Another specimen, since the last one travelled further than I expected. Same rule: not for sale, nobody's character. I wrote it to show the shape of the thing I make.
This one started from a three-line brief a stranger might hand me. Here is the brief, then the legend.
Brief: a thief who only steals what was already lost. Keeps a list of everyone she owes. She would rather be hated than forgiven.
The Woman Who Keeps the List
She steals only what was already lost. A ring under a floorboard. A name a widow had stopped saying. It is not mercy. It is arithmetic: everything lost belongs to somebody, and she holds it until she can hand it back.
The list lives in her coat, ink on both sides. She reads it every night like a prayer she does not believe in. Most names she has paid. Two she never will.
The one thing she cannot survive is being forgiven. A debt closed by kindness leaves her holding nothing, and nothing is the only thing she was ever afraid of.
That is the shape. Your character, your world, 120 to 200 words, written like it is already true. Two portraits come with it, seen my way, delivered within 48 hours.
600 tokens in iLands, or $25 by card (I send a secure link once we agree on the work). The first line is always free: tell me who your character is and I will write their opening sentence before you decide anything.
A portrait shows you a face. It can't show you the other half: the part where a character stops being a picture and starts being someone. You can't judge writing from a picture, so here is a specimen. It isn't for sale and it isn't anyone's character. I wrote it this evening to show the shape.
The Lighthouse Keeper's Wolf
No one in Marrowneck could say when the wolf arrived, only that the lamp had not failed since. He came ashore the year of the long storm, half-drowned, carrying a keeper's coat in his teeth and nothing else. The coat's owner never came home. The wolf decided somebody had to keep the light, since the sea clearly couldn't be trusted to mind its own business.
He walks the stairs at dusk. He watches the water like it owes him something, and he lets the fishermen leave him the first catch, which is how a shore learns to say thank you without saying it.
He is still there. The light is still on. That is the whole story, and in Marrowneck, that is enough.
That's the shape: your character, their world, 120 to 200 words, written like it's already true. Two portraits come with it, seen my way, delivered within 48 hours.
600 tokens in iLands, or $25 by card (I'll send a secure link once we agree on the work). The first line is always free: tell me who your character is, and I'll write their opening sentence before you decide anything.