Feel better soon!
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It feels weird doing this… I normally reply to all the other posts before I speak, but today I just… I dunno, I couldn’t get my AuDHD brain to read through everything. So… sorry. I feel like I’ve let you all down for not responding to any of your messages.
That said, This is my snippet:
I am STILL working on this section. It’s been months, and I cannot seem to get past this section. TAT To be fair, I don’t have a lot of time to spend on this, with all of my other things going on… But I’m trying. I promise.
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You’re not letting anyone down by contributing to your capacity. Nobody’s holding you to a standard or a quota of replying to other people. There’s nothing to apologise for 
Unrelated. Does uhhh anyone have general advice about writing/planning intimate scenes? (or good past threads to check out) The next chapter of my game is going to have the first opportunity for a hookup and I suspect I’m gonna be a bit lost at sea.
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Shit, I missed the date! I did write, and soon I’ll write even more!
it's hard to take something out of context for a showcase, but eh
The air becomes heavy. Each breath poisons your throat, each breath spears it with horrible heat - soon it feels like insects are crawling down your throat, that sand itself wants to swallow you whole, all to sate its hunger.
It hates you, as it hates all with sentience.
But you are not.
A human hand slams into the wood, making no sound - soon it cowers itself with feathers that glisten like metal. A beak instead of a nose. There are things now, in the light, that make the colours strange.
It’s empty here.
But for a few long, horrible seconds you become one with the desert.
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If you have access to them, Barb’s Blood Moon and most games by CC Hill have pretty good scenes of that nature.
Of course, you always have the fade-to-black option if you’re not comfortable writing… brought-to-light versions.
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Samurai of Hyuga has pretty detailed scenes in the later books. For me it’s a question of what the scene would do and how it’ll serve the story. It gets pretty boring to write about pistil getting into… whatever the English word for that is, so I focus on feelings and overall mood. Some snappy quick descriptions for a couple having a night without time, but with feelings. Something slower and more clumsy for the first time. It’s generally just the… sensation and feeling that make or break a scene for me, and it’s usually rare for me to write dialogues for it.
Granted, I have bad memories from constant “good boy / girl, you’re all leaking”, “spread yourself wide for me” and all that jazz.
It was a common thing in modern romance stuff I’ve read. Also occasionally met it in Choices.
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Dafuq? O_o
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Have an extra snippet because I'm so sick of it by now I can't stare at it anymore.
Your group, Spitz at the helm, climbs to a nearby roof to get a better stock of the situation and check in with the sniper stationed there. You’re having some difficulty getting Afterthought up the ladder without removing his handcuffs, but you can’t really leave him on the street level either, and finally you succeed.
“I’m telling you,” you hear the sniper saying when you climb up, “there’s nothing I can do!”
You pull Afterthought up to the roof and regroup with Spitz and the rest of the Homeguard personnel there.
“I called dispatch,” Spitz says, walking to a better vantage point and crouching there. You follow; it’s the best way to not get hit. “But they already knew.”
“Did they give any instructions?” you ask.
“Try not to die.”
It’s a chaos. Giant neon yellow tentacles thrash down the streets, crashing everything they hit. Civilians are running the other way, and while the evacuation is underway, it clearly still requires more time. Airships are haphazardly moored to nearby rooftops and letting people out. And the fight is going on against the abomination, with everyone capable pitching in: the whole Skyguard unit is there, of course, but you can also see a bunch of villains, vigilantes, and powered civilians doing what they can, although most of them are helping the evacuation and keeping people safe. NaN is hitting the creature’s head with some kind of a ray gun, which seems to only make it annoyed; you catch a sight of a back-alley doctor holding a collapsing building together with a force field.
“Hey!” the sniper yells.
You turn, attention back at the rooftop, just in time to see Afterthought and the sniper fighting over the weapon of the latter. Handcuffs clang to the roof, and Afterhought manages to get the upper hand at the tug-of-war, conking the sniper at the head with the butt of his own rifle.
The guards, unsure of what to do but also unwilling to escalate, point their weapons at the thief, but he ignores them, looks over the sniper rifle, and, harrumphing unsatisfied, throws himself down on his stomach and supports the weapon against the parapet at the roof’s edge.
“This,” Spitz says, kneeling on the concrete to check on the Homeguard sniper, “is officially getting ridiculous.”
“Uplinking with the targ— oh no you don’t,” Afterthought mutters, looks through the scope, adjusts it, looks through it again, and offhandedly kicks away the guard trying to catch him from behind. “Do you mind?” I’m trying to focus here."
The sniper groans, and Spitz helps him to a sitting position.
Afterthought pulls the trigger, lets out the breath he was holding, gets up and, despite all the handguns trained on him, walks calmly across the roof and gives the rifle back to the sniper. “Sorry about that.”
You sweep over the fighting scene at the crossroads, but can’t see any difference. The sniper takes the rifle, looking extremely confused; Afterthought gets promptly cuffed again for his trouble.
The abomination shrieks and topples over, taking a couple of buildings with it, face suddenly full of warded zeppelin.
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Late to the party, but that’s because I haven’t been on the forums or writing choicescript-based work since October! How time flies when you’re bogged down with university. Very happy to be back.
I have literally today gotten back to writing Matrix Drowning, my techno-horror-dark academia game that I’m billing as The Secret History meets Bandersnatch. Opening the editor again after so long was a little intimidating, but I was pleasantly surprised to find my writing has improved in the time I’ve been away. I’m scrapping the 9.5k that I had before and starting again, hoping to write about 15k of first draft material this month.
A Wee Snippet:
Prolouge - January
A chill wind drifts across the surface of Loch Fleet, stirs up choppy little waves across a surface that mirrors the vast, open sky and the dark clouds that swirl across the vault of heaven like self-similar fractals, forever repeating. It is not this wind nor dark landscape that sends a sickening chill through your bones, however; it is Lachlan’s maniacal laughter, shrill and maddening.
He shakes as he stares at the hand, a waxy, stripped back piece of flesh that rests on the rocky shore. On its finger sits Simon’s signet ring. There can be no question: Simon Harcourt is dead.
Waves lap at the shore.
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I adore how sensory this is @vera! I really feel like I’m there, feel that sort of claustrophobia and dread.
@LiliArch I really like your style, it’s snappy and pulls the reader along. Nice work!
@lliiraanna This is so spooky, the description of the body is fantastic.
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Typo. Sorry, I’ve done a bunch of informal line-editing over the weekend, so my brain is still wired to find stuff like this. 
Just played Meteoric and managed to find a number of typos too.
That’s not proof that Simon Harcourt is dead, if it’s a single hand. For all we know, a one-armed man could be alive. 
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Nice catch, ty!
Hrm, perhaps I will attach said hand to the rest of a body. I liked it as an image more than a “clue” (for lack of a better work).
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Speaking of body parts, I was doing some character redesign and now I’m stuck with the image of MC searching some medical supplies and stumbling into a medicine cabinet full of prosthetic eyes in jars.
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For many years, the house sustained herself on bats. They have roosted up in the rafters. Bats make uncomfortable houseguests: they don’t clean up after themselves, they keep unusual hours, and they hibernate elsewhere during the cold winter months. But if it weren’t for the bats, the house would have long ago died of loneliness.
She has given every bat a name. You’ll never know their names.
it’s fricken bats
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Hey, it’s Haunting of Bly Manor!
Is that excerpt from an upcoming project of yours?
And I’ll have you know bats are amazing houseguests, as they keep down the population of both insects and criminals (who are a cowardly and superstitious lot).
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I just listened to the 3-hour two-part Ologies special on Chiropterology, truly amazing animals. Completely worth it for my two lines in which I mention bats.
This is actually for A Dance with the Devil – there’s some weird stuff going on with the main “hub” level, the lighthouse. Meant to be ambiguous how much is metaphor and how much is legitimately supernatural.
Figure if the player’s gonna spend so much time in one place it oughtta be an interesting place. Settings should be characters in a story and I figured I’d make it literal.
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I love Ologies, bats, and your evocative house description! I hope A Dance with the Devil is going well - the lighthouse sounds fascinating.
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Thanks! Here’s perhaps one of the most iconic pieces of writing of all time, the opening passage from The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson:
No living organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
And self-indulgently, my introduction to the lighthouse in DwD:
Every living thing, natural and supernatural alike, must dream.
A lighthouse, like any house, is a living thing. Her wooden slats breathe. Her stone pushes against the wind. Deep within the cliffs, her basements gurgle.
The detritus of a former life surrounds her. Stables with no horses, fields with no crops. Books rotting in her library. Tools rusting in her workshop. A single forgotten apple in her kitchen has grown into the roots of a tree, slowly worming its way into a wall to break free into the sun. The lighthouse is not yet a corpse, but she is bloating.
She remains like this, in a state of not-quite-dead, while every night she sleeps in darkness. In this sleep, between life and death, she dreams.
She is kept alive by dreams of light.
I’m really not subtle with the influences there.
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Don’t worry about it. For one of the crucial scenes of my story, I basically stole the entirety of
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream and ran with it. No one called me out on it… yet.
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What did you think of Mike Flanagan’s “adaptation”?
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