Portfolio Sampler
Below is a selection of works encompassing various forms of writing and creative development. In order, they are examples of: screenwriting (animation); game writing and narrative design; comics; and prose.
Screenwriting (Animation)
Working Title: Wishflies (approximately 12-minutes)
Synopsis: Through the use of her half-brother’s magic insects, a teenage girl seeks to bring her birth mother back from the dead.
My goal in this excerpt is to demonstrate how I can introduce the main characters and illustrate their relationship at the beginning of the story. This excerpt ends just after the inciting incident.
Game Writing & Narrative Design
Below is an excerpt from my ttrpg supplement, “Divining Heroes.” Originally designed for Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons but revised to be usable with other ttrpg systems, it explains a method of using tarot cards to determine ability scores during character creation. Appendix A pertains more to the designed mechanics, as it contains the tables with bonuses granted from each tarot card. Appendix B leans towards narrative design as it frames the supplement more into a tarot reading of sorts, prompting the Game Master to ask the player questions about their character before they draw a card.
Comics
A one-page comic adaption of a prose poem I wrote in 2023 about love and relationships. Here I experimented with flow and vertical panel layouts with a horizontal gutter across the center to still facilitate the movement of the reader’s eye going from left to right.
Prose
An excerpt from my speculative fiction novel The City is Glass and Steel. The first 25,000 words were completed as my final project for the MSt in Creative Writing course at the University of Oxford.
The story is set in a society split in two: New City, a shining utopia of green hive-rises that stands above City B (formerly Toronto), the underbelly hiding refuse and bloated with warehouses. Hal (28) is a lower class citizen in New City and dreams of acting for the Ads that pervade and gatekeep everyday life despite his distaste for their current purpose of selling a shallow and polyphonic lifestyle. “Familiars” are smartphones on steroids, required for participating in society.
This excerpt follows Hal as he accompanies his brother, Noah (37), a police captain, on a call.
Approaching the hive-rise, Hal could have easily mistaken it for his own. It is more or less the same height, about forty stories, same hexagonal cell structure, same perforation, networks of ventilation tunnels that also serve as traffic alleviators for drones. The staggered placement of each row of units is what gives the hive-rise its patented name and design. A honeycomb. There is a debate as to whether the architects and engineers settled on the honeycomb design as a tribute to the bees which had been on the brink of extinction, or if it was just another way for New City to further divide and differentiate itself from City B. But Hal knows the truth; his father was on the team of architects that designed the building, and his mother was one of the engineers that helped raise it into the air; he knows that more than either theory, the hive-rise was an exercise in novelty.He remembers his father explaining to him when he was young that the unorthodox shape meant that the interior of each unit could be split into three parts: the centre serving as the main floor with the interiors of the upper and lower triangular sections squared off to become an attic and a basement respectively, giving the impression that one could still have the traditional house experience without worrying about being able to afford one (single houses have become exceedingly rare and expensive; a likewise endangered species).There had been talk of installing wind turbines in the tunnels so that the hive-rise could produce more of its own power, but the growing necessity for more drone flight paths outweighed and smothered the idea and hive-rises would have to make do with the solar panels on their green roofs.Noah takes the lead and hovers his familiar over the door lock. It clicks open. An officer’s familiar is essentially a skeleton key.