The Story Within The Stories: Who Is Janet Q Henterghast?

To date, I’ve launched about twelve ‘Your Character Here’ stories on Fiverr, as well as hundreds of personal commissions based on all kinds of kinks, fetishes, and fantastical scenarios.

And while they are all similar in that they’re ‘quite spicy’, many of them have a common story thread that connects them all. Some of my most dedicated fans and readers are likely already aware of this thread. If you’re one of them, first of all, thank you. I’m so happy to see that you’re paying attention~

Any time I’ve written something set in the modern day that has a lot of science fiction, horror, or magical realism elements to it, I’ve provided a bit of backstory on the goings on in the form of brief excerpts of memorandums from an agent of a fictional investigative branch of the US government called the Federal Anomaly Taskforce (F.A.T.). These memorandums are often the harried warnings and frustrated interjections of one junior research agent trying to get her seemingly uncaring superiors to take the supernatural events and threats the agency handles more seriously.

As if to rebut the notion of “Weird anomalies that make people obese or inflated? That’s preposterous! Why should we care about that?” right before a kinky story of someone else across America stumbling upon a weird anomaly that makes people obese or inflated.

Occasionally the memos will appear at the end of the story as an epilogue, often amounting to a snarky ‘I told you so’ conveyed in office jargon.

The character writing these little memos is named Janet Q. Henterghast. An auspicious and bombastic name to suit her stories of shadowy government actions and supernatural happenings.

And writing her into my assorted stories is a joy.

It’s pure marshmallow. It’s the frosting on the cupcake, the cherry on top of a sundae, the cinnamon sugar swirls in every bite of a breakfast cereal for kids. I adore writing her and adding to her world, little by little, brief snippet by brief snippet.

But for the total of thousands of words I’ve written from her perspective, Janet Q. Henterghast isn’t a character I’ve actually investigated too thoroughly. I have a really rough conception of what she looks like in my head (Brunette, long hair tied back in a bun, round wire-rim glasses, a perpetual thousand yard stare, slacks held up by suspenders like she’s a character from Noir), but I haven’t gone into much detail about her personality and her backstory, or the potential backstory of the mysterious ‘Taskforce’ she’s a researcher for.

Obvious inspirations are things like The X-Files and The SCP Foundation (More specifically Control from 2019); Monster of the week stories where something supernatural wrecks havoc on a town or a single individual, but is put right and contained by the story’s end. Such is the case with so many of my orders and commissioned stories. Like a lot of these inspirations, the concrete details of the organizations’ backstories are left vague on purpose, so the reader can fill in the gaps with their imagination. Janet and the inner workings of F.A.T. are much the same way.

But I think it’s time to delve into Janet a little bit more.

I’m currently working on a novella in what little spare time I get. It’s a sapphic feedist romance with the backdrop of UFOs and alien abductions around a radio telescope array in a national quiet zone in northern Canada.

Working on it gives that same giddy joy I get when I’m spinning conspiracies with Janet.

So now I’m thinking of making her the main character, and incorporating it into the slow burn world of weird that I’ve been steadily creating.

I can’t wait to show you all more!