After pushing it off until almost the last moment, I cranked out over 25,000 words to finish my two Smut Wars assignments in just about 4 days total.

Reveals will be in just about two weeks! I'm planning to go back and do some light edits -- maybe add one more erotic scene -- that sort of thing. But even if reveals happened right now, I'm happy with my output.

And I have two gifts of my own waiting for reveals as well! This time, I've decided not to "shake my gifts" to preview the works' tags. I'm going to live in blissful ignorance until reveals on September 5!

Yay Smut Wars!

Last week, I was suddenly seized by inspiration, based on a message in the Gingerpilot channel of the Discord server:



I was entranced by the thought of Hux dressed up as one of those glamorous pin-up / movie star women from the 1920s-1940s! Let's see his perfectly coiffed red finger-waved hair -- his scandalously low cut chemise -- the whisper-thin peignoir over the top -- the long cigarette holder and the posh hotel lifestyle, all funded by one -- or more -- mysteriously absent husbands.

And who better to investigate all those disappeared husbands than Detective Poe Dameron, a greaser from East LA who finds himself just as entranced as all of Armitage's ill-fated exes...?

And thus was written --

The Case of the Missing Husbands
Author: ArtemisDart
Fandom: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Ship: Poe Dameron/Armitage Hux
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Wordcount: 4,068

Summary: Detective Poe Dameron looks into Armitage Hux's three missing husbands... and finds something he wasn't looking for at all.

I stayed up from about 1 to about 3:30 one evening last week writing this, and I'm fairly well pleased with it, for a first draft. I probably should have sat on it a bit more and polished it up, but I was missing the feeling of publishing something and getting a few kudos.

And "a few" kudos is all this one has received. I think people don't like first person narration, and/or they don't like modern AU settings... which is too bad, because I do enjoy them! But oh well -- I am mostly writing for my own amusement.

After I published this, it occurred to me that I could spin this out into at least four more chapters and really make a story out of it. I'm already noodling over ideas. However, I really need to finish my WIPS, and write my offering for Smut Wars, which is due in less than a month -- before I go adding to something that has only gained 7 kudos in a week, and will probably never gain many more than that.

After struggling allllll day with Chapter 16 of Live Wire, I finally managed to get something out that I'm half-okay with... so I went ahead and posted it. It's not my finest chapter ever, but I was able to get through the various plot points that I had planned out -- and even add a thing or two that only came into my mind today!

At this point, I've plotted and replotted the final arc of this fic at least four times. Through every iteration, I've kept the thrust of the character development beats in mind, but the mechanism for how they're going to achieve those beats has been changing. This last iteration is not especially better than any of the ones that came before, but it's the one that I found the least annoying to write... and that's saying something, since this was quite annoying!

Just two more action chapters after this, and then I can write a whole bunch of sex! :D

I've been fighting with chapter 15 of Live Wire for three weeks, and it's been rough. Maybe because this one needs to be from Mitaka's point of view, and he just escalated with Techie pretty severely -- and maybe he's feeling guilty about it, but also thrilled, but also worried, but also guilty? My point is -- there are a lot of Feelings going on, plus I want to mix in some philosophy and move the plot forward all in one chapter. I've set myself a high bar to hit in only 4k to 6K words! (So far, the chapter length has ranged from 4,181 to 6,487.)

Well, after a delightful date last night and then waking up next to one of my loves, I think I might have an inroad to Chapter 15 after all. I'll need to review an earlier chapter that I wrote last year to make sure I'm not being too repetitive, but I think this will be doable soon. Which is great!

Turns out there's a "WIP Week" event on Tumblr, with the following themes:

June 21: Your Oldest WIP
June 22: A WIP From Your Smallest Fandom
June 23: Your WIP Closest To Completion
June 24: Your Favorite WIP
June 25: A WIP From Your Largest Fandom
June 26: Your Newest WIP
June 27: Any WIP

Eek! I'm just finding out about this now on the 25th. Can I get anything published in just 2 days?? We shall see!

Less than a week until I get my assignment for Smut Wars. I'm so curious about what it will be this year!

In 2025, my main assignment was "Beautiful Obsession Killer," and I also created two treats: "According to His Design" and "Calibration Error."

In 2024, my main assignment was "Good Things Come in Threes," and I created two treats: "Plenty of Action" and "Vox Populi Vox Clippy."

The time period to create is quite long. Maybe I'll have time to write three things again this year!

I let my relational database sit untended for 2 months... eeeek... so it was a mammoth job to update it! But just now, I got it almost all sorted out -- all my kudos, users, new works, new chapters, new ships, new exchanges, and bridges between some of those tables, are all in place. :)

This update saw the creation of my 5000th user record (technically the max right now is 5003), and my 500th chapter (I think it's actually 502 at the moment). Wow, that's a lot! Currently, I have 156 published works, and a total wordcount of 1,938,704.

In the New Ships world, I entered Prux (Enric Pryde/Armitage Hux), which featured in "Frugal Thrills." I also created Gingerrose, the ship between Armitage Hux and Rose Tico, which was the background relationship in "Her Perfect Vessel," although Rose herself didn't appear in the story and indeed was never named.

I chose not to create a ship for Armitage Hux/Tritt Opan. There's no ship name for this pairing, since it's so rare. Maybe if I make more of them in the future I'll create a ship name. JayneSilver suggested "Opsect," which is great for the whole shared delusion we have on the Discord server about how Opan keeps beetles and lets them bite him for every kill -- but it doesn't have Hux in the name anywhere, so it's not a great ship name.

In the Exchanges world, I logged an exchange for Slutty Armitage Hux Week, and I created a new type: "Challenge." I'm picturing Challenges as just organized receptacles for works, but there's no actual exchange component.

I also created an exchange for May the Fourth Be With You 2026 to hold the fic, "Bête dévorante," that I wrote for irrationalgame.

And I created an exchange for Gingerpilot Week 2026, also with type "challenge." But oh no -- I realized when looking though my Dim_Exchange table that I never created exchanges for the two past Gingerpilot Weeks that I took part in back in 2023 and 2024! Luckily, adding new exchanges to the table is easy, as is adding new rows to the bridge between Dim_Work and Dim_Exchange.

I'll do that another night -- right now, it's almost 2 AM, and I should sleep!

I'm so happy to say that, after a last minute burst of inspiration that led me to write the entirety of Day 7's entry this afternoon, I am officially done with this year's Gingerpilot Week!

This is my third year creating for the event. In 2023, I wrote Left in a Lyft, a modern AU in which Hux worked for the evil First Order company and ended up snowed in with Lyft driver Poe.

In 2024, I wrote 7 fics, one for each day. I think my personal favorite of the 7 was The Connection Room, the plot of which came to me in a dream.

There was no event in 2025, sadly. People got busy and it wasn't something anyone wanted to take on.

So this year I volunteered to help out! And I'm so pleased with the creativity that I've been seeing on Tumblr, as well as on AO3. I think more pieces have been posted on Tumblr, but there are 11 in the collection on AO3 as of right now.

I don't want to write about all 7 of mine now, because I'm tired and want to sleep. So I think I'll post about them over the next week in order to clear through my backlog!

I recruited another fan to the Discord server, and she's been _going to town_ commenting and making connections with everyone else.

There's another new woman too, recruited just a day earlier by JayneSilver. With this fresh blood, everyone is just chattering away about the Sequel Trilogy and our interpretations of the characters, recommending fics to each other, giving each other props for great fics and art that we've always loved... it's just a giant feel good scenario right now.

One of the new people is from Portugal! So that's another country collected. It seems that there are only a handful of people on every continent who are still hardcore into the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, and specifically Armitage Hux as a character. I guess that makes sense -- those movies have been out for awhile now!

I'm still busily prepping for Gingerpilot Week, which starts on Monday. I have 1 fully written, two more half written, and I'm prepping my notes for a fourth. With the long weekend, I should be able to hit all 7 -- and, I hope, finally get another chapter of Live Wire done!

My offering for the recently concluded May the Fourth Be With You Exchange, was, unsurprisingly, for irrationalgame -- again! This is maybe the third time I've written for her for an exchange? We keep on both offering and requesting the same things, since our tastes are so similar -- so it's hardly a surprise.

And it turns out that my main gift from this exchange was -- wait for it -- written by her! So once again, we swapped fics, haha! Her gift for me was Phasma/Rose, with Gingerpilot in the background. My gift for her was Gingerpilot all the way.

I admit that I didn't take as much time with this story as it really needed. If I'd managed my time better, I could have spent another week on it and added another 5 to 10 thousand words, which would have helped the pacing in Chapters 3 and 4. But this is what I could do at that time, and I feel like the story hits the highlights of what I wanted it to be!

With that background, here's the blurb:

Bête dévorante
Author: ArtemisDart
Fandom: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Ship: Poe Dameron/Armitage Hux
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Wordcount: 22,691

Summary: Major Armitage Hux negotiates with a Hutt and ends up as a reluctant yet ultimately very willing customer for one of the Hutt's pleasure slaves... a curly-haired young man who is skilled with his body in several fascinating ways.

I think Poe would be a natural in a Hutt pleasure palace. He'd know everyone, know exactly what he could get away with, and have the whole place wrapped around his finger as much as possible in no time! At the same time, I think it would really chafe him to be trapped. He'd want to get free so he could fly again! As for the sex with strangers thing, I don't think it would bother him all that much, unless he got really gross or creepy clients.

I see a relatively young Armitage Hux as being completely scandalized by such goings-on, yet perhaps... he'd be somewhat intrigued? Maybe there was something in that drink the Nikto servant gave him... Hmmm. I'll let the reader be the judge!

Overall, I'm relatively pleased with this story. I don't think it's as good as The Connection Room, which has a similar premise. But my recipient liked it, and that's what matters most of all!

Here's the main gift I received from the May the Fourth Be With You Exchange! I am 100% sure I know who wrote it for me, haha!

Unexpected
Author: Anonymous (for now) -- (EDIT: I was right! This was irrationalgame !)
Fandom: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Ships: Phasma/Rose Tico, Poe Dameron/Armitage Hux (Minor or Background Relationship(s))
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Wordcount: 7,918

Summary: Six months Post-Exegol, Rose Tico tries to juggle leading the engineering corps, failed-relationships, Poe Dameron, and the unexpectedly intriguing refugee First Order officers clogging up her workshop.

When Phasma approaches her with a problem—a Hux and Poe shaped one, complete with unresolved sexual tension so thick you could cut it with an arc welder—the last thing Rose expects is to find her own connection with the most unexpected person.

I really enjoyed this one! Phasma/Rose is a rare pair -- only 23 works in the whole ship! I assume it's mostly because these two never interacted in canon. Still, that's hardly an excuse! I love the height difference -- Gwendolyn Christie is literally an entire foot taller than Kelly Marie Tran -- and I think that feisty, spunky, engineer Rose would have a lot of things to say to stone cold butch Phasma.

The author had a lot of fun with the height difference -- rrRRRRrrr -- and the smut was hot! The background Gingerpilot shenanigans were delightful as well! They also listed Rey/Finn as a tag, but that's barely there at all so I didn't include it in my summary, haha.

A most wonderful gift that pleases me greatly!

I also received an extra little treat!

Say No More
Author: Anonymous (for now) -- (EDIT: This was by lucymonster!)
Fandom: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Ships: Finn/Rey
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Wordcount: 536

Summary: Finn meant to talk to Rey first. He really did.

This short-n-sweet foray into Finn and Rey being sex-pollened for each other was a lovely little soupçon of a fic. I was delighted to receive it!

Another successful year in the books. In just a few more days I'll be able to blog about the thing I wrote! :)