify to yourself the amount of time you'll spend with them, but man, I could not unglue my eyeballs from these people enough (I love all the core Undersiders, to be clear, I'd say it's Rachel > Taylor > Tattletale > Aisha and Alec and Brian, there are very small gaps between these, I just don't go berserk for the last three like I do for the first three, I'm taking Bitch and Skitter to the grave I'm dead serious)

Worm irreparably destroys your ability to engage with superhero fiction the same way ever again, as evidenced by the fact that it destroyed the author's own ability to engage with his own superhero fiction ever again. And everybody who read it has one or several gripes with it with some major dealbreakers in the mix. Tumblr's kinda the only place online where you can really talk about them at length without the spectre of John Wildbow hanging over the discussion, which enables discussion to the point where yes, maybe it does look like to outsiders that nobody can agree on whether Worm is good or what is it even about or whether it even has worms in it (it has at least one, although it's a very big one).

And it is good, it has the Undersiders in it and the Undersiders are one of the greatest groups of characters ever put together, but everyone has at least one major point of contention with Worm whether it's the timeskip or the length or the racism or the gross fatphobia or aspects surrounding the Dallon-Pelham Torment Nexus and etc. I'd say it has maybe the most racist vision of Latin America I've ever seen in a superhero text a hair short of pro-colonial tracts in Golden Age comics and that is a tall fucking order by any metric (part of why I started WEON4 as a project was motivated by spite, to try and make my own stories about non-American superheroes even if just as practice). It is Complicated, and that winds up making it so fascinating to talk about.

Worm has self-sustaining ecological systems of posts up here, far away from the Spacebattles and Reddit battlegrounds where it has different ones and that's not getting into Weaverdice or the sequel or Wildbow's larger body of work, which I haven't gotten to and probably will not any time soon because Worm was enough of a commitment as is. Do I recommend Worm to everyone? It is certainly not to everyone's tastes and I personally find it difficult to describe it simply enough to make it sound appealing or not like a pyramid scheme. But yes I do think it's good, in fact great, in fact, amazing, except when it isn't, and except it Plainly Sucks, but then something like Taylor vs Mannequin or Kevin Norton's interlude or "You needed worthy opponents" happens and it fucks harder than anything has ever fucked before and you don't walk away from it the same, so yes I guess "good" will have to do now.

It's certainly a lot but I definitely found it worth my time to read and then read the texts written about it here. You'll have to take my endorsement of Worm as proof of it's quality and proof of how deranged it makes it's readerbase, they're not mutually exclusive. If you can make it, Worm and the wormosphere has layers and layers to wade through and talk about and enjoy, despite how we're all so very small in the end *gunshot*.

"Make your entire main cast walk into a magic thing that plunges them into a nightmare of their deepest darkest fears realized' really is an absolutely amazing character exploration cheat.

A king's daughter is sent to be wed to a lunar prince. An alliance between two realms.

A storm riddles their goal. A mad god rouses his Chosen One.

A demon goddess awakens the daughter to her heritage. She forges her own path.

One in where the princess murders the hero.

A romance of blood and steel. The lost daughter of a Raja with the blood of a demon goddess. A timawa bound by oath and love. A hero chosen by a mad god. PRINCESS. KNIGHT. HERO. The cycle turns evermore. What conviction will they find now?

PRINCESS MURDERS THE HERO is an ongoing martial romance (both in the love sense and the adventure story sense) fantasy webnovel set in The Sword Isles, an epic fantasy setting founded upon Southeast Asian stories and myth. Read it for free here!

The main characters are...

👑 BAKONG THE PRINCESS, a sheltered girl awakening to the truths of the world

🛡️ MASUNA THE KNIGHT, swordgendered peerless swordmaster bound by duty and love

⚔️ SAMPONG BAHA THE JUGGERNAUT, butch lesbian heir to a royal house, slayer of pale kings

🪷 BANGAHOM THE SORCERER, trans wielder of dark blade magicks and claimant to Put'wan's Throne

Did you know that right now you could be reading over a million words of trans lesbian communist sci-fi?

Unjust Depths is a webnovel about communists struggling for the sake of a better world, through mech combat and romance and sparking waves of liberation in the depths of the sea. And there's even an epub now!

It's my favorite story, and its dedication to portraying the clashing ideologies and ideals of such a large ocean-spanning cast of memorable characters inspires me every day. The vast majority of its cast is trans and gay women striving and fighting for a better world that has a place for them. The willingness of the story to jump between perspectives and understandings of the world and to manage it so gracefully and effortlessly is incredible to read.

And at the heart of it, the story is funny, romantic, sensual, just capable of encompassing so many different dimensions of the characters within and using all of those elements together with ease to shape the work into something I've been turning over in my head for years. It's got romantic cannibalism, muslim catgirls, horrors from beneath the hadal zone, toxic old women yuri, and gertrude lichtenberg. It's really good. I think everyone should read it.

hello! Like the description says, I made this blog to post about my webnovel, The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, currently hosted quasi-inappropriately on RoyalRoad, the online hub for progression fantasy and dubious user ads. I am intending to set up a site in the near future, but have been procrastinating.

TFTBN is a weird project that I've been working on at variable pace for coming up on four years now. To try to sum it up, it's a psychological whodunnit in a science fantasy setting that is 1/3rd depressing yuri and out there sci-fi concepts, 1/3rd my decade's worth of fermented thoughts on Ryukishi07's library, and 1/3rd my hyper-specific grudge against critical response to a bunch of ideas surrounding life extension espoused in certain strands of nerd/tech culture, most particularly the rationalist community. It's kind of an over-complicated mess but I'm also proud of it, so please consider reading if you haven't and any of that sounds appealing!

I haven't posted on tumblr in almost a decade, so I'm not 100% sure what I'll do with this beyond announce updates. But if you have any questions regarding my writing or the story, setting or characters of TFTBN, my asks are open, so please go hog wild.

Procrastinating on writing Time to Orbit: Unknown by making Time to Orbit memes instead

Worm and Ward and Familiarity

I saw a really great analysis of Worm working with tropes while Ward works against them by @greatwyrmgold, and it reminded me of a more general contrast that I noted:

Worm is coming from a very familiar place and being pulled out of that. The Undersiders have fairly relatable experiences (on average). Poverty, bullying, neglect and abuse by guardians. I'd argue that, as extreme as Alec's experience is, it would resonate with many who have dealt with indoctrination in their youth (like me). Brockton Bay is a city on economic decline, struggling to stay afloat, and afflicted with violent crime. There's superpowers thrown in, sure, but it's fundamentally very familiar human shittiness and problems that drive a lot of the story.

The powers are definitely weird and creative, but it's still unmistakably a superhero story. Bugs, darkness, flight and strength and durability, contact biokinesis. Superheroes and supervillains in costumes fighting each other, hijinks and blood loss.

Except that there's Endbringers, and Echidna, and Cauldron, and Scion. The culmination of the story is peeling back the mask of a familiar superhero setting to reveal a cosmic horror story.

Ward is set in the aftermath of that.

There's a massive megacity that still doesn't have a name. It's basically a country, but it's led by a mayor. Infrastructure is just barely there, lots of people are still living in tents, the internet is just barely running and not everywhere. People with superpowers are no longer just superheroes and supervillains, they're... what, exactly? So many threats that were once contained are now running free, the ratio of normal territory to gonzo hellscapes has been turned on its head. The skyline is torn apart by portals to other worlds, and it's fucking with the weather. There's a political movement against people with superpowers, and there are people affected by superpowers with their own identity, and both of those groups are very conspicuous in how hard it is to treat them as an analogy for any other groups. People are estranged from their own environment, and it's a brave, terrible new world in the shadow of a slain god.

The superpowers are less straightforward. Being unable to be pointed at, impregnation tentacles that fuck with the effectiveness of other powers, lots of cluster triggers and grab-bags, etc. The powers are more obviously reflective of the cosmic horror story people have had to wake up to, unfamiliar, weird, and deeply upsetting.

The characters are also pretty dang weird. Rain is a lot like Alec, and I think he might actually be the most normal of the bunch. Body dysphoria+, sharing a body with a sibling, attachment issues, living as a clone or as a sort-of clone. Not totally unrelatable, to be sure, there are parallels with real life experiences, but these are more their own thing, not so recognizable.

This makes Victoria kind of the perfect protagonist, matching the themes: she's estranged from who she was and her old connections; her home city is gone; she's gone through something absolutely mind-bendingly terrible that is among the worst that people can experience IRL and then some; her power has changed; she was raised into the weirdness of superheroics and is pioneering how it looks in this new world; she's knowledgeable about the weirdness surrounding powers, giving her a good eye for understanding the new world.

I think a decent fraction of Ward's relative unpopularity sadly comes from this: estrangement from the once familiar. The characters can't be related to as easily, the powers aren't so iconic, and the setting feels undefined. I don't think Ward is inherently worse for it, it's just a bit of a tougher sell.

Spring is on the way.

Looking to get into a new story to carry you into the new season? Maybe a longform dark fantasy web serial with magic swords, haunted forests, sexy demons, and the occasional splash of sapphic spirituality? One with over 325,000 words already online, and 3,000 more coming every weekend?

I write Blank Slate. It's about fire. Come check it out.

hey, so— i’ve been ~officially writing a web serial since 2021 (unofficially, since at least 2014). Updates are currently very irregular, but i’m definitely still working on it!

✨🧿 THE BITTER DROP 🧿✨

modern fantasy romance about gay/trans Eastern Bloc Jews, set in a secondary world counterpart of early Soviet communes

The lounge is nearly empty tonight; all the action is downstairs at the grinding workshop — in the basement discotheque; you if I’m to have any hope of pulling, that’s where I ought to go but … ekh, I’m foggy tonight, between the psychosis and the laudanum for the pain what likes to haunt nefilim and the horse pills they made me take at the Mamka — nu okay, I skipped tonight’s dose so I can drink but like, neuroleptics don’t let go that quick — and as the brainfog settles on my thoughts, it turns to hoarfrost and my will seizes up like a rusty hinge.

Lev/Lyubov Morgenshtern, a queeny bigender flamer who’d once been one of the Pale’s youngest-ever ordained rabbonim, has just returned to the Talons Ghetto sovyet — an autonomous workers-and-peasants commune of the kind that directly preceded the Soviet Union (and indeed the thing that the USSR named itself after).

Lev is fresh off a stint on a psych ward that’d followed a far longer stint living in the tzarist-held half of Svet Dmitrin with a bougie respectability-obsessed ex-boyfriend — he’s got nowhere to sleep, no assurance her old friends, Red Guard and civilian both, would want to see them and the only workable plan she’s got is to find someone willing and soft-hearted to take him home for the night …

… and what luck if their rescuer, a medical necromancer by the name of Anzu Menelikov (Nyura to friends and lovers) is a beautiful trans flamer from a prominent rabbinical family! who better to welcome Lyubov home than a fellow hothouse flower and dedicated scholar? and does it matter if Nyura did anything the White Guard might still bear a grudge about? after all, most of the old Ghetto walls are still safely intact, and it’s not like Reb Doktor Menelikov personally set the Winter Palace on fire, right?

i’d say if you liked the Baru Cormorant series, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Gentlemen of the Road, Fallen London and its associated games, China Miéville’s oeuvre, and Disco Elysium, this’d probably be your thing!

content warnings

(under the cut)

reclaimed homophobic slurs

the narrator has a history of psychiatric institutionalisation

homophobia, transphobia, transmisogyny and antisemitism are environmental hazards in the setting, though by far not the focus

Read Chapter 14 of I've Heard of It

The Return of Fractured Magic

It is, perhaps, an understatement to say that the Fractured Magic hiatus has lasted longer than any of us expected (myself included). I want to both thank you all for your patience and tell you how terribly sorry I am for making you wait. At long last, I bring great tidings: Fractured Magic is getting an official relaunch!!

When: The first chapter drops January 29. From there, new chapters will be published every Monday. Where: If you want chapters delivered directly to your inbox every week, you can subscribe to the Substack. Otherwise, new chapters will be posted to my website. Why: You can read my full statement about this decision here.

What are you talking about? What is Fractured Magic? Thank you for asking, hypothetical reader that I’ve invented to suit my needs. Fractured Magic is a fantasy webserial with Victorian gothic overtones and a queer array of queer characters. It’s about political and personal accountability, ghosts both figurative and literal, and the agony of having a crush who ghosts you every time he has a mental health downswing.

In the story, an elven King is kidnapped by a woman not-quite-alive and his nephew has to find a way to get him back. His plan requires an elite team, an infamous hero with corrosive magic, and a great deal of patience.

The presence of a 'thieves guild' as, like, an organized public corporate body with a monopoly on crime is such a weird fantasy trope.

Especially when the text seems to unironically position them as, like, 'criminals but not that bad. Always looking out for each other and never really hurting anyone who doesn't deserve it.'