#grey try not to infodump challenge (impossible)

[redroom-rainbowguts]

🔪 🍴 🍷 for grey and white?

🔪- what is the first thing in your house you would use to kill with?

Grey: "Well, if I had to kill I'd probably just use something relatively hard to trace. Figure out information on the other person to see how easily I can set up the death to look like a suicide. Maybe a rope, plastic bag, some drug that can easily be found over the counter, if I can help it. Worst case scenario something easy to inject, so I guess syringes. I guess it just really depends on the circumstances, there's not a "first choice" I can think of unless I'm in a situation that requires it."

White: "Depends on my mood and what I want to see. Knives lose their appeal after awhile and I don't usually want them dead right away. It also depends on why I need to kill and why it's the "first thing" I'd kill with. Am I being attacked? Did someone manage to escape? I need more information."

🍴- how do you feel about cannibalism?

Grey: "I... Don't? I mean, I don't really think about it much. I don't think it deserves the degree of taboo that it has in our culture. I mean, meat is meat. We already eat intelligent creatures like pig, cow, chicken, and don't get me started on fish. They're smarter than we realize but our worlds are so different we're only now learning just how intelligent they actually are. Did you hear about the fish that actually passed the mirror test? Besides, I don't know about cows but pigs and chickens would definitely eat us if given the chance. It's the nature of meat eating animals to, well, eat meat! It's really not a question of morals in my opinion. Anyways I'd definitely try cooked human, but I'd still be a bit anxious about it being prepared properly. I know you definitely can't eat the brain but I'm not 100% sure how safe the other parts are."

White: "I don't have much of an opinion about it as a concept. I think meat is meat, if that's what you mean. Though there is an experiment involving cannibalism I'd like to try. I wanna know if diet can affect a person's flavor. When white people first came to America, Native Americans thought they stank because they had vastly different diets, so I have to imagine they tasted pretty different too. And in the past doctor's would actually taste diabetics' urine, so I feel like they'd overall just taste sweeter too? And do people who eat only super spicy food actually become somewhat spicy? Only one way to find out..."

🍷- what would you do with a gallon of blood?

Grey: "uh, why do I have a gallon of blood? Whose blood? Is this a threat? A gift? Don't get me wrong I'll uh.. I'll find a use for it I'm just really confused about the circumstances. I'm excited to look at it under the microsc- oooh it'll be like a scientific scavenger hunt for figuring out who or what the blood belonged too!"

White: "Have you ever seen the movie Carrie? I wonder what would happen if we recreated it. You can't prove it won't give the recipient cool ass psychic powers, so let's test it out!"

[hoochieblues]

100 Days of Writing: Day 60

How do you start your chapters? Do you start with dialogue? Why or why not?

for @the-wip-project

There are a lot of rules about not starting chapters with dreams, dialogue, pronoun games etc. etc.... and, like most rules, I like to ignore them. (I know. So bad.)

I've seen some guides say there's a division between fanfic and original fic as, for example, in starting with dialogue it's "not engaging" for a reader to have no idea who the character speaking is, to not know their speech patterns etc., while with fic there's an appreciable familiarity that already exists and lets readers skip that introductory period.

I feel like that's not true, at least not for me. If you can make that starting line of dialogue interesting and attention grabbing, doesn't it make the reader want to learn about the character?

Same with starting with a dream. Sure, if you bait and switch, run a great action sequence that turns out to be 'just a dream' it can be very unsatisfying, but if that dream tells you something about the character or explores/foreshadows a concept that you couldn't otherwise get into at the beginning of the chapter... idk about you, but I'd rather read a dream sequence with hinky symbolism and weirdness than I would a colossal infodump.

Just recently, I started posting my reduxes for Feasting on Dreams and Justice in Surrender, which have the main fic WIPs I've been working on during this challenge.

As FoD (mostly) follows the canon DA:O Tabris storyline, it canonically starts with the protagonist waking up. I fully embraced the cliche, and I love how it worked out:

On the morning of her wedding, Merien dreamed of flowers. She’d gathered them on a mountain, snow soaking through the patches in her shoes, so her mother could stitch them into a quilt. That seemed important, though she couldn’t remember whose idea it had been. Shianni had helped; they carried the flowers home in their aprons, the way they brought back two-day-old stale halfpenny bread from the baker at the east gate, and when Meri ran her fingers through the petals, they clacked and clattered in her hands like glass beads. It didn’t seem strange, not when they were so pretty, glowing in bright reds and greens.

Somewhere, a dog barked, and someone was singing an old song she loved about a lady and a falcon. She dropped one of the flowers and as it rolled across the muddy ground, petals scattering to pieces like a late summer rose, the dream began to fracture and fail.

She’d slept badly all week, full of nerves and uncertainty, so it stood to reason that—as soon as she did get some rest—someone would try to wake her. Meri resisted, clutching the scratchy woollen blanket tightly in her fists. Her mother laughed and said something that was impossible to make out through the calls and flapping wings of a flock of black-feathered birds that launched up into a grey sky, silhouetted against the city’s towers and parapets.

“Come on, cousin! So help me, I’ll use cold water….”

With a groan, she cranked open one eye. Shianni’s sharp, freckled face swam into view, alight with excitement. She was crouching on the floor beside the pallet and, as she leaned over to pull the blanket from Meri’s grip, a whiff of sweet ale perfumed her breath.

Then again, I'm a sucker for writing about dreams and altered perceptions anyway.

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