A confession

Somewhere between a squat timer and a daydream about dragon-riding heroines, I accidentally wrote the opening chapters of a romantasy novel and hid a fitness tracker inside it.

Weapon and Flame is the result. Here's the pitch in one breath: you pick a heroine — Dragon Rider, Forest Witch, Rebel Queen, take your pick — and every workout, walk, or “I drank water today and that counts” small win gets translated into a quest. Not a checkbox. A quest, with a sentence of story attached to it.

String enough of those together and you unlock actual chapters — real ones, with a companion character, a plot, and a cliffhanger I'm mildly proud of. Turns out treating your Tuesday like it's part of a bigger story is a genuinely sneaky way to get yourself to move.

It's live. It mostly works. And that “mostly” is exactly why I'm writing this instead of just quietly launching and hoping.

I need beta testers

Real ones — not “sure I'll try it” and then never open the tab again, but people willing to actually go through the motions: sign up, pick a heroine, do a few quests over a week or two, and tell me the truth.

• Where you got confused.
• Where the story fell flat.
• Whether you actually wanted to come back the next day.
• Whether it felt like homework with a fantasy filter on it.

I would genuinely rather hear “chapter two bored me” now, from you, than find out from silence after launch.

What you get

Everyone who tests gets free full access for the beta period — the whole of Book I, no card required. You're not doing me a favor for nothing; you're getting early access to something before anyone else, and a direct line to actually shape what it becomes.

If you've ever wanted a say in how a story world gets built instead of just consuming it after the fact, this is that.

What I'm asking for

Honesty over enthusiasm. Tell me what's confusing. Tell me if the heroine you picked didn't feel like “yours.” Tell me if you forgot the app existed by Thursday — that's useful information, not an insult, and it's exactly the kind of thing I can't see from the inside after staring at this for months.

How to get in

Comment “BETA” on the post that brought you here, or drop a line at beta@weaponandflame.com. I'll send you instructions and a two-minute rundown of what to actually try. No sales pitch, no funnel, just an app that needs some honest eyes on it before it meets the world for real.

And if fantasy-fitness apps aren't your thing but you know someone who'd read a book and wants an excuse to finally use those running shoes — send them this post. That's a favor I'll take too.

Weapon and Flame is a solo project I've been building alongside my writing and my Etsy shop, which tells you everything you need to know about how I spend my evenings. More on the actual building of it — the good decisions and the ones I quietly patched at 11pm — in a future post. I'm also working on two sister projects: QuestFit and DeadFit (zombies and D&D), neither live yet, both equally ridiculous.