Part 3 of 3: Queer Coda
In the final part of this journal, I’ve collected the entries focusing on themes of queer authorship, and what I want to do next.
(And also, the section that got shoved here because of this site’s character limit. 
)
The Part That’s Really, Actually, A Spoiler
This one was meant to be at the end of Part 1. Oh well.
Okay, this element of Pharos Fidelis is hard to talk about, mainly because it’s something I think is cool that I hope people experienced unspoiled on their own. I think that the reviewers might have felt similarly, given that people talk around it.
At this point, while the comp is over, I can’t safely assume that people have read the story, especially given that it was in the lower tier of both rating and review counts. So, I don’t know, if you’re somehow engrossed enough in this weird journal that you’re still interested in reading Pharos Fidelis for yourself, this is the section to bow out of and save for after that. I can’t stop you, of course.
As I’ve mentioned, I first had the idea for this project in late September 2024, as I was wrapping up my IF Comp response thread. It was originally a project intended for EctoComp 2024. In addition to all the other pieces that I’ve discussed in “Originary Fragmentslag,” when I sat down to make another project that was “interactive fiction” specifically, the most important piece of it was to try and execute a big point of view twist that only would work well in this medium. This idea was specifically inspired by two entries from IF Comp 2024 that left me thinking.
The first is my personal favorite from that event, The Saltcast Adventure (2024), by Beth Carpenter. Not only does it hit on a lot of themes I cherish, namely empathizing with misunderstood monsters, it has a twist at around the two-thirds mark that delightfully upended my experience as a reader.
Look, I know there’s people who have read everything and played everything and nothing is shocking or fresh or interesting to them anymore. I’m guilty of that from time to time. Maybe to them, that game’s twist is nothing special. It’s fine, it’s all a matter of taste in the end. But this time, I was in the right headspace while reading The Saltcast Adventure such that when I got there, it made me feel something. And I’m glad when I could still feel something about a plot development. Invigorated by the cool twist, I was excited to think about how I could use the medium of Twine to restructure and enhance the kind of twisty fantasy plots that I love to write.
The second IF Comp game that motivated my development of this project was Forsaken Denizen (2024), by C.E.J. Pacian. You might think this is a little weird as an interactive fiction influence for my entry, since It doesn’t really have anything structurally in common with Pharos Fidelis. Forsaken Denizen is a survival horror parser game that is very much a game, unlike what I made, which is much more similar to a novella.
But Forsaken Denizen is the game that demonstrated for me, for the first time, the inherent instability of point of view in interactive fiction that produces a lot of meta tension if authors allow it to. In this game, instead of being written in a second-person format, it’s in a (to me) unusual-feeling first-person format. The narrator/player is Cathabel, but the actions the player types on the command line are executed (or ignored) by her girlfriend, Dor. So the action hero doing the plot is Dor, at the behest of narrator Cathabel’s instructions, which are supplied by the player.
While the “triangle of identities” between the player, the player character (usually the “you” of second person), and the narrator describing the events is a pretty well-known and discussed IF thing, for me just showing up without any context, it was something brand new and weird to think about, and this game puts on a masterclass of doing something interesting with it.
So, once I had an idea for taking the pieces of prior concepts and bringing them together (Vosaphar as a character and his backstory; the Skyrim fanfiction premise), the third critical piece that made it an “interactive fiction” project idea was to have the reader gradually, and then suddenly realize they had been an in-universe character in the story, rather than this external alien force making choices from safely beyond the veil in third person. By the end, I wanted it to feel difficult for the reader to answer the question, “who is the main character of this story?” because that answer would keep changing underneath them.
In the first third of Pharos Fidelis, the reader would have their agency severely restricted. The reader would be following Finnit in a third-person story that is (apart from a few minor flourishes) an unbranching narrative that they cannot control.
Then, when Vosaphar enters the story at around the one-third mark, the player suddenly would gain access to branching events (via the motes of hellfire) that influence Vosaphar’s actions. The story has kind of folded over, making Vosaphar seem like the player character, since he’s the one you can directly affect.
At the two-thirds mark, after a few second-person hints, the point of view would fold again to reveal that the reader, “you,” have been an in-universe character: the Warden of the Calciferous Wastes. I wanted the reader to be invited to face and respond to having their complicity in the story brought to the forefront, and the story would end with a kind of power struggle between what the reader wants, what the reader’s character, the Warden evasively wants, Vosaphar’s potential rebellion against the Warden and reader’s choices, and the kind of cackling fourth voice of the narrator.
To clarify: this is not necessarily what the project is. That’s what the idea for this project was. I wanted it to build toward a kind of climactic identity power struggle crashout at the end. Whether or not the final version actually does, successfully, any of what I described above, is not really my place to say. What I want it to be, and what I hope it feels like, is not necessarily what the reader experiences. In fact, it almost certainly isn’t.
For example, I don’t think readers were unsure who the main character was. People seem to still generally say that it’s Finnit, either to kindly avoid spoiling the story, or because the person you follow first and most is still effectively the main character even if weird meta stuff goes down. And I should accept their verdict, I think.
But I wanted to explain where the spark of the idea came from. It came from combining all these pieces together—my past experience in writing multi-POV fantasy, random story and character ideas I had floating around in my head, and my experience of reading/playing IFComp games last September.
Cozy Fiction: A Brief, Concise, and Succinct Interlude
I wasn’t conscious of this at the time I was writing it, but given the weeks I’ve had to reflect on the project as IF Comp passes me by, I’ve made the realization that Pharos Fidelis is, at its core, my version of “cozy.” I was reminded of this thread from last year where people talked about the “cozy” genre label.
I would not label Pharos Fidelis as “cozy” in a marketing context given the way the term is normally used—I mean, look at the content warnings—but when I originally started thinking of it as “a romantic island getaway” as a meta joke, the description stuck for me because that simply is what it is. Yeah, there’s a massive amount of other stuff going on, and a lot of it is scary or unsettling, but at the core of the story, Finnit and Vosaphar are just hanging out together in what might as well be a cabin, being all cute. It makes one wonder if Luminary Raekard was shipping them together on purpose. Airbnb? More like air-DND.
When I read works that are framed as cozy in the traditional sense, I often experience a considerable amount of friction. Coziness for whom? Happiness for whom? If things are outwardly aesthetically pleasant, that’s dishonest and inauthentic. So says my inner contrarian, who is mostly the one in charge of what I think and feel. Like of course I get that other people find these appealing and escapist. Maybe for them, going through a lot of real life tragedy and hardship leads them to want something bright and sunny where things aren’t so complicated and you can trust that everything works out. I don’t begrudge anyone that. But for me, it’s things that are dark and melodramatic that have escapist appeal. This is an aesthetic preference, not a value judgment on normatively “cozy” works themselves and the people who make and enjoy them.
But I think it’s worth asking, why do I think this? It’s hard to say, exactly. A core childhood memory for me is sitting at the very back of a minivan, the youngest by a significant margin, while my parents and my older siblings in the rows of seats ahead of me engaged in lively and energetic conversation. During this, I sat in silence, neither thought of nor spoken to. Everyone else around me was happy, the environment was happy, but I was not. They were a family together, that I felt marginal to. Extraneous to. A moment like that is instructive, it teaches that external happiness must be in some way false, inauthentic, or incomplete. To be clear, I question the reliability of this memory. These are my recollections of the paranoid thoughts of an insecure child. Like, of course I was thought of. Of course I was spoken to, eventually, probably. Right? At any rate, sometimes paranoid and insecure children are not able to overcome this condition, and grow into paranoid and insecure adults.
I can see the origins of my aesthetic perspectives all over what I do remember from this time, though. Take music. When I was learning piano, I noticed that pieces in major keys sounded static and uninteresting, except for their temporary modulations into minor keys, which were brief and quickly resolved. In this type of western classical music theory, a major key’s central cadence is major-to-major-to-major (IV-V-I). There’s tension in this sequence, but not a lot of it. But a minor key’s central cadence is minor-to-major-to-minor (iv-V-i), embedding the leading tone in a more interesting context. Minor keys have melodrama infused into them that major keys lack (at least, in beginner level classical music, though even for advanced works, a major key piece has to do a lot more work to prove its “interesting” credentials for me). Minor keys are unstable—protean, to reference Mike Russo’s description of the demons—having multiple versions (natural, harmonic, melodic) and a wider emotional range. Many minor key pieces resolve to a major (Picardy) third at the end, but many more do not. Isn’t that more exciting, to not know for sure what will happen at the conclusion of a dark and moody journey? Why would anyone ever write in a major key and thereby forfeit all the stakes of the composition? The fact that I only wanted to practice minor key pieces further withered my approval rating with other members of the household.
Maybe you read the paragraph before this one and your immediate thought was something like, “Of the major keys, B Major is a good one, there are some lovely things written in B Major, really, some very evocative and fresh things, and it’s weird to pretend otherwise,” and you’re right, of course. I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head, but you’re right. I do have a feeling that there’s something “not-yet-outgrown” about my aesthetics. Like isn’t the whole cultural narrative around moody children and teenagers that they are rebellious and contrarian just for the sake of it, and they outgrow this eventually to become functioning adults? I don’t think an adult well-calibrated to the social world around them would’ve written a work like Pharos Fidelis.
What is so cozy about it, then? Well, to me, coziness rings false unless it arises from contrast. The more relentlessly dark, rainy, and austere the environment is, the more honest that the relief feels when something good happens. What is a hot devil appearing in a cold room, if not an invitation to get cozy? I think this is why I gravitate to hurt/comfort-style romance fics so much. Someone is in pain, or otherwise having a miserable time in isolation, and they find someone else who is also having a miserable time, but they can help each other through it, heal, bond, and have sex (if you’re in the UK, pretend I didn’t mention that last part). This is cozy to me; moving from a state of misery and isolation to a state of closeness and empathy. Comfort becomes meaningful in the context of its prior scarcity and the threat of its future scarcity.
I wonder if people hoping for something kinkier or more erotic find my work to be dreadfully vanilla and restrained. Sure, there’s some light claw action, but I had an entire demon in the story and yet he barely got past some fade-to-black horny cuddling? Maybe that’s a huge disappointment to the gay demon romance fic audience. I can think of a time that I was somehow disappointed by a gay demon romance arc, when I watched the Critical Role mini-series Exandria Unlimited: Calamity.
In this four-episode DND campaign that streamed on Twitch and YouTube in 2022, a gay human player character (Zerxus) has a romantic arc where he comforts a wounded Asmodeus, an archdevil and Lord of the Nine Hells, and falls in love with him. And wow, did I feel seen. Like that’s what I would do in a DND campaign, if someone were brave enough to invite me to a campaign these days. I would have a big, inappropriate, plot-crashing crush on an archdevil and want to take care of him and treat him like someone worth valuing, against the dictates of DND lore. You cannot be fawning over Asmodeus, this is a serious campaign. People are dying, gorge.
A good DM would exploit the narrative drama such a situation would create. Indeed, that’s what happened in EXU: Calamity. For Zerxus, this affection ends in brutal betrayal and tragedy. What did he expect? A devil, in DND terms, is inherently evil. It is in his nature to betray. EXU: Calamity is a compelling and narratively well-constructed story, but for me, also a disappointing one. I felt big weird emotions, and while I appreciated experiencing them, it left me yearning for a better outcome. I just felt kind of sad and empty by the end of it.
So when I say that Pharos Fidelis might actually be a cozy fic, this is what I’m getting at. Finnit is a character who makes a series of baffling, reckless, and self-centered choices because there’s a hot demon he feels bad for and wants to help, and he’s also lonely and wants help with a research project. He is modeling neither common sense nor altruism, and thank goodness for that. But there’s a narrative logic that says that this simply shouldn’t work out, that Finnit needs to be held accountable, punished for doing what he does, in the same way that Zerxus falling for Asmodeus has to end horribly.
As the reader, if you really want to, you can dish out narrative “accountability” for the characters’ irrational decisions, if that’s something you care about for whatever reason. The possible tragic endings to Pharos Fidelis aren’t invalid, exactly. Even the most catastrophic among them have something to say. Where else are you going to learn the Fourth Principle of Summoning? But, I would be surprised if many readers prioritized choosing them first (or at all), instead of taking the late-story choices that overtly signal better outcomes. The reader is not punished for wanting things to work out, and even if they arrive at a monumentally bad ending by accident, they can revisit their choices. In most cases, even if Vosaphar unexpectedly swerves and rejects your influence at the last second, you can still recover a good ending out of it.
This is the kind of story I yearn for: one where you can be a gay loner and kind of a disaster, and fall in love with a big grumpy demon dude who is having a rough time, and against all narrative and cultural logic, the romance turns out to be tender and sweet and gentle and respectful, and becomes the brightest, warmest spark in a dark, dark world, and the reader can help nurture it and bask in the heat from that mote of hellfire too, if they like.
In my opinion, that’s what makes for a cozy kind of story, content warnings and all.
VosaFin
I had been calling the Vosaphar/Finnit ship “Finniphar,” but beta readers fen and vane, the latter of whom made this disgustingly beautiful fanart, call them “VosaFin.” Ultimately, it’s the fans who get to decide these things. That’s why I shouted out “VosaFin” and not “Finniphar” in my results-stream speech in a vaguely threatening way; as an unwelcome reminder that they chose this.
I hope that the relationship between Finnit and Vosaphar seems interesting enough to readers to warrant a closer look. My overarching goal was to depict was a relationship that included overlapping power imbalances that kind of canceled each other out to form a fraught and tense equilibrium. That sounds a bit abstract, but I will explain what I mean.
One power imbalance between the two of them is a significant difference in physical strength. Vosaphar cannot truly die. He is larger, and supernaturally strong, with horns, sharp claws, and a hooked tail. He can incinerate things in his vicinity with hellfire on an impulse. Even with no ill intention, Vosaphar risks causing harm to Finnit by handling him indelicately in crisis situations, or thrashing in his sleep when experiencing nightmares. By contrast, Finnit is a mortal who can do some magic, but his kind of magic is less instantaneous, requiring more focus and concentration. He is smaller, much weaker, and has the unfortunate ability to die. This is a significant power imbalance in a relationship that involves a lot of trust and good communication to maintain safely.
On the other side of the ledger, consider the stakes of the accord that Finnit and Vosaphar strike. Finnit has preemptively thought through everything to present Vosaphar with what he imagines a fair accord to be, without ever having spoken to a demon before to get their perspective on whether they would even want an arrangement like this, let alone the shape of it. While Vosaphar offers a few stipulations, he largely consents to the accord without that much pushback. Doesn’t this say a lot about their respective social positions? Vosaphar emerges from the calciferous wastes hungry, exhausted of magic, bleeding, and miserable. If the accord negotiation fails, he immediately returns to that terrible situation. From Finnit’s perspective, the accord not working out just puts him back at the status quo, where he can wait out a miserable few weeks in isolation before returning to Cairnveld to fail his discovery trial, but at least after that he would get to move on with his life. Were Finnit acting in bad faith, he could push a number of terrible contract clauses onto Vosaphar that Vosaphar would end up accepting, not unlike traditional devils of legend, who allegedly prey upon desperate mortals with imbalanced deals. Vosaphar is dependent on Finnit’s magic to remain on the mortal plane; otherwise, the principle of planar reversion will return him to the calciferous wastes where he will once again be unable to heal, sapped of energy, and hungry.
So, summing that up, Vosaphar is a physically powerful immortal being who is at a social structural disadvantage, while Finnit is a fragile mortal sorcerer with not-fully-realized social structural advantages. My hope was that this results in something that feels both balanced and tense, but I suspect that individual readers could have a lot of different perspectives based on what types of power imbalances feel more threatening to them.
Don’t get me wrong, all I really need from a gay monster fic is a hot devil and a cold mortal, and it will immediately make sense to me why they hook up with no further explanation required. Nevertheless, I wanted to show at least some challenges to making their dynamic work, and gesture toward the fact that there are ways it could go horribly wrong if they don’t attend to the emotional labor of understanding each other’s perspectives and building trust.
Something I’ve noticed in a lot of monster-related fics is that the authors like to explore the more aggressive dynamics that can exist in the context of having a ruthless villain as a love interest, often taking it in a BDSM kind of direction. These can often be very engaging—I’m not meaning to devalue these works and what their authors are expressing at all—but for whatever reason, at this point what I personally really crave to read is a more wholesome, respectful, and kind of vanilla relationship with a devil. Is it subversive to write that, because I’m writing the dynamic against-type? Or is it the exact opposite—did I undo almost all the subversion embedded in a devil-mortal relationship by trying to make it so normatively tender and romantic?
Is Luminary Raekard secretly the hottest character because he’s the most “traditionally demonic” in personality?
Scholars remain uninterested.
Whatever you think of it, my goal was just to write the dynamic I wanted to, and I did. I’m not going to write exactly this same dynamic every time, but I don’t know, I just feel like demons have been through a lot of hardship and disappointment in fiction and should get more chances to have positive experiences in stories. That’s my queer bliss, I guess. So, yeah. I ship VosaFin.
Sexually Suggestive Content
I still don’t really understand how to write about, or in proximity to, sex.
It feels important to me that if I want to, I should get to, and be able to, write well-crafted scene-work about men in love with each other who have sex as part of that.
I’ve read a lot of fanfiction on AO3, which means that I’ve read erotica at a charming range of skill levels, and seen many approaches to how people depict queer intimacy. But when people write about the actual literal mechanics of sex, I often don’t really enjoy it that much. It gets repetitive and I eventually just skip past those scenes because it seems like, once the author has orchestrated a way for the characters to get together, the interesting plot they’ve been building falls to the wayside. The most exciting parts are those directly leading up to, and immediately after. Those moments have the most character and tension and eroticism to me, with the “actual” sex in between being just like, ok, whatever.
Maybe this is an absurd analogy. But we’re this far into the journal, I feel like only the real ones are still here, and by “real ones” I here mean, “people with a delightfully high tolerance for absurdity.”
Oh, that joke structure reminds me, I want to go on a tangent about Lemony Snicket. I’m not going to, but I want to. Some other day. But, ugh, here: something something, postmodern gothic narrators, Elvira-core DemonApologist schtick, the blacked out pages in The Ersatz Elevator, dyslucence, Pharos Fidelis. That should be enough to sort it out.
I should’ve written every journal section like that, that was so much faster. What am I even doing?
Stalling, that’s what.
Anyway, the analogy. To me—and this is not some universal truth or whatever, this is just what I think—if sex is like the sun, too bright and challenging to look at directly, the most powerful eroticism I can actually access like is a total solar eclipse, the moon blocking enough of the light to reveal a less intense but more captivating sensory corona at the edges. This is how “sexually suggestive content” works for me as a writing device. I’ve blocked out the sun, and I now get to vividly describe the beautiful light that its brightness had previously washed out.
This is where I have felt most at home in trying to write about this topic, trying to find lush and sensual descriptions for the before and after, that bring the feeling of the characters’ intimacy together. This how I end up, for instance, at details like Vosaphar’s warm tail wrapped around Finnit’s thigh, uwu.
In my development log for August 5th, when writing Chapter XIX, I wrote:
I’m partially through another critical scene but it needs more time to cook. I want it to be like, the romantic pinnacle of project. Is it so much to ask, that I want it to be the hottest gay devil kiss I can possibly come up with? Isn’t this exact type of scene the whole point of “DemonApologist” as a creative endeavor?
I don’t think I reached this lofty goal, but I still really like Chapter XIX, especially how melodramatic it is. If you can’t be melodramatic when a hot demon has finally returned from the hells into the arms of his favorite summoner, when can you be? But more to the point: my default instinct is to shy away from the explicit, so I have to actively push myself to take it further, to be vulnerable and show a little more of what I want to be feeling.
I think I’ll keep writing within the “sexually suggestive” (rather than explicit) frame for now, in interactive fiction. I like it. The readers that I’ve heard from seem to like it. So, if we’re generally in agreement, why is there still something a little troubling about it?
I’ll try to sum it up, again, I guess. As I’ve stated here, I most prefer reading and writing within this frame of “sexually suggestive” content that is heightened and eroticized, but not explicit. Which side of this scale is closer to being true: (1) This is an accurate, reasonable reflection of my personal identity and I should explore the exact dimensions of queerness that I occupy and feel joy and warmth in writing about and depicting; or (2) everything about this is a rationalization coping for the challenges I experience navigating social existence and artistic expression as a queer person, and I have internalized these beliefs as desires only because of the context of the social pressure associated with this, and I am desperately afraid of losing even more of my tiny audience that I care about, by being too queer?
I think both of these things are true to some extent. I’m sorry. Really. I’m doing the best I can with this, right now.
Future Projects
I don’t have a personal website or blog, so I’m going to use this space to discuss two interactive fiction projects I have considered making in the next year. I am not going to promise to submit either of these to a particular event, or at all. But I would be happy to know if either of these spark any level of interest in people before I fully commit to working on them.
Saffron Incubus Apologia
This project would return to Vintopol (the city setting in Radiance Inviolate) in a story featuring another one of my demon characters, Ossativo, a saffron-themed incubus having a rough time dealing with a contract he has with the owners of money-laundering operation that daylights as a trendy café. As part of his “specificity,” in Pharos Fidelis terms, has an amulet that produces three strands of supernaturally potent saffron every so often, and their intensity and flavor depends on how he is feeling and how he has been treated by his romantic partner(s). Naturally, such an artificially scarce and niche ingredient would be quite a culinary delight for the bourgeois-eat.
How would he respond to the pressure provided by the mercurial taste preferences of flighty restaurant critics seeking to artfully dunk on exotic flavor profiles? And what does it mean to be an “incubus” in this universe anyway? Can I really thread the needle to write about a literal sex fiend in a way that is still approachable and accessible at the level of “sexually suggestive content”? That sounds like an interesting challenge.
My characters are generally very insular and socially isolated (reflecting my lived reality, I guess), so this project could be an interesting challenge in terms of the social worldbuilding. Ossativo lives in a city, and it’s probably hard to avoid unwanted attention as an incubus who cannot pass very well as an anonymous mortal citizen. I imagine we’ll see the return of some of the side characters from Radiance Inviolate, like Gannethil, Camille, and Gwendolyn. This is likely set just prior to the dorrie takeover, so I think Lysander would still be hidden away at the outskirts out of fear of the sun. Poor guy.
Another challenge will be in coding. This seems like it will call for more extreme branching (that is, more frequent consequential choices) than I’ve done to this point, so I’ll either have to be really crafty about pruning them, or learn how to use elements of Twine that I haven’t really been that comfortable with approaching yet.
Cursed Sword Apologia
The other project I want to do is some cursed sword apologia. A few years ago, I watched The Legend of Vox Machina (2022), and was fascinated by a particular NPC, a sentient cursed sword that did its best to influence its himbo user toward evil.
What does a cursed demon sword represent? There’s a kind of seduction toward power, isn’t there? And using that power to accomplish things like vengeance extracts a psychological and spiritual cost. Bloodshed is corruptive.
So taking all that into consideration, I think that a cursed sword is its own kind of well-worn trope that feels ripe for a DemonApologist take. Shouldn’t we be more empathetic in considering the cursed sword’s difficult circumstances? What would that look like?
I imagine a demon who suffered a violent smiting by holy blade, and then was bound and sealed within the metal. The sword locked away in a vault somewhere, leaving him to brood until the sword gets stolen by some thief or another. I mean, is it really even “theft” in this case, or more of an unintentional rescue?
I think “falling in love with a demon bitterly trapped within a cursed sword” is a bit wacky and comedic, so I would want to lean into that rather than resisting it, but there’s a lot of potential for pathos there as well. It must be incredibly lonely to be stuck in a form like that without much recourse, if one is accustomed to being a free-roaming fiend. It would probably be a grievous wound to a demon’s pride and sense of self-worth to be carried around everywhere and used in battle as a tool, without much say in whose flesh their metal carves into. Does the sword feel uncomfortably cold when it’s not wrapped up in the scabbard, and resentful toward not having the ability to sheathe itself? Maybe those are some difficult emotions to work through, that a kind and empathetic person might be able to relate to and help with.
From the human side of things, trying to cuddle up to a sword poses some not insignificant logistical challenges. A sword might be rather phallic, uwu, but it’s a forbidden phallus. It’s a bit of a long-distance relationship, even when the sword is right there next to you. Maybe it can temporarily project a faint, intangible shade of the demon that you could speak with, but still struggle to touch.
And even if the sword-binding is “solved”—hardly a guarantee—doesn’t that introduce a whole new set of relationship issues adjusting to your partner now having a more “normal” physical form? What if you were used to carrying him around and making the decisions and liked that dynamic, but now he’s far more physically imposing and has greatly expanded agency to pursue his own interests, and could even carry you around as a bit of situational revenge? Goodness.
On the technical side here, if I’m going to write a story about a sword, it would probably make sense to have at least some kind of combat system, even if it’s simple. Yikes! I’m definitely nowhere close to coding that yet, but maybe I’ll feel motivated to work on learning to do it. How scary to contemplate.
Should I have said more?
Probably not.
Thank you again and especially: fen, vane, Tabitha, Drew Cook, Juniper Lake Fitzgerald, and ecrusar, for various contributions in terms of beta reading, coding notes, and moral support.
Thank you to arlo, mathbrush, Jaded Pangolin, Mike Russo, and Tabitha (again), the five people generous enough to review my work during the event. And EJ, who sneaked in a secret sixth review after the deadline! All of you treated it kindly, and gave me something to think about.
Thank you to the judges whose collective choices caused “postmodern fantasy-horror gay demon melodrama” to place as unexpectedly high as 14th out of 85 in IF Comp, while also generating a very wacky-looking sixless score distribution. I can’t believe 27 (!) real live humans on earth rated it a 7 or higher. Damn. That means a lot to me.
Finally, thank you to the accursed sun, for continuing to be the ultimate source of cosmic horror.
Take care,
DemonApologist