amateur detective who solves crimes out of curiosity and then just. doesn’t bother to tell anyone the identity of the perpetrator
armchair detective who investigates objectively funny and morally correct crimes so they can help the perp cover their tracks
bystander who accidentally observes the protagonist commiting a felony and just…quietly walks off stage. they’re no narc and frankly? not their business
For anyone who wants this exact premise, told like an Agatha Christie-esque mystery combined with Silver-Age style masked vigilantes, check out Lavender Jack.
One of my favorite comics of all time, with gorgeous art, themes of power, wealth, law, justice, and corruption. With incredible characters who bond and grow as the series progresses, including some amazingly well-written villains. With a dash of Steampunk sci-fi for good measure.
Literally every single Neuroscience guy I listen to on audiobooks and podcasts: Multitasking is a lie. You are not more efficient. You’re just rapidly switching between tasks and doing all of them slower but your brain is tricking itself into thinking it’s more efficient because you get a little dopamine reward when you activate the ‘change task’ neurons. And you’re burning up way more glucose in the process, leaving you more tired with less done. STOP MULTITASKING. JUST DO ONE THING. PLEASE IT’S ONLY WORSENING YOUR ATTENTION SPAN. WE’RE BEGGING YOU, PLEA–
My ADHD: Don’t listen to them, babydoll. You are sooooooo efficient and attractive. Whoop. You got an email. Whoop you got a text. Whoop you got a blog ask. WOW look at all the tabs open on this window. Do you even remember what they’re all for? Better look through them and close the ones you’re not using because you’re soooo sexy and efficient. Whoop, email again.
as a writer you will have a specific deck of vocab words you like using a lot and when you read other peoples’ work you will see a very clear spread of different vocab words on their end. this is why you need to read, to collect other writers’ words like it’s a card game
like I think it is good and important to be able to criticise porn and erotica for the relationship to the political environment/context of creation etc, but I think that’s not too different from criticising any other art on these grounds. how is the erotica speaking to conventions of the genre? what is the author trying to tell you in what they hold up as attractive? what might the author be saying that they’re not necessarily aware that they’re saying? how does the narrative relate to other dominant cultural narratives? these are all valuable questions to ask and can be answered in nuanced ways that do not involve kink-shaming & do not involve calling people degenerate perverts. yknow.
something I read the other day had a storyline that involved a woman being kidnapped by foreign “disgusting perverts” (<- not supposed to be sexy) so that she could then be rescued by an army general (<- sexy) who had to fuck her as part of the rescue. now it’s no bother to me if someone else gets their rocks off to that, power to them. that said, we can criticise the framing of Woman Ending Up In Sex Trafficking Requires An Army Man To Fuck Her To Safety in the same way we would criticise similar framing in non-erotic contexts. how is this serving the image of the benevolent military? how is it feeding into the white woman’s fear of the other? what is being held up as ‘perverted’ in its juxtaposition to ‘sexy’? etc etc. this was bad erotica but it was also pro-military propaganda and that does mean something
Word tracking spreadsheets for 2026 - lots of different designs, and there’s one for tracking multiple projects now too. Check them out here.
I also made these new PDF ones for printing or planner apps, which I’m very proud of even though I have no idea whether anyone even wants them.
I want these to be available to everyone who wants them, so they’re still pay-what-you-want. If you don’t want to pay, just put the price as 0. Any support I do get for these goes towards maintaining the website and making more spreadsheets and trackers, and I really appreciate it.
Twitter is terrible now so I have no idea how to get the word out about these, so, reblog to help a writer?
Work schedule is hell for trying to get through Women of Xal but otherwise been obsessed with promoting it to everyone lol
Haven’t even finished the first game itself but we need the Part 2! Just finished streaming to some folks as well
My fave points for the first game so far:
Deep commentary immediately. The writing doesn’t skip the harder themes even from the beginning, it’s clear and fits the world
Unique use of the scroll-back history function. Accidentally and painfully discovered this fairly early lol, it seems difficult to use wisely but adds some dynamic to the game
Nuanced choices and characters. The choices you pick aren’t too obvious to what they lead towards, especially with the extensive choice branches of the game. The characters are the same way
The occasional voice animations are so fun to see (aaand helps me pronounce some of these names)
Love that everyone’s an alien lol, learning the terms can be a challenge but is also fun to go along with and piece things together for how their society (and world itself) works
Can’t even comment on the second game’s demo, but this was enough to convince support for it! Hopefully you can give this a shot, it’s free on Itch.io for the next few days
Currently reblogging a lot of folk’s experience with the first game and/or the demo to the second game! >3
Please also share your experiences with the “#Women of Xal” tag and feel free to @plottwiststudios to make sure I read it! Because I will. Might be reblogged.
Here’s a huge set of posts containing lists of all the releases, new WIPs, and updates I could find! Let me know if there are any I missed - I focus on WIPs with forum threads as it’s easiest to track there, but I know there are a bunch that don’t have them.
31 published releases, 12 completed free games, 151 entirely new projects, and 123 projects from previous years updated (updates to new-in-2025 projects get rolled into the “new” section). And there are even more that I know I haven’t spotted. I’m always so, so impressed with the creativity of this community.
Congratulations to everyone who shared something you wrote in 2025! If you’ve been writing something and haven’t shown it off yet, maybe you can take the plunge and do that this year. And if you’ve been musing on a project, maybe spring is a good time to start one!
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