Following Lori-Lyn and Magpie Girl's leads:




My alter egos and other lives?

1. Secretary to the commander of the British Watch, as documented in Jo Walton's Half a Crown (yes, really! the character's named after me. :-) )

2. A woman who cheerfully and carelessly dumped a bucket of slop on top of Charles Dickens as he walked underneath her window. (This is mainly to avenge my husband's great-grandfather, whose manuscript Dickens sneered at in passing in some letter or other.)

3. An apothecary (I'm descended from a bunch of 'em. My best memories of Taiwan include "helping" my now-dead aunt and uncle in the family's now-shuttered centuries-old shop (I was eight, so this mostly involved pestling, playing with herbal doughs, and imitating my aunt when she paid her respects to the household shrine)

4. Sherlock Holmes's sister, whom Watson considerately left out of the chronicles for reasons of privacy and safety. (My "nom" in the local scion is "no sister of his," taken from "The Copper Beeches." Yes, I am a colossal nerd.)

5. A cantor.

6. A Torah scroll. Especially on Simchat Torah.

7. Sous-chef at a bistro in Aix-en-Provence with a sideline in codebreaking.

8. A drowsy cat on top of a stack of physics books.