Writing Samples

About: The Singer of Ice is queer romantasy novel written as a personal project in 2012. The excerpt is from early on in the story, as the title character Ahmin watches the princess, his half-sister, perform the ritual known as "Singing the Ice."

About: The Mother of the Mountain is a queer romantasy novel written as a personal project in 2023. The excerpt is from a scene where the two lead characters, 19-year-olds Iah and Sol, are running away from a harsh situation, only to be discovered by a third, younger character. The trio are ambushed by a native dragon-like beast, and Iah must use magic to heal Sol before he succumbs to poison.

About: From the game Wintermoor Tactics Club, which takes place in a private boarding school in the 80's and stars Alicia, a young girl trying to defend her tabletop games club from extinction. This is an excerpt from the spreadsheet of dialogue that accompanies NPC characters during exploration of the campus.

About: From the game Wintermoor Tactics Club, which takes place in a private boarding school in the 80's and stars Alicia, a young girl trying to defend her tabletop games club from extinction. This is an excerpt from the game's script during a sequence where the characters are giving each other gifts (mostly within the game world of their tabletop adventure) during a holiday celebration. The pipeline for Wintermoor involved writing scripts initially in Google Docs in a script format that could be automatically imported into Unity to set up a basic cutscene. That format is showcased here.

About: Written as part of a pre-production step for the game pitch "Nashua Tactics," a theoretical follow-up to Wintermoor Tactics Club that would have been a fantasy/magical realism coming-of-age story set in Nashua, New Hampshire. This short story was intended as an internal pitch/showcase of one possible tone for the game.

About: Based on the long-running webcomic Homestuck. Homestuck was a long-running webcomic about a group of humans and aliens called trolls getting caught up in a high-stakes, universe-sized game. The fanfic is a series of vignettes following the characters Dave (a human) and Karkat (a troll). The excerpt takes place when the characters are teenagers, stuck with a small mixed group of other teens in a facility on a meteor hurtling through space for multiple years. Warning: contains discussion of genitalia.

About: Based on the Kingdom Hearts game series, specifically Kingdom Hearts 3, focused on the character Riku. The Kingdom Hearts series is notoriously complex, but the most relevant aspects are:

• Riku is the best friend of series protagonist Sora. His arc through the games is a journey from rival to antagonist to guilt-ridden anti-hero and finally to hero proper. Much of his journey centers around his conflicted feelings towards Sora and their mutual female friend, Kairi.
• In the game scene immediately preceding the fanfic, Riku (roughly 16 or 17 years old) is sitting on the beach, having a conversation with what is effectively a ghost of his younger self (14 or 15), a “replica” of himself that he faced as an antagonist in an earlier game.
• Within the series, a paopu is a star-shaped tropical fruit with a mythical status. The legends say that if two people share one, “their destinies will become forever entwined.” This is often given romantic connotations within the franchise.
• The series centers around the theme of Light and Darkness, which are tangible forces within the world but also represent a character’s strengths and flaws, positive and negative emotions, etc. Riku’s journey across the series is, uniquely among the characters, about learning to balance light and darkness within himself (as opposed to banishing the darkness completely).

About: Excerpt from a larger internal primer on "Aetherial," a fictional world designed to accompany the elementary school curriculum (grades 3 - 5), which is primarily narrative-driven as a way of keeping younger students engaged.