the peculiar silence of winter

I actually wrote this back in October, for the MacTaggart Writing Award. I'm posting it now because I didn't win, not that I was really expecting to: I wasn't originally planning on entering, so I didn't actually start writing the story until a week before the deadline.

Word count: 2,973

( Sleeping )

This one was mostly influenced by Tanith Lee's Biting the Sun. It's a book I read a long time ago - I think I was twelve - and it kind of loged in my head; I wondered, "what if the main character had made a different choice?" Obviously the details are rather different and I certainly don't have the backstory to my character or the world they live in; I'm not sure the book's all that widely read, either. (Certainly I don't know anyone else who's read it.) Another, more minor influence was Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series, which does show up in some of the details.

I'm not entirely sure that second person was the best tense for this story, but I'm really fond of it, which might be why I'm using. (And I do actually have that piece I was writing about why I like second person so much sitting on my hard drive; I still don't feel like it's done, but I may post it as is anyway. I'm not sure I'll ever feel as though that one's finished...)

I posted this short story in my personal journal awhile back, before Christmas, but because I'm wanting to link to it, I'm re-posting it here. (Besides, etincelleux is intended in part to be for my writing, I might as well. ;) )

This was written as a practice piece for the creative portion of the Alberta diploma exam, and is written in second person. It was written in the space of an hour, so please excuse the errors. XD (If you want to give me concrit, however, I welcome it!)

( Breaking the Lines )