1. Who are you?

Queer trans disabled antifascist Hellenic polytheist writer.

2. What are your fave books?

*wince* the only thing I've even read this year that's longer than ~10K and isn't fanfic is Something Familiar by S. N. Arly, and, uh. People who have read Something Familiar by Freedom_Shamrock will recognize it.

(Brains. Why.)

3. Have you ever done NaNo before?

Several times. Won once; rebelled like hell to get there, though.

4. What's your project looking like? What kind of support do you want/need?

Not sure about support, but since it doesn't look like I'm gonna finish drafting where the firelight fades in the next ten days (it's not impossible, but it's not likely), my NaNo project is gonna be that to start. It's a Miraculous Ladybug novel-length inspired by alliando's brilliant fanart:

She leans up to kiss him under the starry Paris sky, above the glowing city night. She leans up to kiss him, gentle but confident, lovingly and without reservation, everything he's ever dreamed of—except he can smell her, sweet lavender and bitter rosemary: he knows he's awake. She leans up to kiss him, her warm hands caressing his arms and a glint off the gloss on her lips, and she hasn't said a word of why—what is different about this place or this time, about him or—

—about her.

"Stop it!" he cries, pushing her away. He can't—he can't look, he—his heart, like ice. Like ice shattering. How can she have—what did he miss? How did he fail to protect her? How could he?

Ladybug's smirk isn't even vicious. Wouldn't even look vicious without the nightmarish argon glow outlining a butterfly mask.

"What's wrong, Chat?"

I am trying to write the scariest akumatized!Ladybug story ML fandom will ever see. (In related news, this should take getyourwordsout members to the prompt I got for the Forkful of Spoonerisms challenge, and anyone who can see that prompt should also be able to see my two firelight excerpts that illustrate why I am boggling at that prompt.) I'm 25K in, having hit the narrative midpoint at about 22K in, which is to say, about 11K past what I thought was the narrative midpoint, though I must also admit I originally thought this would be an under-10K story! I've fourteen Six Sentence Sunday bits up; four are under the earlier title "falling hot and real".

And when that is drafted and out of my head, I'm going to what I planned would be my 2019 NaNo, butterfly dreams, which title is like three levels of wordplay. Hawkmoth won. He got everything he wanted: his wife is alive, his son is no longer rebellious, his loyal assistant is healthy, his reputation is intact, and that pestilential insect can no longer bother him. No one even remembers anything from the original timeline, except for him and his assistant.

Problem is, magic like that has a price. The girl under the Ladybug mask—whom Gabriel can't kill for fear of losing Émilie again and doesn't want to kill because that would make him the villain of the piece, but because the girl is and will remain in the same semi-alive state Émilie was in before Gabriel won, that's not a problem—made a couple of promises. One was to protect their city from people like Hawkmoth. Another was never to abandon her partner—that is to say, Gabriel's son, who may not remember what he's afraid of or why, but is certainly scared and lonely enough he's willing to listen to the ghost girl telling him everything he knows is a lie…

This excerpt may not actually make it in to the novel?

"I heard this is where to get the best mille-feuille in Paris," says the customer: he might be about as old as Marinette would be, Sabine thinks. "Good thing they don't come in purple." The black hoodie he's wearing helps obscure his face, but he's holding himself like he's scared, and she can see his hopeful smile turn hesitant. "Zǐsè húdiésū?" he prompts; when Sabine continues to not react, his face falls. "Should've known," he mutters, and hands over cash in exchange for his layered pastry. "Keep the change," he says, and is gone before Sabine can protest.

Hours later, counting out the cash register, Sabine finds a sticky note on one of the euro notes. It's a plain square lavender post-it, with a simple stylized butterfly outline sketched sideways in black ink to fill the space—a papillon drawn on a papillon—and handwritten text. The upper wing contains the exact Mandarin phrase the boy in the black hoodie said earlier: 紫色蝴蝶酥, the first four characters in black and the fifth in red—'purple mille-feuille', it says, but the red character taken alone reads 'flaky pastry', and the four in black, 'purple butterfly'. The English words filling the lower wing are written in red as well: loose lips sink ships (I hear this rhymes this way). Along the butterfly's body—

The center of the note reads 誠敏嵐 in black ink. Black ink to write Marinette's name, not red. Not red, and pointedly so! To write a name in red is to say that they are dead: if it isn't true in the present moment, there are always agents of misfortune who will try to correct that error. Sabine has been writing and burning letters addressed in red to her daughter for years.

Purple butterflies, and a boy her daughter's age: someone who is afraid to show his face and to deliver his message in plain French, and who wants Sabine and Tom to believe, however secretly, Marinette is alive?

This is going to be so much fun.

5. Anything else you wanna share!

I seem to like emotionally torturing my characters. 😸