Hey everyone, the completed short story from which I posted an excerpt the other day has no had a comb through and I would like to present to you Draft 1. I would love for any feedback you can give this. The ending is a bit of a cliff hanger which is what I intended, as once I have done a few more drafts of this, I am going to move on to the next tale in this world I am looking to create.

The PDF is below and I thank you all in advance.

Ella – The Beginning

Reblogged from Fresh Ink:

It would be a simple one screen page, hosted with a domain similar to my name, “DanielPostlethwaite.co.uk” for example. And then you would click the button to take you to the website in question.

It’s just a quick mockup and it is 3am here so I’m a little tired aha. Another idea I had is to give a brief description of the blog under each of the button, explaining which is which.

Also, just a quick reminder, Words Form Windows has a Facebook page!

https://www.facebook.com/WordsFormWindows

I’m going to be doing something a bit different with these now, to help myself get writing and to help all of you get creative I am going to link songs, describe why I have linked them, and then I will follow up with a mini-story aka flash fiction. The story can be based on either the music or the video (maybe even both). The idea of this prompt and write set up is taken from Picture It & Write which is ran by the people of Ermilia’s blog. I hope this catches on and people like it. I will also publish this to my other blog Fresh Ink. The story and reason for choosing this song is after the jump.

So this weeks song is Crystallize by Lindsey Stirling.

I am a lover of dubstep music amongst others, but something I haven’t ever took the time to listen to properly is the violin. So when I heard this song (and most of the others by Lindsey Stirling) I was amazed at what can be done with a violin. And these two things are so far apart that mashing them together and managing to pull it off is a brilliant achievement.

Also, if you don’t like the music just mute the video and watch that amazing scenery.

——

I walked through the frozen husks, running my gloved fingers along the walls. My gloves were made from the finest furs, but still the cold seeped through, chilling me to the bone. It was a romantic torture, if there was such a thing. The beauty outweighed rational thinking.

I pulled the glove from my hand and placed my palm flat onto the walls of this crystal castle. Instantly I felt the strength drain from me, my knees buckled and I pulled my arm away, pieces of skin staying behind. I felt the warm blood trickle in between my fingers. It dripped to the floor staining the snow red. My reaction was just to laugh, at my stupidity, at the sheer beauty of this place. I forgot how I had even come to be here, what was I doing? In the distance I heard her call again, and for a split second the pain went away, hearing her voice calmed me. Made everything stop.

I turned and I saw her there, further into the structure. She stood, her hair as white as snow, her eyes as blue as the ice. My feet moved forward and the glove I was holding fell to floor. Frost clung to her eyelashes, as she blinked at me.

“David, your hand?”

“I needed to feel close to you, to touch you just once!”

“You fool.”

I walked towards her, this goddess of ice and dropped to my knees.

“Are you sure this is what you desire?”

“Yes.”

“Then let it be so.”

She slowly brought forth her hand and placed it onto my head. Slowly my face became numb, and the long locks of hair that fell in front of my eyes slowly turned pure white.

I knew this was the end.

I was hers now.

—

I ran too it and began to dig, putting to use all of the speed I had recently been given, the deeper I got the redder the sand got, until it was pure crimson. By then I knew it was too late, but I couldn’t leave her there like that. I dug down and finally uncovered her. I pulled her mangled corpse up out of the sand, bent my knees and jumped with all my power, soaring into the air. I came crashing down onto the top of the Weisman building, one of the tallest skyscrapers in the city. In the distance I saw the skeletons of the other skyscrapers, just rotten husks collapsing in on themselves, crashing into the streets below.
I looked around trying to find somewhere to lay Julia’s body to rest, but everything was covered in sand and everything was collapsing. I decided to get out of the city and into the country side, it was the safest option. I leaped off the Weisman building onto the street below and sprinted fast, within minutes I was out of the city and half an hour later I was on the flat expanse of the plains. The once luscious green fields were now deserts.
I spotted a tree in the distance, then I was there. It was an apple treed, the highest branches poking out of the sand. Portals where in every direction but any Fated that had come through where nowhere to be seen. I put Julia’s body down, up against the trunk and arranged her limbs to make her look as at peace as I could. I was exhausted after all the sprinting and jumping. It made me realise that this power wasn’t an infinite well that I could tap into as I pleased. I was going to have to pace myself, using it only when necessary in this new harsh world I was now in.
I took an apple from a branch, brushed off the sand and started to eat, five minutes later the cores of seven apples were led around me. The sand was starting to pile up now, I was being buried alive, it will only be a few minutes till Julia is buried again in the sand, although this time somewhere a little nicer, and not in her recently rusted coffee stand.

They will be based in the same world as a previous short story that I have written which you can read here. They will be Steampunky/Post-Apocalyptic, set in the future though rather than the past, in a world covered in sand. The sand is explained in the short story I have linked.

The working title of this collection of stories is “Sandworld” which is very unoriginal I know, but it’s too the point because after all they are set in a Sandworld aha. But it’s only a working title and I’ll think of something as I go but one word came to mind earlier when I was walking home. And this word is “Adelaide”, now I can’t decide whether it should be a character name, the name of a town, or the name of the country/world that these stories are set in.

The reason this word came to mind? I was walking back home past a sign I have walked past many times before and this sign read, “Victoria Street”, and Victoria clicked in my head, sending me back to my story set in a Steampunk world, and what timeframe are most steampunk stories set in/based on? The Victorian era.

So thinking of streets name to inspire my story I thought back to a street I lived on for ten years, and this street was called Adelaide Street, and there is something nice about that word/name. So I decided I would like to use it in my story. One plan was to have a character called Adelaide AS WELL AS a the country, with her being named after said country.

What do you think?

It’s amazing how trains of thought work, I even previously wrote an article on this very subject.

So yesterday was a the solar eclipse and I can’t tell whether this is an actual photograph from a satellite or the space station but it is breathtaking to behold. I don’t the original credits for the picture but I took it from this Facebook page.

Unfortunately I never got to see the solar eclipse as hardly any form of eclipse is visible in England.

Speaking of the space station, it is so amazing that people are living out there. I have always wanted to visit space but unfortunately I have not been yet. But with the rise of “space tourism” it is looking like by the time I die I will have been to space. The biggest

pioneers in space tourism at the moment are Virgin Galactic. For $200,000 (deposits starting from $2000) you can secure place a trip to space.

Or actually just to the edge of space. I recommend you give this a read, it reads like a mini story of your emotions they expect you to feel as you go through this journey.

Related articles

• Solar Eclipse (instagram.com)
• Solar Eclipse Comes To The States (4us2be.com)
• Solar Eclipse (framework.latimes.com)
• Solar Eclipse: What is a Total Solar Eclipse & When is the Next One? (rant4u.com)
• Picture Japan: Solar Eclipse (blogs.wsj.com)
• Annual Solar Eclipse is on tap today (newsnet5.com)
• Day 141 – Solar Eclipse (neophytephotographer.wordpress.com)
• 40 Awesome Photos Of The Solar Eclipse (buzzfeed.com)
• Where and When to See Sunday’s Solar Eclipse (tammybruce.com)
• Rare ‘Annular Solar Eclipse’ Tonight (science.slashdot.org)

University is finished! That is my third year complete just one more to go!

And then after that last year it’s out into the wide wide world, unless I stay and get more in debt (by doing a masters aha).

So what will I do with my time now? I honestly don’t know. At the moment I am going home for the summer until September. So with nothing to do I will have to create things to do for myself to keep myself occupied.

And that thing is….writing! Next year for my University course I have to write a feature length script and do a dissertation (among other modules), so my plan is to work on a few ideas for this and then start to work on it over summer, giving me enough time next year to draft and redraft and redraft my redraft.

So there will be updates on that over the summer, but what else can you expect? Well, I want to focus more on this blog too, but I’m not quite sure what sort of content to create for it. My vision for my blog was originally a place to share my work and my writing but recently it has become a series of personal posts and things that have interested me or that I have been thinking about, for example you may remember the gay marriage post a while back, as well as the one regarding the existence of aliens. But I need more.

So, with that I am creating a rough schedule and I will try to post an article to this schedule, these will Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. This may take a while to get going because I will need to have a think about what I want to talk about, and what should go when, and if I am posting that often I will have to plan ahead. I’m thinking the Friday post will be “Music Which Inspires Me” as these seem to have been like by most of my readers, and it pleases me to share my musical interests with you all. I may try to put a spin on this, maybe: “This inspires me, how does this inspire you? Write a piece based on the music.” Sort of like Picture It & Write, but with music, Listen & Write I guess! What do you guys think about that?

Another thing I may me doing (although probably not regularly) are video updates which are something I’ve mentioned previously but we’ll have to see about that depending if I can think of a unique “angle”.

I have also update the Spreadshirt store. There is now a selection of Fresh Ink goods as well as mugs and pins, and t-shirts in different sizes and types for men, women and children!

I will also be looking for a job over summer, I am thinking about going to an agency and trying to get some sort of writing work as I want work experience that is fitting my career and not just in shops working behind a till.

What are your plans for the summer? I’d love to know!