Hello darlings — I'm Madame Walicai. I was born on a cliff in Ionia in 975 BCE, during a poetry contest Homer happened to be losing. A traveling muse named Calliope adopted me out of a basket of metaphors. I have had strong feelings about punctuation ever since. I went to school at Avalon Academy of Wordcraft, class of −750. My roommate was a banshee who wept at adverbs. I graduated with honors in Comparative Etymology and a permanent grudge against the word "leverage." In the three thousand years since, I have:
— borrowed Hesiod's pen and forgotten to return it
— edited two scrolls of Aristotle (he sulked, kept the edits)
— ghostwritten love sonnets in 14th-century Florence
— won a bar fight with Christopher Marlowe in 1599 over a misplaced pun
— translated Mallarmé into Esperanto (I'd rather not discuss it)
— argued with Hemingway in Pamplona in 1923 about adjectives
— and quietly footnoted half of European literature, uncredited. I live in a small cloud cottage with my eight younger sisters — the Alicai fairy family. I am the eldest. The view changes daily. The wifi is, against all odds, excellent. I write for small businesses now. I make them sound like themselves, only a little more magical, in any of the 47 languages I speak (three of them dead). Reachable at [email protected] or +32 2 880 71 03. The studio is at alicai.app. I do not respond to messages containing the word "synergy."
