I bet if I asked you to take a wild guess who the oldest character in Low Dawn is, you wouldn't pick Maunat, but it's true: she might be the second-youngest character on the page, but she's the cast member who's been with me the longest. She was born on a night shift in the ER in 2011, when I was taking care of a young person who was Going Through Some Shit, including but far from limited to Gender and Sexuality Shit. She (at least, she went by she at the time) found it deeply, profoundly meaningful that so many ER nurses were women with short hair. Which seems like a low GNC bar to clear, in 2011! But there it was. I found myself thinking about a 'girl prince' of sorts, someone who swam against the current regarding her gender role without necessarily wanting to do anything about her gender identity. Which, again, there are many characters like that... but this was the character who rode the wave of that interaction, knocked on my brain-door, moved in, was joined in short order by her cute femme boyfriend, and never left, so I guess it's fair to say this one is mine.

I guess if I had to sum up Maunat and Bhimmi, I would call them my love letter to kids who've been told they would "mAkE mOrE sEnSe" if they were trans or in some other way queer. Even if that turns out to be true*, what a thing to tell a young person! That the point of who they are is to be easy for other people to understand? To fit neatly into the paradigms of others? What the fuck! Telling every feminine person that they must be a woman and/or fuck men, and every masculine person that they must be a man and/or fuck women, is not the progressive take you think it is.

*I guess, technically, it did turn out to be true for Maunat and Bhimmi: based on their histories they both qualify as bisexual, so now I also get to feel fighty about the fact that even as a cis woman and cis man becoming a monogamous married babymaking couple, they are both still bisexual (and would be members of the queer community if they were real people who existed on Earth in 2023, as opposed to fictional exoplanetary settlers in the 4200s whose main connection to Old Earth is history books).

Ironically, they finally made it onto the page in a novel too explicit to ever, ever find its way to someone as young as the person who first inspired their creation. Whoops! And I feel so protective and parental towards them that they only made it onto the page under the sheltering wings of their surrogate uncle(s). (Yes, I can feel parental towards fictional characters AND write them getting their junk out early and often. All my fanfic OTPs are my sons, including the men twice or twenty times my age. I don't make the rules.) But I'm choosing to roll with the principle that written is better than unwritten. They deserve to be known and enjoyed by more people than me, even if 'more people' is (*checks sales*)... four more people XD

With the Amazon link live, I'd say Low Dawn is now fully launched, to the tiniest amount of fanfare imaginable on two very private Discord servers XD but hey! I wrote and published a whole-ass book! It was actually a ton of fun and I'm hard at work on the next one! Maybe someday there will be enough of them to be worth spending a few bucks to promote them for real!