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Run Aground Update!

Edit: Today, June 22nd, Chapter 3 is up! Read it on Royal Road, Wattpad, or our website. (We're working on getting alt text in for the images wherever that's supported.)

The seventh book (and second full-length novel) in the Michigan Fleet series, Run Aground, is now posting one chapter every Sunday on Royal Road, Wattpad, and our new Michigan Fleet website! You can read it wherever you like, and can leave us comments so we know who’s reading where! (Please give us feedback, we’ve been writing this book for so long...) Every other chapter is illustrated by the talented cowriter-artists Roach and Splickedy. The book should stand alone fine if you haven't read the series, although it will be a richer experience if you've read After the Storm and Taste of New York.

After years trapped in a wealthy monster’s harem, actor Rafael Caro is a ghost of his former self. When he meets Rich Merrill, the newest captive, unexpected kindness brings him back to life and headlong into love. Rich, Rafael and their friends in the harem try to keep each other sane and safe in this cruel place—but no one escapes without help from outside...

Note: The series so far has been reasonably delicate with the subject of sexual coercion, but this story has a lot to do with captivity, exploitation, and depersonalization. We take those subjects seriously, and though we try to keep the hurt balanced with comfort, the dark topics are still prominent parts of the narrative. If you have triggers around sexual coercion and abuse, be cautious about this story. If you're into this shit: hell yeah welcome aboard!!!

Content warnings: dubcon, noncon, sexual slavery, violence, alcohol use, noncon drug and alcohol use, murder, attempted suicide.

At the rate of one chapter every Sunday, we’ll finish posting Act One in December, which is when the ebook will become available! Thanks to everyone who participated in the poll and sent us messages saying they actually wanted a single book but had voted for the multiple book option for our sakes or out of impatience – that was very clarifying for us. XD

Now go, read and enjoy on whichever site you prefer! (And if on Royal Road you feel like giving us kind reviews and ratings as well as comments and favs, ratings and reviews are what help the story's ranking the most and thus potentially get us more readers!)

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warmup doodling..... I would like Pearl(s) to be like 350% more unnerving to look at. please. for me.

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giggling and moaning a little every time Daddy Ocean slaps me across the face, punches me in the ribs or throws me down onto the (sea)bed so that onlookers know she's doing it consensually. send tweet.

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surpirate asked:

gamzee + clown church + "and then i remember that there are children inside." - "to throw a wrench in the blood machine: five (season appropriate) metaphors for voting" by kyle tran myrhe

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I just watched someone

walk down the sidewalk outside this coffee shop, stop, and set down a little cup of sour cream on the sidewalk

keep walking

turn back around and come back like they thought better of it

dump most of the sour cream carefully into the crack between the sidewalk stones

and then walk away, pouring the remaining sour cream into their mouth as they went.

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Help out indie writers with no ad budget!

Our Michigan Fleet sequel novel (working title "Run Aground") is a good distance through the editing process, and we plan to put it on Royal Road as a free webnovel, posting one chapter every Sunday at noon EST, starting June 8th! One week away!! (If you haven't seen Run Aground's summary, check the bottom of this post.)

The first book, After the Storm, is now fully posted on Royal Road. Today, June 1st, After the Storm's Epilogue went up! Illustration below.

Here's where you come in: we need as many stars and reviews as we can get on this new platform so when we finally start on the new novel it'll go as well as possible! We are SO looking forward to sharing Run Aground with all of you, and every fav, follow, rating, comment and review (yes, on Royal Road comments and reviews are two different things) will help make it a success. (And also we delightedly read and reread every comment and review! Thank you guys SO MUCH for all the lovely reviews and comments, we love them all!!!)

Go check out After the Storm!

Run Aground:

After years trapped in a wealthy monster’s harem, actor Rafael Caro is a ghost of his former self. When he meets Rich Merrill, the newest captive, unexpected kindness brings him back to life and headlong into love. Rich, Rafael and their friends in the harem try to keep each other sane and safe in this cruel place—but no one escapes without help from outside...

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i really like everything you've done with the concept of troll gender in pof, but i was wondering if you've given thought to why/how they developed the concept of gender as a not really sexually dimorphic species? and who exactly assigns them genders as wrigglers? like are they getting the concept from the lusii? also i was wondering how they can tell each other's genders without asking directly. i know the clowns indicate that with their paint usually, but what about everyone else? i would love to hear any thoughts you have about this!

Okay so. This is only somewhat represented in the actual fic, mostly because I started writing it more than a decade ago when I was a little weenie with no gender imagination, but the grand scope of the xeno loadout I'm contemplating is thus:

in the same way that Lord of the Rings was theoretically a localized+translated legend from another language. PoF is a translation of a troll society that is in some ways localized by its translator (me lol).

THIS IS TO SAY: gender isn't gender. Pronouns are a self-declaration of "the role I take in my use to the Great Hive of The Empire". Trolls we translate as "male" and "female" are just roles of Use To The Hive that a human translator maps to "he" and "she".

If the mother grub, the drones and the trolls are all the same species, I find it delightful to imagine that insofar as trolls have a physical sex, it's BEING "trolls"; "troll"="the farmed ones/caretakers/(trollspecies) servant class" who provide and care for the mother grub.

Some of said class focus more into social violence not intended to kill+loud and posturing to drive away enemies+big emotions for Care About Hive. Because humans are, to quote troll xenonecroscholars, "obsessed with assigning mammal genital configurations to things", humans have dictated these trolls are "men". Some trolls focus more energy into stronger psionics+no patience for posturing/straight for the kill+hone and reinforce the inner strata of the hive. Humans refer to these individuals as "women".

I'll be shorthanding these roles as "masc" and "femme" because I use way too many words already, but just know that's an oversimplification haha.

FIG 1: Karkat by this standard? Very masc, but his insistence that he wants to be the leader/in charge is idiosyncratically femme of him. *cishet bioessentialism voice* Football player repeatedly goes out for ballet.

FIG 2: let's be clear Karkat telling Tavros to "stop playing games for girls" after he got jumped off a cliff was Karkat/Homestuck being classic 2010s shitty. But it doubles in this as "you decided to play with the Scourge Sisters (Deadly High Femme), you moron, you're lucky you're not dead".

how people figure out which one they initially go by... tbh it seems like schooling is pretty much via computers. I feel like you could easily just get like. A module on reproduction, and then a module that's essentially a fucking. quizilla quiz. Assigned pronouns at government-required school module.

Recent chapters have started making characters 'they/them' until the POV character gets a hint what their preference is--in this theoretical setup there would be quite a lot of sussing it out. "Gender presentation" would be a loose constellation of traits with a lot less certainty! The webcomic was not made with this in mind but I do find it fun to willfully reframe the pretty generically human-gendered characters we get.

FOR EXAMPLE!! Long/big hair as a peacocking flair/brag, often by old or powerful classes, or people who are powerful enough psionics they don't have to give a shit about a very grabbable liability in a fight. Trolls whose vocational pronouns translate as "female" often specialize in straightforward impersonal murder and social engineering more than brawling, so longer hair wouldn't be a liability and therefore is correlated, but only loosely.

Feferi has long hair, but so does the Grand Highblood. Equius (reads quite masc to humans) has long hair (nobility fle%), but Kanaya (the most overtly human femme) does not (practical middle-class brawler)! I don't think that's on purpose but I AM taking advantage of it lol.

'They/them' is the equivalent of the "joker" title I made up already for Clown Church--somebody with multiple skillsets, mixed roles, or fields of influence. My gender is undeclared college major. My gender is Jack Of All Trades.

Verato's transness isn't really about his switch from one gender to another--it's more because he plays a "femme" role in society but uses the "masc" pronoun for himself. His self-consciousness about it is more similar to a nonbinary or bisexual human who's used to being told to "pick one" and being told which one they "seem like" or "should be".

Meanwhile the Behemoth's 'it/its' in English stands out as a pronoun usually used for objects, but in Alternian it would be the pronoun trolls use to refer to DRONES. "(Trollspecies) made for thoughtless violence/enforcer/culls the weak". Chilling!!

I would have to go through and edit huge chunks of the fic to drag all half a million words into line with fun xeno shit alongside the clown church worldbuilding I already got in there, but damn if the concept isn't tempting some days.

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Part Two of my scifi-noir oc comic! In which both protagonist and antagonist are forced to confront the sunk-cost fallacy of a lifetime of self-destruction.

Part I

in summary:

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Michigan Fleet Publication Questions!

Run Aground is a three-act story that will be released this summer as a serialized webnovel through Royal Road, Wattpad, and our personal Wordpress. It’s expected to run about 70 chapters. In totality, the text is close to 400 thousand words long.

This presents us with a few different options for how we want to present that text for sale through our Smashwords account. 

One option is to present the entire story as a single, complete, extremely long novel. Due to the significant length, we would ask for perhaps an unusually high purchase price for an ebook, something like 15-20$. 

However, if we presented the entire story for immediate purchase right as the free webnovel starts updating, we’re worried that no one would bother following along with the weekly serial. If we presented the ebook for sale after the free webnovel finishes updating, we’re worried no one would bother paying money for a story they just read!

What we would probably do would be to ask people to follow the webnovel online, and then offer the complete ebook for sale after the conclusion of act one; purchasers would still get to read the rest of the story right away but not be either too far ahead of the webnovel to give it any attention or cheated into paying for an ebook they’d already finished reading. 

The second option is to release three ebooks in stages, one containing the first act, one the second act, and one the third act. These ebooks would each be more than 100 thousand words long, and a third of the price of what we’d ask for the entire text. We would offer an ebook containing the first act for sale right as we started serializing it via webnovel; once the webnovel had updated to the end of the first act, we would then offer the second act ebook for purchase and discount the price of the first book, and then as it concluded we would finally offer the third act ebook and discount the price of the former acts.

Once all three acts were concluded online, we would offer an omnibus edition ebook of the entire text, with hopefully some fun little extras thrown in, such as a bonus short story. 

The strength of the three ebooks plan is that it staggers the full release of the story, pins it to the webnovel update schedule, and lets it unfold in stages over time. It also doesn’t slap 400,000 words down on the table and ask for either an absurdly cheap price or an unreasonably high price. The disadvantage is that a multipart ebook release is complicated and will involve a lot more work to format and update. Additionally, the acts are sections of a larger, overarching story, and don’t stand on their own the way traditionally published novels in a trilogy would; readers might find this frustrating and disappointing. 

So, here’s the poll: 

Release the 400k ebook after the webnovel finishes Act One.  I don’t mind a high price for a huge story!

Release the 400k ebook after the webnovel finishes. I prefer to buy books after I read them, not before!

Release the 130k acts as three ebooks and a final omnibus! I’d prefer to pay a lower price for shorter novels and follow the story as it unfolds!

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A repost of this comic I posted back in september (bc I accidentally deleted that one lol)

Part One of a scifi-noir comic featuring my ocs: haunted vigilante Capt. Den Conor (eyepatch); desperate, cutthroat ladder-climber Whitney (android); and fierce hacker-revolutionary Amber Grey. 💫

PART II

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one of my very favorite obscure story tropes is when there’s an episode/plotline/tabletop campaign session where the conceit is ‘each member of the gang gets trapped in a specially tailored dream/nightmare/illusory mindscape and has to break out’

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Help out indie writers with no ad budget!

Our Michigan Fleet sequel novel (working title "Run Aground") is a good distance through the editing process, and we plan to post it on Royal Road as a free webnovel starting in late May or early June! Before then, we thought we'd go ahead and get the first book, After the Storm, up there, both to attract new readers and hopefully to entice some of our loyal regulars to reread.

We now have After the Storm fully queued up, posting one illustrated chapter every Sunday at noon EST. Edit: On May 11th, Chapter 15 went up! Illustration below. So here's where you come in: we need as many stars and reviews as we can get on this new platform so when we finally start on the new novel it'll go as well as possible! We are SO looking forward to sharing Run Aground with all of you, and every fav, follow, rating, comment and review (yes, on Royal Road comments and reviews are two different things) will help make it a success. (And also we delightedly read and reread every comment and review!)

Go check out After the Storm, and make our day!

After four years of hell serving aboard the Sympatico, a dysfunctional ship with a deadly crew, all Rich wants is to prove himself worthy of an unexpected second chance. Get some sun, make some friends, maybe hook up with a cute guy and even learn to relax. But old scars, bad habits, and an insane AI aren’t going to make it easy…

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weird dog what lives in your basement

this is Bajnok, another character from my work-in-progress graphic novel. he's based on gorgonpsids.