#sloom.bts

15. Where does your inspiration come from?

This is such a story by story question, I think, because my inspiration is wildly stretched for each one.  So for Sloom my inspiration originally came from an amazing, relaxing, gorgeous youtuber called Liziqi.  She’s a Chinese farmer who films aesthetically pleasing videos about different experiences on the farm, and I based a lot of Ramona’s self built home and some of her backstory on these videos.  What you see in LIziqi’s videos -- her house, her garden, etc., imagine a more rudimentary version as what Ramona has built around the seed vault.

For the disease aspect I took major inspiration from Lever Four, Virus Hunters of the CDC which is an awesome fucking book and I would suggest it to anyone interested in viruses or illness in general.  It helped me get the basis to build MARV-HN and base the apocalypse on illness.

The idea of short stories in each season came from ducking with @skeletongrrl who suggested something sort of like The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brian and I shouted ‘SEASONS’ and uh, so it went.  The archetypes for each visitor came from an rpg that @saorisea invented that was about the world ending in the rapture!  

There are other smaller inspirations like the smoke jumper museum in Missoula, Montana and the aesthetics carried in Of Monsters and Men songs and so on but those are the main ones!

19. First line of a WIP you’re working on.

It’s kinda cheating to post the first line of Sloom, so let me post the first line of the Priest’s story in Sloom instead.

Wang Seed Vault was supposed to be the far away fortress of an inevitably collapsing world.

20. Post a snippet of a WIP you’re working on.

So much Sloom today!  Uh here’s one I just charged out that I dislike but am respecting and leaving in the first draft.

     His steps draw closer and then further away in an odd pattern.  Weight in dirt and scraping across the stones half buried along the meandering walkways.  Ramona draws  herself inwards, focuses on the cutting of vegetables and arrangement of ingredients on her tray.  It’s effective, dulling her and keeping her from realizing why the motion of his steps makes so little sense until it’s resting besides her fire-stove, awareness striking her like the ache in her knees when she crouches, the feeling of wood threatening splints as she picks up shards of broken logs in her hands.

     The priest is giving her time.  As much as his curiosity leaks to her through the air as a heavy presence, so too must her nervousness to him.  

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A snick of his pocket knife unfolding, a glint of metal in light, and then he’s carefully spearing a thin ring of jalapeno out of the jar.

Ramona’s hand built ‘home’ has a pantry that’s half dug into the floor.  This is where she keeps her preserved foods, fermenting foods, etc. etc.!  Now compared to this, Oliver has far less options for healthy foods and his pantry is basically 100% canned foods from the local grocery store and abandoned homes.  He’s in fucking awe of what she’s built, and Ramona in this sentence has just given permission to let him try one of her pickled jalapenos.  

The risk of starvation is the most severe enemy that those who still walk have to face.

Here she’s thinking about the fact that people have stolen from her in the past.  Usually not much, but they’ve seen the amount of food she has and absolutely used that to their advantage just because they aren’t anywhere as well off as Ramona is.  This line leads into Ramona thinking about how while she can’t blame them, it has fucked with her trust and made her a lot more paranoid than she already was.

     You can always see the final hope and thoughts of the deathly ill written in their body: solemn peace or a hunger for salvation.

So in this line, Ramona is walking up a formerly occupied trail and seeing all the bodies of the dead who had fled to the mountains to try and survive the apocalypse, thinking the virus wouldn’t follow.  She’s considering the two ways you can tell the final thoughts of the deceased -- by if they were at peace with their fate, or reaching out for a savior even at the end.

     “Brandied peaches, I think.  Peaches for sure but… brandy I’m guessing by color.”

Kinda a boring line, but Ramona is answering Oliver’s questions as he touches or lifts just about every container in the pantry and asks what it is.  This is super profound as a scene (for me) because Oliver’s own survival cache is cans and boxes and... not good for you.  Ramona meanwhile has made this sort of haven of her own with so many plants and edible things that it’s like heaven in comparison.

     More biting than even baby Sunny seems to know, his eyes keen and clear with no shiver to his soft, downy body.

Suffice to say considering the themes, Ramona’s really lonely.  One of the ways she gets through this is she brings one of the animals she rescued with her on journeys up and down the mountain -- and Sunny, a baby goat just born awhile ago is one of her favorite companions.  She’s noting the fact that he’s not effected by the cold of winter fading into spring like she is.