Another day, another promo for our Kickstarter campaign for Aim For The Heart: Queer Fanworks Inspired by Alexandre Dumas’s “The Three Musketeers”! Today we’re introducing Xianyu Zhou, who wrote this biography before they published three erotica stories with us, lol.
Fated Encounter Challenge by Xianyu Zhou
About the Author: Xianyu Zhou is a translator and aspiring garment and plushie cloning specialist hailing from a coastal city in the tropics. Despite staying a 20-minute drive away from the nearest beach, they have yet to visited one, preferring to dwell in their darkened room luminated by a table lamp and ever-shifting RGB of a CPU fan. They have the tendency to accidentally wander into new and exciting forays such as joining Duck Prints Press (and enjoying it!), learning to sew (stitching and unstitching the same part of a “coaster” for the nth time) and working on their language skills (watching shows to scruntinize take notes about how their subtitles are written).
Xianyu’s contribution to the anthology is their first publication, and they have reportedly made a party hat for their computer to celebrate the occasion.
Story Teaser:
Right. I have a plan, she reminded herself as she tried to wriggle her way out of the flow of bodies.
Dottie’s plan: Attempt and complete the 20th Street Fated Encounter Challenge.
The challenge was deceptively simple: visit three shops in succession and buy something from each of them, then sit in front of the fountain at the end of the street. Supposedly, she would then meet her “fated one.”
Dottie wasn’t actually interested in meeting her “fated one.” She’d never been interested in romance much; she just liked the idea of it, fascinated by its effect on people. What she really wanted was to debunk the urban legend around this challenge.
Tags: alternate universe, anti-soulmates, aromantic, character has a different gender than in the source material, coffeeshop setting, customer service representative, f/f/m/nb, florist setting, games and puzzles, meet awkward, modern, past tense, pov third person limited, pre-relationship