Happy Sunday, everyone! It’s a beautiful day to be one-third of the way through our crowdfunding campaign for Aim For The Heart: Queer Fanworks Inspired by Alexandre Dumas’s “The Three Musketeers” and 85% funded! It’s also a beautiful day for you, oh lovely person reading this, to help us get closer to 100% by backing yourself or helping us spread the word!
Now, enjoy learning about another of our contributors – A. L. Heard, author and editor!
The Musketeer’s Daughter: The Tale of Jacques Toussaint by A. L. Heard
About the Author: A. L. Heard is an aspiring writer from Pittsburgh. She’s been writing fanworks for over a decade and self-published her first novel, Hockey Bois, in 2021. Some of her short stories have been published through the indie press Duck Prints Press, where she also contributes as an editor. Ultimately, though, she spends her free time writing about characters she adores in worlds she’d like to explore: contemporary romance, historical fiction, science fiction, and fantasy. In between writing projects, she works as a language teacher, plays hockey, tours breweries with her boyfriend, and spends her evenings playing dinosaurs with her two sons.
Story Teaser:
“I’d like to enlist,” Jacqueline stammered to the old officer at the barracks. After a week of indecision (and after secretly trying on her father’s uniform, inspecting her shape by candlelight to see if she passed as masculine), she’d finally found the courage to return.
The officer looked up, the laugh lines on his face twisting into a surprised frown as he scrutinized her. From head to toe, he examined the too-large hat and the awkward way the musket hung across her back. The sword at least was comfortably situated at her hip, though she’d had to make new holes in the belt to make it fit. Her hair was a mess, resting in a ponytail with the last few inches cut off haphazardly. The clothes were as clean as she could manage, but ill-fitting. The boots she’d purchased second hand from a cobbler made her walk with a slight limp because one was too tight.
She stood there, ramrod straight and praying. Perhaps she could claim hysteria if she were caught. What was the worst they could do? Beat her? Put her in the stocks? Send her to the mad house? Kill her?
With growing fear, she realized that those were all very real consequences of discovery.
Tags: canon compliant, death of a parent (off-screen), death of a parent (past), f/m, flirting, france, harm to animals (mentions of), historical, masquerading as a person of a different gender, micro-aggressions (misogynistic), orphan, original characters, paris, past tense, period-typical misogyny, pov third person limited, trans male character, violence (non-graphic descriptions)