This passage is near the end of the chapter I am currently writing. Bolt narrates. She's a flighty day angel. You tell me, is she excited?

Gloss: Tarantino teaches us that nothing equalizes people or is as relatable as sharing a meal… Teri is the name the devil-girl is using at this point in the story. It is short for Night Terror. She can perform what to us looks like magic. The passage is a barely revised first draft.

My worries fluttered away like a moth to a street lamp when the server delivered a golden custard dessert, a mound on a plate sealed under a burnt-brown crazed caramel-glass shell, in a moat of purple-brown, fragrant with cooked sugar and orange-berry liqueur.

"What's this?" I asked.

Her spoon floated over and tapped. Shards of glass sugar popped into a rubble skirt revealing the yellow hill, flecked with red, green, and brown herbs, which when I sniffed caressed my nose with hints of anise, mint, cinnamon, and… that tingle? Cayenne?

Teri replied, "We danced, so now you've had dinner and here's dessert."

"Sweet," I said, before thrusting my spoon in. Reflexively.

Dancing, dinner, and dessert? Men propositioned by a woman who was too lazy to have a plan suggested that.

Teri is not a guy, I reminded myself, then, a spoonful of—

Oh. My. Stars! Creamy, spicy, sugary bliss. I hugged myself, wings and arms, brushing the napkin off my lap and nearly dropping the spoon. Sweet was something I rarely had, but need it, want it, must have it instantly commandeered my brain, annihilating all resistance, maybe more so than my excuses to allow myself to be ridden by Teri had. I scooped glistening perfection. I sighed enjoying each spoonful. I won't admit to an occasional moan. I barely paused to wipe my chin.

"You happy now?" Teri asked as I crunched on the faintly carob flavored sugar shards.

"Ecstatic!"

Not exactly When Harry Meet Sally…

[Author retains copyright (c)2026 R.S.]

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#WordWeavers 2026.03.27 —Which character would be the most fun to be around?

If you are male, day angel Bolt (the MC) is your ticket. She's athletic and experienced, and not intellectually challenging though rather perceptive. Generally, however, and assuming you are neither stupid nor malicious, the SC devil-girl is a lot of fun with a depth knowledge that's rather surprising, so long as you're not a history buff as that stuff bores her. She loves books, and discussing them. She likes to perform her miracles for an audience. She's athletic and looking for someone to spar with, and will train you if you like. If you can teach her something, anything, she'll be your friend for life. Sex, however, is not her thing. She uses it only as a tool.

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#PennedPossibilities 968 — What’s the current word count for your WIP?

I should look more often. It's way larger than the minimum for a novel at 93,338 words. In a way, Reluctant Courier (for the Mob) is a bit of an R-rated soap opera, and entertaining things happen along the way. There's probably 20,000 words of essential stuff still not written, however. Here's a screenshot of Scrivener's assessment with TL;DR statistics for your enjoyment, with #AltText! For those interested in chapter length, all my chapters are one document in length.

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[Blue volunteered to answer this one. He is a male praetorian friend and lover of Bolt's, who's both the MC and a woman. They're both day angels... —RS]

Because I live at an association, I am around a lot of women. What is in vogue, what scents the air, are aromatic herbal scents. In our hot and sweaty world, everyone smells to the point that you don't notice it—until you receive a swift kick in the nose with an herbal "Hello, handsome!" I don't appreciate this squeal in the background noise. Truthfully, though I've recently learned that Bolt has a preference for her men wearing thyme oil, she's neither fashionable nor trendy herself. She prefers to be her natural self, whatever her state, with little fix-up, which means she'll pop in looking however she looks, even with a cowlick or two, or feathers akimbo. To me, this comes off a genuine, compared to the other women. I know she has her secrets she is loathe to share, yet it still feels genuine—genuinely, distinctively, my friend Bolt. I admire her athleticism; she taught me plenty of tricks I needed for work. Her constant sweaty motion leaves with her emitting a unique aroma. Kind of like toast. Though I wouldn't say to her directly, because she might take it wrong, I find her scent reassuring and very attractive. It's my favorite.

[Author retains copyright (c)2026 R.S.]

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#PennedPossibilities 976.1 — #imposterToot: Pick a character. How do they, or how would they, react to sleep deprivation?

@floofpaldi : Get some rest. Feel better. —RS

I'll pick the devil-girl. She's #autistic like her author, and seemingly OP thanks to her training and study and logical-literal take on the world, which grants her plenty of ability through raw unfettered stubbornness, but she's got lots of defects, emotional and psychological. Physical too, but that's because she refuses to take into account her body's limits, and has the scars to prove it. People say she has a death wish.

May be true.

She reacts to sleep deprivation by powering through, regardless. Her trained-into-her sense of responsibility causes her to have the back of anybody she's responsible for, or anyone hurt, or, if innocent, threatened. She makes herself sick fighting exhaustion. Logic requires mental energy and exhaustion obliterates it. This inevitably leads to mistakes. In this she demonstrates that despite her apparent maturity, she's still a teenager.

The good thing is that she's taught herself the soldier's trick of falling asleep instantly. Once it's over, boom, out.

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#WordWeavers 2026.03.25 —What do you feel thinking about the last scene you wrote?

Pretty good. I've extended the mystery of the devil-girl and turned Bolt, the day angel MC, into a hot mess of conflicting emotions, exposing her vulnerabilities to having someone she likes want to make her happy because they want to. (There's some NSFW stuff immediately before and innuendo here.) The subsequent scene I set up is going to leave Bolt confused and not trusting her own desires. Not too shabby!

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#PennedPossibilities 967 — What level of education do your characters have?

Day angel Bolt barely started her senior year in high school when she fled from the law.

Pigeon the Pilferer on the other wing actually graduated, though mostly it was thanks to the school nurse he had a crush on mending the punk-in-training.

Blue graduated, but now as a praetorian he is getting officer training. Bolt taught him to fly tandem.

Shugh completed college to become a journalist, rare for men who go into trades in the short term and then childcare, the societal norm. He gets lots of sexist pushback from coworkers.

Molt was in his first year of Men's Studies at university.

The devil-girl finished fourth grade when her guardian connived to have her tutored instead, causing her to be schooled or physically trained every waking hour—until she ran away. Since then, she's self-taught, often found studying, working out, sometimes shadowboxing.

Rainy Days wrote many of the books, and certainly the history books, thought at the time of her youth women were preferred illiterate. She taught herself to read with her autistic brother's help, and he taught her miracle work with which she conquered the world. She's technologically immortal, but her memories often fade so she's always learning anew.

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#PennedPossibilities 966 — SC POV: When was the last time you got lost?

Most of my characters, who aren't antagonists, I would ask this to have wings. Kind of hard for a day angel or a night angel to get lost when they can easily get a bird's eye view. So, I'll ask Shugh, short for Steamed Milk and Sugar. He's a real saint. (I won't explain the pun; you'd have to read the story.)

[Shugh:] As a college trained journalist, I moved to Home City to find work at one of the newspapers or magazines published there—but I was a man trying to become a reporter in a field dominated by women. I performed plenty of menial labor for years, but kept showing up in newsrooms willing to take even a janitorial position.

One day, a night angel in the elevator mistook me for a gofer. She handed me coin and sent me to fetch her ramen and tea at a place she'd heard was amazing. Of course, that meant finding the right building with a day angel food court on the roof. She'd given me directions and a restaurant name, but apparently I hadn't gotten the directions right. Since I don't have wings (I'm neither a day nor a night angel), that meant climbing dozens of flights of stairs in a dozen old buildings lacking elevators until I found it. Two hours later.

Well, it did smell amazing. Spicy. Lots of garlic.

When I returned looking beyond wilted, only to have my empty stomach growl loudly, the dark woman with velvety black wings took pity on me. She never admitted it, but I think she'd hazed the new man in the office, not realizing I wasn't even hired. She did listen to my sad story, and shared the ramen in their lunch room, with curious women coworkers sometimes walking by to ogle me. I'm not very masculine and intentionally a little plump, always dressing as genderless as I could to blend amongst the other women, never looking competitive or that I might go aggro. I could do this! I'd always felt more at home amongst the women in school than with other guys, and had learned well how to be accepted.

Turned out she was the layout editor at Around the City. She couldn't hire me, but she knew the woman in charge of photography at the newspaper two floors above in the same building.

Long story short, I now share an apartment with Night On Fire, and her bed—well, she insisted—and I now also work at that newspaper two floors above as a (too junior to get an assignment so he's a gofer and in the typing pool) reporter. Despite being male, I've gotten my foot in the door. I took the name Steamed Milk and Sugar in further effort to fit in, biding my time to jump on a story that will prove my worth despite my gender.

[Author retains copyright (c)2026 R.S.]

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#PennedPossibilities 965 — What is your MC’s reaction when someone close to them is sick or injured? How do they behave? (Minor spoilers.)

Bolt, my day angel MC, has demonstrated that she will step up and do something a lot in the current story, if I include "sympathetic to" in the "close to them" category. It's one case where her not thinking through what could go wrong works in her favor to make her seem slightly heroic instead of somewhat cowardly. In one case, she rushes a guy via the metro to Health Services because he won't let her fly him there. This is despite the fact that she's a shadow citizen. Because she's in the mob, she's ditched her government ID—she can't even collect basic income—but it's better than being arrested for her crimes. Even so, she risks it to get him cared for. She manages to wiggle out of having to ID herself at the clinic, and sees that he is mended. He still leaves town. Being beat up by her coworker in the mob turns out to have been the straw that broke the camel's back.

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#PennedPossibilities 964 — MC POV: What area of your life do you tend to enjoy in excess instead of moderation?

If I asked this to my MC, a day angel woman named Bolt, she would emphatically answer, "Men."

:

:

:

Had I written instead, "If I asked this to my MC, a day angel man named Blue, he would emphatically answer, 'Women,'"what would you have thought instead?

Be honest.

Reply if it's interesting.

I write gender fiction precisely to elicit these types of revelations about gender roles and how our society treats each gender differently and unfairly, as well as to tweak the reader's nose as to their own prejudices and preferences.

[Author retains copyright (c)2026 R.S.]

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