I like the colour palette and the sun, but I feel the second image ends up growing too large and ends up conflicting with the text. It’s still cute, don’t get me wrong, I’m just good at noticing little details that end up bugging me.
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great advice I agree I put it too big. Not bad for first attempt though. Even if it’s me saying it , lol 
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Thank you for your support @postalspring 
The Patchworks project is my current focus, but I still have Emigre waiting for me.
I am glad to see you back and active.
It is fine that you have posted your excerpt today. I am happy you did. 
Edit:
Yes. the cast is stuck on the interviews still, and with this writer’s strike, I do not know when they will be rewritten. 
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So YOU’RE the one delaying the caravan departure. 
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Okay, today we’re going to be learning about the one thing that money cannot solve:
Public transport not being late.
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The colors remind me of cotton candy.
It’s a little too bright and cheerful for me, and the second picture is, by lack of a better word, too weird, but I like the first picture and the visual effects like the curving text and the fading in/out of the elements etc.
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I’m finally done writing my novel on another platform. It’s a slice-of-life polyamory (MFF) story with no smut.
With that, I can fully focus my energy on Falrika the Alchemist.
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I had no idea the excerpts on the 15th days was a thing. I’m a few days late, but shan’t be on the next one.
Excerpt from a extra story coming out next update
The murmurs inside of the congressional hall rang out as if they were in a small stadium with how much reverberation came from the echoing walls. People of all genders, races, ethnicities, they all only had one thing in common; they were all Gifted. All with varying different mutations that affected them to different extents. But still, no matter what, they were debilitated in some way or another.
Through the mumbling of many stood a single smaller sound; the clicking of a pen. A man sat at the guest speaker’s table dressed in a full charcoal gray suit, neatly pressed that morning, and wearing a burgundy colored tie. He wore glasses and his head was completely bald. The name on his guest speaker tag that faced congress right now was ‘Robert Cullen’.
His heart raced with anticipation that he was finally going to be able to speak his mind about the issues at hand, but also frustration that they needed speaking about at all. But none-the-less, he was passionate about this topic and these people needed a voice. Ever since The Pulse five years ago, countrywide health care has been a bigger problem than ever before, and Robert was going to express exactly why that is.
Suddenly, the speaker of the house tapped the gavel twice and the room fell silent, save for a couple of chairs scraping on floors and a cough here and there. Mostly, though, the sound of a single respirator machine that a man in a wheelchair had near the entrance to the room could be heard. The speaker addressed the room, “The guest may now articulate his or her voice in an appropriate, timely manner. He or she shall have ten minutes to speak, at which point time will run out and his or her microphone will be cut. Does the guest understand and accept these conditions?”
Robert leans in towards the microphone, “Yes I do, speaker.”
The speaker holds out his hand, motioning towards Robert, “You may proceed.”
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It is high time that I explain why I decided to join the more experienced writers on this bandwagon.
I also have anxiety to put my work “out there”. Oh the irony! I use this space as a place to air my thoughts, of what videos are going on in my head. I think some may find this controversial, but this is a good place to do so. Having an open, conducive and safe area to share our thoughts is very important. I also want to know what other things other people have in their heads.
Moreover, I wanted to have some company, to have the feeling that I’m not alone, that there are others out there also having videos of other stuff (western, fantasy, etc) in their heads too. Otherwise I’ll have all the things stuck inside my head with nowhere to vent it out. It helps me relax. It honestly is a form of escape for me.
Feedback is fine, but I want to see people building off one another’s ideas. I do not demand feedback, but make it such that “you’re fine in giving me, but you do not have to give me if you don’t want to or you’re not feeling comfortable in doing so”.
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I’d share an excerpt but… I don’t think anyone wants to read a critcally wounded interdimensional parasitic being devouring a rat. (No animals were harmed in the making of that passage)
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Don’t think like that! My therapist is showing me how damaging these feelings are!
Put a snippet that it is not too extreme and into rules with warning triggering labels. With that many people will read it I am sure of it.
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Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Just a warning for any animal lovers.
No animals were harmed in the writing of this scene
More pulses of life approach from the outside. These ones are smaller. Weaker. Following the pulses, the Shade finds rodents. Their noses furrow attracted to the aroma the humans’ waste attracts.
Their little legs carry their furry bodies past the obstacles the humans had set in their way. So persistent and eager, it’s easy to find one that separates from the rest. Dark void swirls around the rat, its form turning still. Was it fear it felt, or confusion at a form its mind couldn’t understand?
The darkness was replaced with the black fluid, and no sooner than that, the Shade struck before its prey could escape.
Even more noise.
The rat struggles against its grip. Its high-pitched squeals echo through the alleyway as it struggles against the innumerable tendrils restraining it. Its movements are frantic and desperate, biting into its restraints in a futile effort to break free before resorting to doing the same to its own appendages.
It’s harming itself to survive? This wouldn’t do. The tendrils strengthen their grip. The rat lets out an ear-piercing shriek until there’s a deafening snap as its bones are crushed. All it can do is let out weak little whimpers as the life was drained from its limp body.
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This comment comes very late lol, but still there might be something interesting to glean from a very basic overview of the history of English.
For the major European languages English has probably seen the most change and evolution throughout it’s existence, and that’s reflective of the region’s history. Post-Roman-withdrawal, English history is basically delineated into a series of invasions by “Vikings” and former Vikings, up until the early renaissance.
So you’ve got whatever hodgepodge of Celtic languages with a smaller population of Latin speakers that are already there getting inudated with the Germanic languages of groups like the Angles and Jutes following the arrival of a great number of immigrants from what’s now northern Germany. And then the political elite of England gets replaced following invasion by the Normans, a group of former “Vikings” who now speak French. Not to mention the linguistic influences provided by the Scandinavian and Danish settlers in the late 9th century. All of those influences forms something closer to what we know as English today.
You can see this very clearly by comparing Old English to “older” forms of other European languages. As an example, the Italian and French in the middle ages is much more similar to their modern forms than Old English is to what exists today. Old English(so we’re talking around 9-11th century AD) is basically almost entirely a Germanic language, and therefore largely illegible to a modern reader. By the time the of the 14th century, Middle English starts to become a thing, and that is at a stretch able to be somewhat sussed out by a modern reader. There are still some significant regional differences in dialects, which speaks to there having been many regional differences in the centuries before, but English is starting to coalesce. An example is what’s usually termed Old Scots, an evolved form of Northumbrian English thats not dissimilar to Middle English, becoming an accepted language at the courts of Scotland in and around the times of the Scottish Wars of Independence(so around the early to mid 14th century.) What’s happening is English starts to become the Lingua Franca of political elites around the 14th century, as opposed to French, hence Chaucer’s written works.
Following this period, there seems to be some rapid development. By the late 15th century, English really starts to come into it’s own and at least when spoken would’ve quite closely ressembled the English spoken in the 16th and 17th centuries, around Shakespeare’s time. An example would be Mallory’s La Mort D’Arthur.
For a multi-lingual person, I would definitely argue that English in it’s modern form does tend to seem less poetic, less evocative than many other languages. On a sentence to sentence basis, to be poetic, and evoke evocative images in the English language generally seems to require taking a more circuitous route, to create longer routes of travel through sentences to get to those moments of poetry. For a non-european contrast, sentences in Mandarin Chinese can be incredibly poetic and evocative, while remaining very brief. In English, being brief and punchy often comes across as also being direct and blunt.
Something to consider is that most “stories” written in a form of English from those times, would most likely be written in poetic verse(same as works in many other languages.) Even then, I would argue that Middle English as a language lends itself better poetically speaking when written in verse than modern English would. Passages written in Middle English, or even Old Scots, when spoken and performed(as they often would’ve been at the time) certainly “sound” more impactful, and also more powerful in that distinctly Germanic way. Obviously, only some of what I’ve spoken about is attributable to the language itself, but nevertheless I would argue that it takes a great amount of skill with the language to make English sound poetic, evocative and impactful, when compared to many other languages.
Point being, throughout it’s history English develops heavily through periods of injection by other contemporary languages. As a result, English becomes somewhat distinctly adaptable as a language, able to adopt new terms, form new words that carry meanings of their own and terms can evolve and change very naturally. The structure of English words and the grammatical structure of English sentences very easily allows for this adaptation. It is very easy to turn a noun to a verb or adjective, even a very foreign noun. For example, Shang Hai(the Anglicised name of a foreign city), can very easily become the verb forms Shanghai’ed or Shanghai’ing(meaning to kidnap) by adding the common suffix. The utility and adaptability of English makes it very useful, but can also make it seem blunt and clunky, and rather un-poetic.
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Another issue I’ve found in English as a non-native speaker is the fact, no matter how much dialects you add and how speech patterns vary, it all ends up sounding… neutral, very middle-of-the-road despite constant cannae and innits. It’s very hard for me to grasp style in English, even if I genuinely try to - I fear all comes out still neutral. In Russian there are a lot more ways to differentiate speakers through speech patterns, words and phrasing, and it generally just feels more naturally expressive and vibrant, more… helpful in creating a required visual image.
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I think writing primarily at my computer often gives me permission to do anything but write. I think this is good advice.
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Such is the siren song of the worldwide web at your fingertips.
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It is time for me to update May’s writing progress:
I have finished the rewrite of my common route for Patchworks, and am now prepping it for alpha distribution.
I am also revising and reworking my roadmap for the next milestone: character arc review.
Defining a character’s arc is something that I do before I actually start writing, but once I reach certain milestones (such as completing the common arc) I like to review them for all major and even some of the minor characters in the story.
I like working on things that are “under the hood” while I wait for feedback because I can be proactive with any problems I find before my readers send in their feedback issues.
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@Eiwynn Congratulations on your progress! And thank you for the welcome, to you and everyone else!
I’ve unfortunately not progressed as much as I hoped, landed a big work contract that’s interfering with my writing, lol. But I’ve still been working at it an hour or even just a few minutes every day, refining and adding words when I can.
More importantly, I’m really enjoying it. It’s fun! And that makes me so happy.
Do you guys enjoy the process too? I know it can feel like a slog sometimes too, but right now it’s my favourite entertainment.
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For me, it depends on how it’s all going.
If I’m struggling, then writing is a garbage hobby and I hate it.
If I’ve just hit one of my milestones, it’s the most fun I’ve ever had.
Sort of like climbing a (small) mountain, the challenge is part of it but if you go interview somebody halfway through dragging themselves up, you probably won’t get a positive response.
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