Bits and bobs. Fun fact; my Open Office spell-checker doesn't recognise the word "popsicle".

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They get along beautifully, don't they? :P

Snips of the pants-dropping kind. Perfectly worksafe, I promise.

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More TWWD! Because I've finally wrapped up the third chapter, and it's Ivan's POV again and it's kind of funny and it's kind of wrapping-things-up and it's kind of, well, there.

.... Anyway.

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Yes. Seriously.

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This is slightly ruined by the fact that I can't reproduce the awesome fonts that the story-title and chapter-title is written in - it's gritty and type-writerly and very survival-horror-ish.

By popular demand - a TWWD snip!

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Ivan - coping mechanism: relentless focus on practicalities.
Sorelia - coping mechanism: cracking somewhat inappropriate jokes.

TWWD again.

( Sorelia meets Ivan, finally. )



Yes, that is Ivan cursing in Russian. To be specific, it means "damn". Russian is a very long-winded language.



( And here's a bit of chapter two... )



Ivan is the close-mouthed sort, but at least a part of his tacit behaviour is due to the fact that he isn't entirely confident about his English skills. Therefore (and I hope this shows up later, when I post Ivan-POV snips) he spends a lot more time thinking than he does talking. No rambling internal monologues, but still.

Sorelia is a Southern girl, and I'm trying to get that through in her speech patterns without falling entirely into caricature. I usually write her dialogue and italicised thoughts with a tab open on Wiki's article on Southern dialects, trying to keep in mind grammatical quirks and words typical of the dialect. Since she's from Somewhere-Imaginary, Georgia, I can't exactly settle on a specific regional dialect, but I'm doing my best.

One day I woke up and decided I wanted to do something crazy with my writing. So I made up an off-the-wall urban-fantasy-survival-horror thing which I've dubbed The Night The World Went Dark (or TWWD for short, because it'd be an awkward acronym otherwise.). I've only written a little bit so far, but I thought I'd put some snips up.

How my main characters are different when dealing with dead bodies:

( Sorelia goes first. Warning, this snip contains gore. )


And....

( Ivan goes second. Warning, this snip contains even more gore. )

I daydream. A lot. However, it's almost never about me personally - I daydream about my characters, writing out stories in my head that I'll never commit to paper, simply because they're frequently quite dead-end, and only made up to keep me distracted while I'm waiting for something else to happen.

In essence, I tell my own bedtime stories. And no, that is not quite as cracked up as it sounds; my mind takes a long time to slow down enough to fall asleep - I need to shed the weight of everything that's been running through my head over the day; rid myself, perhaps, of something I've seen or heard of read that makes me uneasy (yes, I get nightmares much too easily - I blame my overactive imagination) - and so to keep my mind from running haywire just as I'm trying to fall asleep, I tell myself stories. (Also, in the shower, because my hair takes a long time to wash :P.)

Frequently, these stories are fanfiction, because I don't write it any more and because picking up someone else's characters and universe keeps me from thinking too much about the whole thing. Sometimes, though, I let my own characters out to play - and lately, I've been telling myself a story involving my HoD-verse characters, but that's set in the world of Final Fantasy IX (what can I say? I like steampunk and I know that game like the back of my hand). In it, the main POV holder is my old beloved guinea pig, Shanka, and as I was mentally stepping through a scene with him, I realised that maybe I should write this down - with the school application and Morphic and everything, I've rarely had the time to write prose at all since January.

It's a little awkward from lack of practise, and because I spent some time cutting out the FFIX references so that it could stand on its own, it might feel a little stunted.

( Beware! Here there be snippery. )