I have ZERO assignments at the moment, and it's WEIRD.

This year I decided not to do the Five Figure Fanwork Exchange. Last year I decided not to do FFFX, but then I picked up a pinch hit for it that I felt wasn't very good, in the end. The year before, I wrote Tournament of Dragons, which is one of my own personal favorites of things I've written. But when I thought about signing up again, I realized that the exchange doesn't really meet my own personal needs. It has a word minimum of 10,000, but I usually write at least 10k, so it's not that much of a stretch to force that to happen. And the lead time! It's something crazy, like eight months?!?! That's just an awkwardly long lead time. I'd honestly rather have two weeks.

Still, I do like FFFX, and I keep my eye on the pinch hits in case there's another one I could pick up this year. I have new standards for myself after last year, though -- I won't be writing any more Original Works for fanfic exchanges. If I'm going to write Original Works, I want to make a Kindle Unlimited account and publish it there and try to get $2.50, haha!

ANYWAY! Having no assignments whatsoever is a weird feeling. I was thinking about signing up for Yuletide, which I've also participated in for the past three years, but I'm still on the fence. It's all about small fandoms that need more love, and small fandoms or ships IS where I tend to focus my efforts!

Now that all the fun of Smut Wars is behind me, it's time to get back to my WIPs! I need to return to:

• Live Wire - I left my boys on a cliffhanger! I really need to get back to them and deliver sweet justice to the terrible Moff Vortigern!


• Uncage Me - I've mostly left the Naruto fandom, but this work still pulls in kudos and comments, and I owe my readers a real Explicit chapter. It's been rated Explicit this whole time without any reason for that!


• Cat on a Plasteel Roof - Poor Armitage Hux in this story. He needs to get some comfort... after even more angst, of course!

I finished my offering for the ExSHAMEnge yesterday a few hours before the deadline (whew!). With those published words, my total on AO3 is now over 2 million!

Briefly, I considered cutting a few hundred words so I could get a screenshot of it at 2 million words exactly -- but I don't care THAT much, and it seems a bit silly, haha. I didn't do that at 1 million words.

I'll probably add a bit more before reveals on Sunday night, but overall, I'm satisfied with what I created for the ExSHAMEnge. I hope my gift recipient likes it.

As soon as authors are revealed in Smut Wars, I'll be back here to blog about the three things I wrote for it... one of which is FAR more popular than the other two, lol!

Two of the exchanges I joined recently revealed their works -- so I can blog about them here!

From the 2026 Smut Wars Exchange, I received one gift and one treat!

The gift:

Title: Helpless
Author: Anonymous (for now)
Fandoms: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Phasma - Delilah S. Dawson
Ship: Cardinal | Archex/Armitage Hux
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Wordcount: 2,320

Summary: Knowing Armitage has plotted to kill his own father changes their relationship. It doesn’t change how Cardinal’s body reacts to him. [Armitage Hux x Cardinal | Written for the Smut Wars exchange]

This was a cruel Armitage Hux, mistreating Cardinal in a way that he can't resist, because he's hopelessly conditioned to obey, as well as probably also being in love. There's no emotional happy ending to his one, just smut!

The treat:

Title: Splendour So Fine
Author: Anonymous (for now -- but I know who it was)
Fandom: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Ship: Armitage Hux/Tritt Opan
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Wordcount: 6,592

Summary: Observation was part of the job. Obsession was not.

THIS WAS EXCELLENT! From the opening quotation from an 1800s treatise on beetles, I was helplessly sucked in.

Tritt Opan is barely a character in the First Order. As far as I know, he doesn't have any lines in the Sequel Trilogy. He may or may not have any lines in the official books -- presumably he must have lines somewhere, yet I'm not familiar with any of them. He's an assassin for Brendol Hux, and he's played by a character actor known for his unusual, even offputting look. The way they costumed and styled him in the Sequels made him look positively cadaverous. He is not the traditional vision of a leading man, is what I'm saying.

In December 2025, over on the Discord server, Milo quipped that Tritt Opan looks like the sort of man who owns a beetle named Wolp. I think I've blogged about this before -- the shared headcanon that we immediately began fleshing out, complete with what he does with the insects (lets them bite him after every kill), etc. etc. etc.

I wrote one fic based in this headcanon ("Bite Me"), and started another one ("Live Wire"). Well, "Splendour So Fine" is a third fic written from this shared understanding of Tritt Opan as being a creepy bug guy -- and it's SO creepy, and SO problematic, but in the best way!

The main challenge of writing from Opan's point of view is that he's an assassin -- divorced from regular human emotions. He has to be, to do what he does. I assume he's not only a hardened killer, but also has a very alien viewpoint. The added shared headcanon about "the bug thing" means that his point of view is even MORE alien, at least in my opinion. Maybe he has taken on certain bug-like qualities himself: the ability to hold still, the foreign ways of making decisions, maybe even a different way of valuing life and death.

This fic delivers on everything I could have dreamed about a fic written from Tritt Opan's POV. It leaves out so much about his thought process, giving us the bare A to B map, but without any human emotions to fill in the gaps. We are left to infer Opan's priorities to a large extent, until they become too pressing to ignore. All of it paints a subtle picture of a person who is utterly fixated, obsessed, and totally stalking his General, the younger Armitage Hux -- and that should be horrifying, right? Only it turns out that Hux already knows...

This fic was just SO good, and SO well done. I'm truly in awe of the skill that's displayed! So far, I've never been brave enough to attempt Tritt Opan's POV, and if I ever am, I will be struggling to create a unique take on it rather than just attempting to imitate this fic.

In my opinion, this fic is true art. It's too bad that only a handful of people will ever see it, most likely. No one is out there searching for Tritt Opan/Armitage Hux fics.

*****

I also joined the Extreme Timed Multifandom Challenge! This is an exchange that takes just 48 hours from start to finish. The exchange doesn't have an anonymous period, so we already know who wrote what.

I received one gift:

Title: flying the spaceship is the easy part
Author: codesandstuffs
Fandom: Original Work
Ship: Bisexual Spaceship Engineer/Female Pilot She Has A Crush On & Her Supportive Ex-Boyfriend-Turned-Friend (OW)
Rating: Gen
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Wordcount: 1,203

Summary: The ship is headed straight through a pair of binary stars, sure, but that's not really what Lark is worried about here.

This was a cute little chatfic where the hazards of bisexual dating loom larger than the Starship Problem Of The Week!

And I also received a treat:

Title: Adrian's Trasures [sic]
Author: itallcomesbacktoandreil
Fandom: Project Hail Mary (2026)
Ship: Adrian/Rocky & Ryland Grace (Project Hail Mary 2026)
Rating: Gen
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Wordcount: 395

Summary: Adrian watches Rocky and Grace sleep.

This is a short (under 400 words) fic where these three characters snuggle together!

I just have one more fic to write for an exchange -- the ExSHAMEnge Internalized Queerphobia Flash Exchange, which is due this Thursday, September 10, at 5 pm in my time zone. I'm starting to write it now.

Luckily, shame is where I live a lot of the time, so I have plenty of ideas. I just need to pick ONE shame-filled scenario and try to do it justice!

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!

(LATER EDIT) I did manage to write 3 things for Smut Wars in 2026, so the prophecy has been fulfilled! :D

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!