#also this isn’t beta read jsyk

[queer-in-a-cornfield]

On this last day of 2023, I come bearing gifts! @goldiejake11, I am your secret Santa! @duckblrsecretsanta2023

Scrooge and Goldie aren’t my strong suit, but I did my best and had some fun with it! Hope you enjoy! Without further ado,

Break-ins and Lock-ins and Plot Twists, Oh my! (1288 words)

Goldie stands on the grounds of McDuck Manor one early fall morning, the sun’s light only just starting to peek over the horizon, and pulls out her phone to double check where she needs to go.

Louie had called her a few days earlier with a scheme, and asked if she’d be in town that day. She would, and plans were made to meet up early that morning and be just a little richer by the end of the day.

Sharpie

I’ll be waiting upstairs in the manor

Fifth window to the right of the

main door if you want to get in that

way

She didn’t quite get why Louie insisted on waiting inside, but she did always get a kick out of breaking into ol’ Scroogie’s house (as did her bank account), so she didn’t mind.

She climbs a tree which, conveniently for her, was right next to the window she was breaking into and gets into position so she could reach the window without any of the branches breaking.

Next, she starts to pry the window open with a small wedge. As she expects, it goes quite quickly, and she slips inside.

“You’d think he’d get more secure windows, as paranoid as he gets. He must just like making it easier for me!”

She scans the room for anything valuable she could snag, momentarily forgetting about Louie. As she pockets a little gold stautette she remembers why she’s here and realizes that Louie wasn’t where he said he’d be.

She whips out her phone again and begins typing to ask Louie “where the hell he was” but is interrupted when the door opens.

“Scroogie?!”

“Goldie?! What in the blazes are ye doing in me house at 5:30 in the morning?”

“Sharpie told me to be here!”

Suddenly the door slams shut behind the pair and the lock clicks.

“Yes, ‘Sharpie’ did say that, but it was-“ Louie starts to say from the other side of the door before being interrupted by Dewey.

“It was a lie! You two need to confess your feelings!”

Scrooge sighs and rubs the bridge of his nose.

“Huey, are ye there too?”

No response comes from the other side of the door other than shuffling feet and the creaking floor.

“Boys, whose idea was this?” Scrooge tries again.

The triplets all overlap with each other’s names and Scrooge and Goldie both roll their eyes.

“Ya think they got the girl in on this too?” Goldie wonders.

“Aye, Webby! They probably did, those pernicious pranksters,” Scrooge says.

Suddenly the window Goldie snuck in through clicks shut with a blue glow, and Webby and Lena float up on the other side of the window.

“Hi, Dad!” Webby exclaims, waving.

“Have fun in there, oldies!” Lena snarks before the other trio slowly falls back down to the ground.

Both adults pause momentarily before Goldie speaks up.

“First, how dare that girl call me old?! And second, who on earth is that and why is she skilled a magician?!”

“Well, she called ye old because ye are old-“

“You say as if you aren’t older.”

“We’re basically the same age an’ ye know it!”

“Whatever you say, old man.”

The petty squabble is suddenly interrupted by a chorus of Ooohs from the other side of the door.

“Boys!” Scrooge and Goldie shout in unison.

Scrooge sighs again before continuing.

“ANYways, you’ve broken into me house enough times in the last couple years to know who Lena is, I know ye have.” He adds “Unless your memory’s starting to slip,” under his breath.

“Or yours,” Goldie teases back.

Scrooge laughs, “All these years and you’re still ‘killing my vibe, man.’”

“All those years and you still let me kill it.”

Suddenly they hear a faint beep of a phone camera stopping taking video.

“Llewellyn… whatever your middle name is Duck, I swear ta all the gods I know, if ye were just recording that conversation!”

Louie and Dewey laugh and crack the door open to show them a video. Louie presses play and…

The sound plays again.

“Tricked ya!” he says, laughing again. “I didn’t- no, I don’t want- go away, ads!” Louie struggles with his phone for a moment, trying to make it stop playing ads at him and ruining his genius prank.” Ugh, finally. Anyways, I didn’t actually record anything.”

Scrooge tries to grab the door, but it closes again, just fast enough to keep him inside. | But try as he might, the door wouldn’t budge.

————————————————————————

Scrooge grumbles and lets go of the doorknob once again, still having no luck escaping.

“Scroogie, just face it already, we can’t get out of here like that,” Goldie sighs, watching him from the center of the room. “We saw the window get magically reinforced and I can only assume the door is too. I know you wouldn’t dare to actually spend your money and buy stronger doorknobs.”

“How do you propose we get out of here then?” Scrooge asks, admitting defeat.

His choice of words sparks an idea in Goldie’s mind, and a sly, proud smile appears on her face.

“I propose that we give the kids what they want- if they hear a confession of feelings, then they’ll be happy and we can go on with our lives as though this never happened.” Goldie explains.

“Ah, okay,” Scrooge says. “Put on a little lovey-dovey act, trick the kids, and get you out of my house. Got it.”

“We’ll have to be careful to sound as genuine as possible though, I wouldn’t be surprised if Sharpie thought of us doing this,” Goldie warns.

“Bah, don’t worry about that! If anything, I can act better than ye,” Scrooge gloats, donning a flirtatious smirk- to help warm up his acting, of course.

“Sure you can,” Goldie teases back. “Now, remind me which one of us had to pretend to flirt with Rockerduck back in Gumption?”

“Ah could’ve done that just as well as you if it would’ve worked, an’ ye know it!”

“Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

“Our escapades havenae a bit of sway over my slee-“

Suddenly, the door creaks open, stopping the pair’s squabble in its tracks.

“I felt guilty about helping to basically hold you guys hostage, so I waited for Dewey and Louie to leave and convinced Lena she could leave the door unenforced,” Huey begins to anxiously rattle off. “Also being stuck in an empty room is not the optimal condition for love confessions, it doesn’t meet hardly any of the JWG’s criteria- uh, but anyways, you guys can go.”

The adults stare blankly at Huey for a moment, processing the boy’s fast-paced speech before coming back to their senses.

“Eh, thank ye, Huey,” Scrooge replies. Then he turns to Goldie.

“Ye can leave me house now,” he says, gesturing to the nearest exit.

Goldie briefly follows Scrooge’s direction before turning into the next room and breaking the lock on that window. As she begins to climb out and into the same tree she entered with, she exclaims, “Bye, Scroogie! See you around!”

Scrooge rolls his eyes and smiles, before replying, “If ye’d like to repay me for the broken window locks, ye could return that statuette yer tryin’ ta steal.”

“Agh, I almost got away with it!” She groans as she hands the bauble over.

“Ye try to steal something every time ye visit, Ah knew there had ta be somethin’,” Scrooge retorts. A moment of silence passes before Scrooge sighs and says “Bye, Goldie.”

“Bye, Scroogie.”

They kiss just before Goldie jumps and Scrooge turns to leave, neither realizing they had unintentionally given the kids exactly what they had wanted out of this whole situation until several minutes later.

[tepre]

Do you have any advice on finishing a story & having the courage of posting it? I don't mean to bother but idk why you're the first author I thought of.

OH EXCELLENT QUESTION!! Ok disclaimer, this answer won’t be groundbreaking, but all the same. 

In literary theory there’s usually a hardline distinction between the AUTHOR and the IMPLIED NARRATOR. The idea behind that is that the author is a real person and we can’t say anything about them or their motivations or thoughts as long as they’re not in the room. The IMPLIED NARRATOR is the imaginary character/voice who’s telling you the story. When I write, ‘Draco’s walk was a brisk, cold line that cut quickly across the room’, there’s the me who writes it, sitting in bed eating soggy oats and trying not to think about how I need to fold the wash already, and then there’s the voice YOU hear/imagine, how they’re a disembodied entity, with a clipped accent, and a purpose, and is probably NEVER distracted by anything and isn’t sitting in bed and CERTAINLY not eating soggy oats. 

It’s a narrator. The voice in an audio book. And it’s this narrator voice that throws us the fuck off, as readers who are also writers, because what we don’t hear in that narration is the CACOPHONY of layered voices that made a sentence what it is: all the literature the writer has read to inspire them, the conversations they’ve had that inspired them, the voices of friends or cheerleaders or betas or editors going over and over and over, “maybe add--?” “better delete--” “perhaps rephrase the--” 

So my advice is: remember that writing is not a solitary sport, and that there is no fixed timeline for any length of story to be finished. Some authors write entire manuscripts in a week (this does not mean they’re good), but also some of the best short stories I’ve read I know took over 10 years to get right. The book/fic you read is like watching a play: everyone in the audience understands the stage is a DISPLAY of work, and that none of the players wandered onto stage at random and went ‘haha what’s this anyway here’s a monologue :)’. I would say, FOR ME, the most valuable thing I learned as a writer was to let other people in. Usually I set a word-limit in that: once I hit 10K, someone else will get to read it (or something). Make sure you let this person know what you’re looking for: just excitement, or also content-related questions, or no questions at all, etc. This isn’t editorial yet. This is just LETTING someone sit with you. 

For me, this helps a lot in the process of finishing. Having someone else care about The Thing. On a more practical note: if it’s the getting-words-on-paper part that’s the issue, then my go-to trick is setting VERY LOW daily word counts. 150 words a day, every day. Or 250. Or 50. It doesn’t matter. The first few days you’ll just do the 150 you’ve set for yourself and that’d be that. And then eventually you’ll go over that limit, and then suddenly you’ll go WAY over, or you’ll finish the thing, or something. Or you’ll just 150-a-day your way until the finish line. 

If habitual hyper-editing of what you’ve written so far is your main problem, then try this: copy paste the last sentence into a new document, and continue writing from there. Then you don’t have to open the old document every time and you won’t be tempted to edit before you finish. 

NOW, as for the posting: once you’ve finished, pick a day. If it’s a short thing, of COURSE you can post it on the same day, but in terms of finding the courage?? Picking a day in the near future helps for me. Then I prepare everything, I have my draft ready, I’ve re-done the summary a million times, re-written the tags even more, I have my notes, my formatted text, all of it. And then I just wait for the day and the time I’ve decided and all there’s left is to just click post. Tell someone you’re gonna do this. Have them hold your hand. 

Literally every single author you’ve read and enjoyed has shat bricks over the thing they’re about to post/their novel. I think every single one of my works is THE WORST THING I’VE EVER PRODUCED the moment I post it. And then, as comments come in, if they’re positive, I think everyone is lying. When they’re not, I’m like, I KNEW IT. And then that passes. Usually, when the anxiety is Extra, I try to make everything smaller than it feels in that moment: if ONE of my friends like it, then it’s a success. If ONE person I don’t know yet likes it, even better!! If NO ONE likes it, then that’s also a sort of success, because I put it out there, and that’s hard for me, so yeah. Like that! Rather than try and recreate an entire literary genre in a fic, I try to break it down to the things that matter to me: my friends, my creative education, my ability to get better. 

HOPE THIS HELPS, FRIEND!! ALSO JSYK, I EDITED THIS POST LIKE 300 TIMES SO YEAH IT NEVER ENDS HAHA

[ao3feed-ladynoir]

The Great Kwami Heist of 2021

The Great Kwami Heist of 2021 by cheesecakesandlovesquares

myprincess has renamed classgroupchat> The-Great-Kwami-Heist-Of-2021

myprincess: jsyk all of u were kwami holders at least once so feel free to reveal ur identities to each other

myprincess: oh and also lila is tigress :) 

myprincess has renamed lilarossli>starsandSTRIPES4evah

myprincess has logged off

Words: 4066, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Series: Part 4 of that in black ink my love may still shine bright

Fandoms: Miraculous Ladybug

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Categories: F/M

Characters: Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir, Juleka Couffaine, Rose Lavillant, Max Kanté, Lê Chiến Kim, Kagami Tsurugi, Luka Couffaine, Mylène Haprèle, Ivan Bruel, Chloé Bourgeois, Nathaniel Kurtzberg, Alya Césaire, Nino Lahiffe, Marc Anciel, Sabrina Raincomprix, hawkmoth (mentioned), Plagg

Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Marinete & Everyone, Adrien & Everyone, Minor or Background Relationship(s)

Additional Tags: Social Media, Twitter, Tumblr, Social Media AU, POV Outsider, Post Reveal, Post-Reveal Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Established Relationship, Interviews, Oneshot, mentions of trials, Lila Redemption, but lila isn't really in this fic, deals with the aftermath, the fallout from everyone's perspective, world knows, idk how to tag this, Kissing, Fluff, Angst, But only a dash, Hurt/Comfort, Twitter AU, Tumblr AU, why should u read this fic u ask?, bc chat noir has a secret ladybug stan account on tumblr that's why, LadyNoir - Freeform, ladrien, Marichat, Adrinette, adrienette - Freeform, minor queer themes, Not Beta Read, this fic is also a mess(TM), this fic is gonna get no comments bc it's too fuckin confusing, I'm Sorry, mentions of adrichat, cuz that was a thing a hot minute ago, Adrichat

Read Here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23938138