A bunch of guys in a trenchcoat (Plural). If I use we pronouns sometimes, don't worry about it.
Headmates will sign off their own posts or stories with their names.
Fantasy writer mostly.
May post fanfic.
Explores a lotta these: queer themes, societal criticisms, intrapersonal struggles with identity and sense of self
WORKS IN PROGRESS (as of JUNE 2026)
Sweet & Savory || Posting
A Homestuck Epilogues/Beyond Canon AU fanfic. Features such themes as "what if the narrative loved you" and "what will it take for you to reach your Conclusion"?
(writers: Nebby (clangorousCoronach), dirk)
99 Lives Left || Outlining
When you kill someone, you are eventually transported into a fantasy death game with other murderers and must kill each other to survive.
tropes: fantasy, scifi, litrpg, action, isekai, time travel
(writers: dirk)
#99ll
The Caro Paradox || Beta Reading
A sci-fi fantasy set in the modern era (usually). The protagonists play a game which turns the very world into an RPG setting. An evil Empress from the game also arrives which begins the apocalypse. With time itself moving against success, how will the protagonists survive in these unwinnable conditions?
tropes: fantasy, roleplaying games, paradoxes, time travel, technology, magic, family
(writers: dirk, nova, helios, kennie)
#turnabout, #tcpx
(If other plural fantasy writers wanna chat or be critique partners, feel free to hit me up anytime.)
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Didn't think I'd be one of those plural bitches that would experience a complete loss of interest in a writing project because the headmate holding the interest stopped fronting but I learn something new everyday.
If you're writing anything involving cons, scams, heists, or morally questionable characters who are very good at lying, here are some free resources I've been using for research. Saving you the "why is this in my search history" anxiety.
1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.
2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.
3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.
4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.
5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.
Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.
Reblog to save for later. Your WIP will thank you.
What To Do When You Know Your Ending but Have No Clue How to Get There
congrats. you’ve unlocked the most ✨ cursed ✨ form of storytelling: knowing the destination but having zero map, no snacks, and one emotionally unstable protagonist riding shotgun.
aka: you know how your book ends. maybe even the Last Line™. but the middle? the plot? the scenes required to get there?
🦗🦗🦗
welcome to liminal writing hell. here’s what to do about it:
🚨 STEP 1: Write the ending anyway.
yes. even if you’re only on chapter three. write the ending now. not perfectly. not canon. just get it down while it’s burning in your brain.
this does 2 things:
gets you emotionally invested in where you’re headed
gives you a north star to align your scenes to
future-you will thank you when you're knee-deep in act 2, spiraling, and you need to remember what this mess was for.
🧩 STEP 2: Backwards logic it like a feral detective.
ask: what has to happen right before this ending can exist? then ask that question again. and again. until you’ve accidentally built a whole reverse-outline.
like:
✨ final scene: heroine stabs the love interest to save the world
→ she needs to know he’s the villain
→ she needs to see him do something unforgivable
→ she needs a reason to be in the same room as him when it happens
→ she needs to go to the city where he’s hiding
→ she needs to choose betrayal over loyalty
now reverse those like breadcrumbs through the forest of chaos.
🎯 STEP 3: Identify your mid-point emotional switch.
the best middles aren’t just “stuff happening.” they’re a turning point. a reversal. a Big Choice. often it’s the opposite of the ending.
ending = character sacrifices love
midpoint = character believes love will fix everything
this sets up contrast + emotional stakes. the midpoint shows how wrong they are. the ending proves how far they’ve come.
no midpoint? no tension. build the middle to break them, then rebuild toward the finale.
🧱 STEP 4: Stack up your themes like Jenga blocks.
what are you actually saying with this ending?
if the ending is: “freedom comes at a price”
then the story needs to explore:
what freedom means
who pays that price
how people deny the cost
how your protagonist learns to accept it
if your middle scenes aren’t touching these ideas? they’re just filler. start weaving the theme early, subtly, and repeatedly. make it hurt a little.
📦 STEP 5: Write “junk scenes” in the blank spaces.
not sure how they get from castle to climax? write a fake scene. not canon. no pressure. just vibes. let the characters mess around in the setting. argue. kiss. kill. eat soup. whatever.
you’ll learn what they want, what secrets they’re hiding, what tensions spark.
some of these junk scenes will turn out to be real. others will guide you to what needs to happen next. use them as scaffolding.
🧃 STEP 6: Accept that messy = forward.
you won’t always see the whole road. write the next landmark. write the next mistake. write the next bad scene and figure out why it doesn’t work.
knowing your ending is a gift. the rest? that’s the part where you dig.
you don’t need a perfect bridge. you just need enough planks to get across without falling into the river of I’ll-Fix-It-Later.
now go. write the scene where everything breaks.
P.S. I made a free mini eBook about the 5 biggest mistakes writers make in the first 10 pages 👀 you can grab it here for FREE:
✦ A free (and actually helpful) guide to leveling up your first 10 pages ✦If you're unsure whether your opening is ✨doing enough✨ to hook re
🕯️ download the pack & write something cursed:
A gothic prompt pack for writers who love cursed universities, secret societies, and scholarly rot.✎ Write the Darkness ✎A 75-prompt horror
It will actually never cease to baffle me that people got so up in arms about the Trickster Mode “Caucasian” bit because “The Kids are Aracial”, and will parrot the point that “The Kids(/Trolls) are Aracial” to hell and back, when like… It’s just not true?
I’m sorry, but you physically cannot have a humanoid character design lack racial characteristics. The only thing you give away by trying to make an “aracial” character design is what you think the racial default is. Considering White Supremacy is the social default in the Western World, more often than not, people will view the “racial default” as white. It lines up with how “white” as an identity works. “White” has never had a set definition, it changes all the time specifically to exclude more and more people- like Jewish people, Italians, et cetera. “White” is defined, historically, as “Lacking Race”, so oftentimes “Aracial” tends to just mean “White”. “Aracial” features always completely exclude Black features, and that’s not by accident.
The character designs in Homestuck have white features. I’m sorry, you’re not convincing me that the Kids are meant to be entirely racially neutral when they’re consistently depicted in the comic as having straight hair and Eurocentric features. The Kids have always been white, it’s just that people view whiteness as the racial default and everything else as of an aberration of that whiteness. Getting mad at the Trickster Mode “Caucasian” bit for “saying the kids are white” or “confirming they are white” is completely unreasonable when they’ve never been depicted as anything other than little white kids by their designs the whole entire time.
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You ever think about how roxy is an imposter in her own friend group because she escaped to a new reality with john egbert and that essentially means *her* friends her *original* friends are still all dead and gone and theyre never coming back.
The Homestuck Analyzer’s Paradox: was this well written or badly written or was this badly written on purpose and was it well written badly written on purpose or was it badly written well written badly written on purpose.
If you add 3 sentences to your work in progress and show me, I will add 4 sentences to my work in progress and show you.
Yeah sure. HS^2 AU be upon you.
[Image description. A written passage featuring Rose Lalonde and Kanaya Maryam from Homestuck. Transcript:
She expected Rose to tell her that he was on a mission or something to explain everything. If not, Kanaya was not an expert on time travel, but surely it would have been easy for Dave to pop back into the part of the timeline where he could grow up with the rest of his friends. Four years was not long for Kanaya, not anymore, but it was an entire fifth of the heroes’ lives had they remained mortal.
But, Rose answered with, “Consider yourself lucky that you can’t manipulate time. I would have had to kill you, too.”
“…Excuse me?”
End Image description.]
My curse as a writer, particularly in fanfic, is that I'll usually make huge as hell works where it initially starts as a detailed outline, and then I'm like "okay I'm done with that I'm moving on", but then it mutates into something that a whole team would better realistically tackle.
I will never learn from the past hosts. Never ever. We're gonna be stuck writing 50k+ word shits that were initially 6k word oneshots until the day we die.
It's actually crazy how much HS^2 hates you for being a reader. I'd even argue its explorations as a piece of metafiction is rather shallow and uninspiring compared to the main comic simply because of how much the story hates its audience.
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Ugh, getting to the point in the Epilogues where Meat Dirk is flipping his shit and being a big white baby. Do people even talk about how white-coded the writers made him? As a POC who identifies rather closely to his main comic counterpart and headcanons him as a POC too, its so weird seeing him be denigrated for things he simply wouldn't have been if he was explicitly Japanese.
Something I found interesting about Homestuck is that almost all the characters don't hold a Want or Desire that drives them, they're bullied by the narrative into acting. John dying because of Terezi. John dying because of Vriska and ascending to Godtier. Dave developing Caledfwlch not because he wanted to but had to. Jade being mind controlled by the Condesce to become evil. And more and more. But if the Epilogues is any indication, without a drive, they just do nothing with their lives. They're poisoned by inaction and irrelevancy and its only through the narrative forcing Meat Rose and Dirk to get their asses moving through the inevitable acceptance of the Ultimate Self that the plot goes anywhere.
However, one of the few characters that do express some internal motivation in acting the way they do (in the main comic) is Vriska. And that's with why she treated Tavros the way she did.
[Image description: A pesterlog between Vriska and John from Homestuck. Transcript (replacing the typing quirk with B's or the actual spelling of the word):
AG: Yes.
AG: But really, that's not why I killed him. He was no match for me, and I could have just incapacitated him or flown away or whatever.
AG: The truth is I killed him because at the time, I thought I wanted to, and sort of felt like I finally had to.
EB: uh...
EB: why did you have to?
AG: Because enough was enough! You don't even know how frustrating it was to be friends with him.
AG: I used to really like him and always wanted to help him get stronger, so that he might stand a fucking chance to actually make it on our world.
AG: But he was just soooooooo weak and indecisive. He wouldn't change!
End image description.]
Nobody else really acts on "what they want". Roxy is probably the next character with deeper desires that isn't just "I want to play a game with you guys becaaaaaaaause we have to, sorry" through her admission of wanting to meet her mother.
[Image Description: A dialog log of Roxy from Homestuck speaking. Transcript:
ROXY: i never wanted anything more than to meet my mom
ROXY: to meet rose i mean
End Image Description.]
But even that is undercut by how many other things she's distracted by. The stagnancy of the void session, her one-sided affection towards Dirk, being there for Jane, etc etc. It makes her lose focus more times than I can count; you can certainly argue this makes for a more compelling narrative but if pretty much every character can't think deeper than surface level problems, or explicitly verbalize what it is that keeps them going besides "having to do it", it becomes a frustrating pattern of seeing a bunch of chess pieces bumbling around and occasionally bumping into the corner of a screensaver to do something epic.
I will say if this inaction is a product of being children under the thumb of parents and society, there could be a lot to say when said children no longer have this kind of society or guardians to live under, what kind of person they would be when untethered to the expectations and traditions of the world they were born into. But in the epilogues, Dave didn't even complete his education. Or anything. All he did was age and later found out Jane was running for Earth C President (which has its own problems by the way, the concept of a global democracy), and went "damn maybe I should do something about that". Again, not because he wanted to do something about it, but that he Had To. And even then he passed on most of the public responsibility to Karkat. This happens to pretty much everyone, like guys, what do you actually want to do, why do you want to do it, and what steps are you taking to get closer to that goal? Please Want Something. Please.
Realizing that I need to stop reading name lists in alphabetical order and just picking the first name that seems like it might fit or else all of my characters will end up having names that start with A.
I feel it’s so interesting that, in the meta language in ORV, a PLAUSIBLY STORM is basically a punishment for BAD STORYTELLING 😆 (as in: ignoring the commonly accepted ways of plotting/tropes).
And the act of constellations/outer gods giving their plausibility support willingly so that a certain character can create the story he wants is like they saying: Oh I WISH to see this version of his so much more than I care about how this story WAS USED TO BE TOLD.
So, the plausibility is a scale that tilts under the combined influence of storytelling convention, popular tropes at a certain point of time, and the power of readers’ WISH.
Come to think of it, this is how stories change and evolve in our world, too. How the authors took this rule of storytelling and made it into the foundation rule of the new world that was Star Stream just like gravity in our physical world was the first few things that made me fall in love with ORV.
(And from then on, I just started to use that term in my book discussion with friends, such like: “do you think this novel really has enough plausibility or it just comes from the fact that its author is famous?” yk… like a nerd 😆)
Outer Gods being the eldritch forms of the characters who's stories have never been read or were merely lost/forgotten is definitely an idea I'm stealing from ORV but it also fits in Homestuck too so I'm rolling with it.
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Adds an academic-style essay about how plurality of a player would theoretically manifest in Sburb/Skaia to my to do list of bullshit to write because why the fuck not.
