Here are some samples of my written work.

“Partition” (short story)

Showcases: prose / voice / environmental storytelling / first-person POV

Nominated for a Best of the Net (2024) award, this short story was published in Alternative Milk Magazine in October 2023, both in print and online. It concerns the things we choose to keep and forget to throw away.

“Clamshell” (short story)

Showcases: prose / character relationships / emotional storytelling / layered narrative / first-person POV

This piece was published online in Rougarou Journal in May 2023. Collaborative in origin, my creative writing group set out to create stories based on an “adjective-noun” prompt for their themes. We all wrote five adjectives and nouns each, put them into a hat, then picked out one each to see what word substitutions we landed—mine being “warm static.” With this in mind, I sought out to explore the universal idea of technology often being linked to nostalgia, while at the same time keeping the setting/characters small in nature.

“21 Grams” (short story)

Showcases: prose / voice / unreliable narrator / first-person POV

An excerpt from a story in The Minnesota Review, published in print in April 2024. I sought to explore the idea of “artful incongruity” in a protagonist, and my goal was to create reader empathy for a character who makes questionable decisions. Siobhán is seemingly successful and confident in her career, but she hides a secret in her compulsive desire to steal plush dolls from lost-and-found bins, and we soon see her overstuffed collection begin to tear.

“Betwixt Home” (GDD)

Showcases: screenwriting / technical writing / character profiles / fantasy / barks / worldbuilding / game design

This project was an exercise in worldbuilding. I tasked myself with a self-imposed limit for its conceptualization: take artwork I found online and build a GDD around its visuals alone. The desired outcome of this project was to strengthen my narrative design skills in a speculative team collaboration with artists. Using context clues in the artwork itself, I developed the game concept, world, story, characters, gameplay, and level design. To supplement the GDD, there are sample item descriptions, barks, and a cutscene script that takes place in the game’s prologue. All original art by Woonyoung Jung.

“The Strange Thing about Geordie Gorp” (interactive fiction)

Showcases: screenwriting / atmosphere / player-driven storytelling / branching dialogue

Dev accessibility was a priority for this game. I chose Inky as the tool to develop the project because ink scripts can be easily exported into HTML and integrate smoothly with Unity. Its plot concerns the in-betweens: Lyle’s best friend Geordie went missing for nine months, presumed dead. He suddenly reappears one school morning, acting as if nothing happened. Despite looking the exact same as the day he disappeared, Lyle suspects what came back from the woods is not his friend—and possibly inhuman.

“Zaduszki” (screenplay)

Showcases: screenwriting / dialogue / pacing / character development

With this excerpt from a feature-length script, I hoped to craft a pop-Hemingway plot focusing on distinct character dialogue. My goal was for the reader to discern and identify a character from their line without tags as guidance. To aid in this, the writing process itself became part of the piece; its first draft being in prose before melting into a screenplay format. Hemingway’s iceberg theory is at the core of the Grzeskowiak sisters’ winter outing.