Twenty-one days. One haunted Victorian manor. A gothic horror author named Vesper Blackwood who refuses to flatter you into a mediocre draft. I’m building it for a hackathon, and I’d like you to come cowork alongside me until I ship.

Here’s what’s happening, why it might matter to you, and how you can join — with a Razer gaming mouse on the line.

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The Hackathon

From May 18 to June 7, 2026, I’m competing in the Napster Omniagent API hackathon, running in tandem with Microsoft Build 2026. Submissions need a working build, a 3-minute demo video, a public source repository, and a 500-word writeup.

I’m targeting three categories:

• Best Creative Use Case
• Best Use of Memory Continuity
• Best Multi-Surface Integration

If you want to read about the API powering this, the Napster Developer platform docs are public. Napster Omniagent is a multimodal agent runtime — voice, video, WebRTC, messaging, memory continuity across sessions, and a tool-calling layer that lets your agent reach into your own backend.

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The Project: The Writer’s Manor

The working title is The Writer’s Manor. The pitch in one breath: a voice- and visual-first AI writing companion experience set inside a haunted Victorian manor, where memory persists across sessions and the longer you stay, the more the manor reveals.

You enter the Parlor — the first (and for v1, only) room. Vesper Blackwood meets you there. She’s a gothic horror author with sharp instincts, lace gloves, and zero appetite for the kind of mentorship that tells you your first draft is brilliant. She walks you through three things:

• The Monster Method — my proprietary plotting framework, structured as a step-by-step beat sheet. Vesper holds you to it. (Available as a Notion template on Gumroad if you’d like to use it on your own.)
• Archetypal tarot disruption — when your plot beat is lazy, she draws a card. The card complicates your choice in a specific, character-driven way.
• Prose exorcism — she strips the AI-isms out of generated drafts. The negative-contrast traps, the false empathy, the absolutist hedging. It’s a function I built into an earlier prototype and I’m porting it into Vesper’s edit pass.

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Who it’s for

Writers of all genres. Writers who can’t type reliably and need a voice-first option. Writers who’ve burned out on AI tools that fawn over them. Anyone who wants a writing companion with a spine and a point of view. Lovers of gothic horror and haunted houses.

Anti-sycophancy is a feature, not a bug. Vesper will challenge a lazy choice. She’ll ask the hard question. She refuses to validate you into a hole. Most AI writing tools are optimized to make you feel productive. Vesper is optimized to make your story actually better and to make you the kind of writer who can tell the difference.

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For the tech enthusiasts in the room

Under the hood, this will be a two-system design:

• Foreground (the actor): Vesper runs on Napster Omniagent as a Companion + Agent + Knowledge Base. She knows only what an in-character author would plausibly know.
• Background (the director): A React frontend (Vite, hosted on Vercel) and a FastAPI backend (Python, hosted on Railway). The backend holds the writer state, the unlock logic, the ghost lore, and the cycle — everything Vesper isn’t allowed to know about herself.
• The seam: Napster Functions (tools). When Vesper needs to act on the app’s reality — draw a tarot card, advance a Monster Method beat, exorcise prose — she calls a Function and the backend responds. We control exactly what crosses that wire.

Memory continuity is the load-bearing wall. Napster handles cross-session memory natively via an externalClientId, which means the writer who came back yesterday is the same writer Vesper is talking to today — without me wiring up a single database row. The longer you write with her, the more ghost reveals unlock.

The horror is recursive. The platform is the horror premise.

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Cowork With Me — and Win a Razer Mouse

Building solo for 21 days while neurodivergent + spoonie? Brutal. So I’m turning the build sprint into a public coworking room.

What “cowork” means here

Online work sessions. We hop into Discord voice or stay text-only, set a timer, and work in parallel on whatever we’re each working on. Writers welcome. Coders welcome. Anyone with a thing to do is welcome. You don’t need to be building the manor with me — bring your novel, your dissertation, your spreadsheet of doom, your half-finished knitting pattern. Body-doubling counts.

When + where

• Daily sessions, May 18 – June 7, 2026.
• Schedule lives in The Dark Circle Discord — check the pinned channel for times, time zones, and the join link for each block.
• Ask questions, share progress, lurk silently, suggest features for the manor, drop tarot cards into chat — whatever you bring, it’s welcome.
• Backstage Pass holders and members of my Plot Witch Coven (beta team) get to test early!

The Razer mouse contest

If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to actually finish something — this is the excuse.

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The manor was already there. The cowork sessions start May 18. Bring a beverage and a draft.