The working titles for the chapters in Apartment.

Tag List:

@pied-piper-of-hamlet, @bloomseey-writes, @crypticsx, @coloursintheblur, @alexwillow, @hinazia, @project-nightshade, @bookish-actor, @purpleshadows1989, @halfbloodlycan, @nectargrapes, @kobalt-ink, @farrradays

I think some of you may have changed your account names since they don’t pop up for me anymore, so I’ll do my best to update those, but it would also help if you could DM me if you see this so I can make sure I’ve got you! ^^

Please let me know if you’d like to be added/removed!

Happy Mother’s Day!

In honor, I give you Erynn’s mother, and Phael’s mother. Sadly, they are both no longer around by the time the books roll around, but they are not forgotten. The important roles they had in the past are often mentioned throughout the story by various characters.

Johalanna:

Saphielle:

Picrew used: The Lady of Hera )

COA taglist: @etjwrites , @alwolfesblog , @project-nightshade , @bexminx , @ruth-lund ,

Sascha Lockhart | COA 1

Thief?         Liar?        Murderer?

Sascha’s attempt to leave behind his dark past and live as a better man truly begins when he crosses paths with Phael, the head of the Council of Arishore.

When Phael is held captive and tortured at a camp where Sascha is working, he is forced to take a closer look at what he is doing with his life. Is participating in the war going to make him a better man? Or is he doing just as much wrong as in the past?

When he sees Arishore’s leader stricken with pain and grief that he would not wish upon his worst enemy… that’s when things change. Sascha eventually sabotages the entire camp and allows Phael to escape.

Little did he expect that he would cross paths with Phael many more times, and that Arishore’s leader would remember him.

–

The lovely supporting OC’s in COA have been getting a lot of attention in my edits, so I’ll be re-introducing some of them! (Also probably Cohnal, who is one of the three POV OC’s and somehow I never talk about him).

COA Taglist: @etjwrites​ , @alwolfesblog​ , @project-nightshade​ , @bexminx​ , @ruth-lund​ ,

Her head hurt.

And it wasn’t because she had hit her head on the rafters three times.

An arm’s length away, Erynn was an unmoving shadow in the darkness. He hadn’t moved since pressing his head into the overstuffed pillow, his body turned away from her.

As expected, he had offered to go elsewhere, his voice hesitant as he told her he meant to respect the privacy and personal space of others. Well, he had begun to say friends, but had swallowed the word uncomfortably and offered her a winning smile instead. It made her heart head hurt.

She had opened her mouth to mention the numerous times he had casually ignored her personal space – but didn’t have the heart to tease him. Instead she calmly explained that she had shared much less with much more people. The words felt wrong, but it was true.

It was also true that she was afraid if he left tonight, she’d find him near death the next day,

or not find him at all.

She pulled her arm out from beneath the blanket, goosebumps forming on her skin as the cold air hit her. Her thin shirt went only to her elbow, uncomfortably tight against and not nearly as warm as the soft brown sweater she had gently placed in Erynn’s hands earlier.

It’s old

             I don’t care for it

She had insisted and lied, offering it to him as he trembled and tried to hide his injuries.

Her head hurt.

Adding the ☾ COA Taglist: @etjwrites , @alwolfesblog , @project-nightshade , @bexminx , @ruth-lund ,

T A G : Last Line

I was tagged by @stuffaboutwriting for this tag game - thank you very much for thinking of me, Kelsey!

Here are a couple of the last lines I wrote for The Pirates of Sissa, added while I was editing the second chapter:

A bit of a charged passage, but it comes from one of the more difficult scenes to write in the book, and it’s been such an interesting experience to get into the minds of these characters before they begin to actually respect one another.

I’ll be tagging @crypticsx, @andiwriteunderthemoon, @isanyonetoknow, @project-nightshade, and @fiama-l-hernandez.

Hope you enjoy, and if by any chance you’d rather not be tagged in future, please let me know ^^

Apartment - Update: DRAFTING COMPLETE March 30, 2020

Last night (early this morning, really), I completed my eerie suspense novella Apartment. You might have seen my initial reaction post here, which wasn’t much because I wrote it while half-asleep. This post is a more in-depth look at my experience writing Apartment and where I feel I’m at with it now.

Keep reading

Hey, I’m interested to be an early reader or beta, when will you be accepting those roles? Thanks and I’m so so excited to read your book !!

Before they were Council members…

Phael was a little more out of control prior to becoming head of the Council, beyond studying and arguing with anybody at Blackwater, he often caused general chaos while on escapades with Ziel. He also spent time trying to reverse the bad decisions his father made - which he was surprisingly successful at.

Ziel, being Phael’s best friend, usually got dragged into his escapades and unwillingly caused a bit of chaos himself sometimes. He read and studied often and far beyond what was necessary, and tutored the younger members of his village. Always a favorite among the children, he sometimes gave them audience to unique beautiful displays of magic. When his brother wasn’t off on official messenger business, he enjoyed spending time with him.

Haryk was a scrivener, who for some reason also had vast knowledge of chemistry. So needless to say, he occasionally took on tasks that required such knowledge. When that wasn’t keeping him busy, he enjoyed taking to the woods to hunt.

Ren spent long days and nights studying to become an architect. Not understanding how to give himself a break, he also liked to create and solve puzzles, riddles, and anything that offered a good challenge. 

Ceja comes from a family of high standing and connections to Blackwater. Her family tried hard to control her and decide her path in life, which led to her becoming very good at hiding behind a facade and getting away with doing what she pleased… which involved a lot of traveling, learning to play various instruments, and spending time with Xander.

Lyre was the local introverted writer of his community. He wrote stories, poems, songs, you name it. In his spare time he enjoyed helping with the care of animals.

Xander, like Ceja, comes from a family of high standing. However, he got on with his expected roles fine. On the flip side, he created a hush-hush “community” of wizards who worked to ensure humans lost or trapped in Arishore would be able to leave safely. His favorite pastime was hanging out with Ceja.

Adding the -

COA taglist: @etjwrites , @alwolfesblog , @project-nightshade , @bexminx , @ruth-lund ,

I hope you all are doing well during this virus chaos <3

Hope you’re doing well too :)

…

Rather than someone who people sought out, Mathias became one to avoid. His temper was short, his words sharp. He would reflect on the many times he thought that perhaps he had been too harsh. He wished he had been more vocal about how much he had cared.

Ziel paced in his room most nights, his chest tight with suppressed sobs. He wished it had been him instead.

Viern hurt for his brother most of all. He hurt when Ziel pushed him away and provided only fake smiles. It was almost like losing him all over again.

Ceja tried not to think about it. The Council still had to function - she couldn’t let herself fall apart. But her mind often wandered when she noticed the several empty seats during Council meetings.

Lyre spent days and nights checking on his friends. He’d find them when they didn’t want to be found, just to make sure they weren’t alone. He stopped writing, finding himself unable to scrawl coherent sentences and smearing the ink with fallen tears.

Ren wanted to find the truth. The how, the why. But there was no clue to follow, no literature, no person to turn to. So he stopped asking questions. He lost his drive.

The scar on Scarlette’s palm served as a painful reminder. But also as a reminder that she was somehow connected to all of it. And that made her determined to chase down answers. 

Aaaand adding on the COA taglist!

COA Taglist: @etjwrites , @alwolfesblog , @project-nightshade , @bexminx , @ruth-lund ,

Warrior of the West ladies!

Simona, Thomasin

Etty, Wren

Used this!

Adding the WOTW taglist since it’s been a bit since I’ve posted anything for this WIP!

WOTW Taglist: @lush-rose , @alwolfesblog , @project-nightshade , @purpleshadows1989 , 

T A G : WIP Quotes

Rules: Pick five quotes that your characters have said about your protagonist, then five quotes your protagonist has said, and then tag five people! 

I was tagged by @livvywrites for this game! I’ve never played it before, so thank you so much for thinking of me! ^^ 

All of my works are multi-POV, and I have more than one protagonist in each, so I hope it’s okay that I’m just going to pick one and go with it. For this time, I’m going to pick Vadra from my fantasy WIP, The Pirates of Sissa. I don’t have 5 quotes for each, because I didn’t want to give some important plot points away and the others were a bit boring and confusing out-of-context. 

Quotes characters have said about Vadra:

Keep reading

I don’t know what writeblr needs to hear this, but the best thing I did with my writing is get rid of negativity.  

And I don’t mean this in a way of not acknowledging your frustration or anger or anything.  But mean this in a way of taking care of yourself, cultivating your dash, and watching your mindset.

For me, watching my mindset is really hard.  It’s difficult to change a pattern of thoughts from “my writing sucks” to “I’m still learning and growing and that’s ok”.  It makes a difference though.  I look forward to writing and interacting with writeblr more.

I’d also suggest cultivating your dash.  I can’t handle a lot of negativity in my life as I deal with a lot on a daily basis (not to mention my depression).  I don’t reblog posts anymore that talk about how shit writing is or how tiring it is unless it has a good ending or goal.  Otherwise, I feel like I’m inviting negativity and changing my dash with more positive posts has really helped with changing my mindset.  

Most importantly, you need to take care of yourself.  Maybe this cultivating and slow change works for you.  Maybe it doesn’t.  But always make sure you eat and hydrate and take a little time for yourself throughout the day.  

I love you all and I look forward to seeing the stories you create!  Go!  Have fun!  Take joy in your worlds and OCs!  Even the tortured ones.  

IT’S FINALLY HERE! WIP Introduction for Apartment!

I’m really happy with how it turned out. I played around with a lot of different designs before settling on this. I didn’t want to have the same design as my excerpts, which I’m actually considering redesigning!

Apartment is my eerie, slow-simmering suspenseful novella (maybe novel) about three neighbours that must work together when their isolated apartment building comes under siege. 

(This is a really simplified summary of the story - a lot of stuff happens before that, a great deal of tension build-up and general creepiness and suspicion. As with everything about this WIP, there’s a lot more than meets the eye.)

The main characters are James, Angela, and Alex. Despite living in the same building, they’ve never met each other - have never even seen each other. Of course, all that is about to change. I’ve also introduced a character called Eli in previous tag games - very briefly and without a lot of information about who Eli actually is. ^^

As I’ve said before, everyone is very suspect. 

EXCERPTS & TAGS UNDER THE CUT

Keep reading

Resources For Writing Dystopian/Apocalypse Stories

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Dystopian Resources

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World Building

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1.0

It was a lovely summer evening. The birds were singing, the trees were rustling, the cats were tanning, the ants were busy doing what ants do, and I was staring at the ceiling bored out of my head and too hot to move. A normal summer evening.

What I wouldn't give to have it back.

It was a sudden thing, like the rug being pulled out from under your feet. The earth rumbled, the ceiling crumbled, and everything we knew was erased, as though toppled aside by some giant hand.

Alright, so it didn't happen quite like that. It wasn't out of the blue, and it wasn't unexpected. But, since I figure I'm the only person left to tell the tale, that's exactly how it was to you.

We fell face-flat on this new existence.

Who are you to say any different?

This is so intriguing!! I sort of love how the narrator isn’t very reliable, like this is their story, they’re telling it, so you listen because it’s gonna be great

I remember reading The Great Gatsby for the first time in literature class and I remember the teacher telling us that Nick Carraway, the narrator, isn’t reliable, and at that time I don’t think I had ever quite suspected that because the story was told quite matter-of-factly and in a way that made Nick sound quite reliable. (And, to be perfectly honest, if Nick hadn’t been the narrator of the book, I’m not sure the story would have held the same magic, the same pull. I don’t think I would have felt quite as badly about how it ends, or that I would have liked Gatsby quite as much. Nick’s bias really drives the story home, makes the whole thing mean something, and in this way, it’s hard to accept the unreliability of a narrator.)

I like the subtlety of actually going for that kind of unreliable narrator - those Nick Carraways who seem too innocent, too descriptive, too invested and persuasive and honest to possibly be unreliable - where the reader might not even notice their lack of reliability until it’s too late. I feel like that adds another layer of work to the writing and planning of the story, however, and it’s a bit like a mystery, in my opinion - to be fair to the reader you have to at least provide some hints here and there of what might truly have happened, or at least a hint that something’s not adding up with the narration. You have to give them something they can piece together if only they think about it hard enough.

This snippet above is definitely more in-your-face about the narrator’s unreliability, and I kind of like that about it. The reader goes into the story knowing that it might not be true because the narrator has confessed as much. The reader knows that they need to be careful and take things with a grain of salt, so to speak, but they don’t know which parts of the story aren’t true.

I just really liked the idea of that - a bit of a contrast to The Great Gatsby, where you might not realize Nick is unreliable at all. In this story, you know the narrator is unreliable. But what are you going to do about it? You’re a reader, and it’s the narrator who’s telling the story, and you can’t question him - he won’t answer you - and you can’t persuade him to tell you the truth - it’s a one-way communication channel. There’s not much you can about it at all, so, just as you said in your comment above, all there is to do is sit back, surrender yourselves to the falsities of the story, and comfortably enjoy it, see where it takes you.

Thanks so much for your comment! ^^ I really appreciate it!

A Guide to Making Up Diseases (as Explained by a Biologist)

So listen up y’all, nothing drives me crazier as both a writer and a scientist than seeing alien diseases that make no fuckin’ sense in a human body. 

If you’re talking about alien diseases in a non-human character, you can ignore all this.

But as far as alien diseases in humans go, please remember:

DISEASE SYMPTOMS ARE AN IMMUNE RESPONSE.

Fever? A response to help your immune cells function faster and more efficiently to destroy invaders.

Sore/scratchy throat? An immune response. Diseases that latch onto the epithelium of the throat (the common cold, the flu) replicate there, and your body is like “uh no fuckin’ thanks” and starts to slough off those cells in order to stop the replication of new virus in its tracks. So when it feels like your throat is dying? guess what it literally is. And the white spots you see with more severe bacterial infections are pus accumulation, which is basically dead white blood cells, and the pus is a nice and disgusting way of getting that shit outta here.

(No one really knows why soreness and malaise happens, but some scientists guess that it’s a byproduct of immune response, and others suspect that it’s your body’s way of telling you to take it easy)

headache? usually sinus pressure (or dehydration, which isn’t an immune response but causes headaches by reducing blood volume and causing a general ruckus in your body, can be an unfortunate side effect of a fever) caused by mucous which is an immune response to flush that nasty viral shit outta your face.

Rashes? an inflammatory response. Your lymphocytes see a thing they don’t like and they’re like “hEY NOW” and release a bunch of chemicals that tell the cells that are supposed to kill it to come do that. Those chemicals cause inflammation, which causes redness, heat, and swelling. They itch because histamine is a bitch.

fatigue? your body is doing a lot–give it a break!

here is a fact:

during the Spanish 1918 Plague, a very strange age group succumbed to the illness. The very young and very old were fine, but people who were seemingly healthy and in the prime of life (young adults) did not survive. This is because that virus triggered an immune response called a cytokine storm, which basically killed everything in sight and caused horrific symptoms like tissue death, vasodilation and bleeding–basically a MASSIVE inflammatory response that lead to organ damage and death. Those with the strongest immune systems took the worst beating by their own immune responses, while those with weaker immune systems were fine.

So when you’re thinking of an alien disease, think through the immune response.

Where does this virus attack? Look up viruses that also attack there and understand what the immune system would do about it. 

Understand symptoms that usually travel together–joint pain and fever, for example.

So please, please: no purple and green spotted diseases. No diseases that cause glamorous fainting spells and nothing else. No mystical eye-color/hair-color changing diseases. If you want these things to happen, use magic or some shit or alien physiology, but when it’s humans, it doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense. 

This has been a rant and I apologize for that. 

As a microbiologist, I think the main advice here is to take into account real diseases and conditions before you make up a fictional disease or condition.

Some bacteria have physical effects on the body that cause symptoms (EHEC varitype of E. coli ruptures cells at the site of infection, which is usually the large intestine, hence, you have bloody stools from it). If your alien or “made-up” bacteria or virus causes a certain symptom, find a real bacteria or virus that causes the same symptom. They need to behave in a similar fashion and have similar physical traits. Bacteria and viruses do not evolve functions because they’re cool. They evolve them because they’re useful.

There are also dietary issues, medications and chronic diseases that cause physical changes–copper toxicity can cause an orange ring around the iris, an eyelash lengthening “medicine” causes darkening and/or color change of the iris, hemochromatosis (sometimes known as “Bronze Diabetes”) causes darkening of the skin etc. If you want to use this sort of thing, again, find something real that causes it and work through things logically. 

Play your cards right, do your research and you will have hordes of readers in the scientific and/or biological community cheering, screaming and crying because they love your work.

@biologyweeps, this feels up your speculative alley - anything to add?

Ohhh.

I’d like to add that the same goes for parasitic infections, more or less. If you want a certain trait for a diseases, cross reference with existing parasites to see what’s happening, and also make sure you check what happens if you put a parasite in a host it’s not meant for. We can sensibly assume that alien parasites that encounter a human would be ‘wtf’ and potentially cause complications that would never happen in the native species. Maybe in the native species it causes a cold like reaction at worst, but in a human the parasites may attempt to nest in a totally different tissue. Maybe that causes widespread tissue damage by the parasite itself as it tries to borrow in? Again, check existing cases to see what horrific things could happen.

While we’re on it, also check how your disease is communicated. One of the things that annoy me so much with zombie movies is that ‘biting’ is supposed to be a very effective way to spread it. It’s not. Anything that requires such intimate contact is actually kind of hard to communicate. Airborne things? Now there we are at potential ‘oh shit’ territory. So if you want your disease to sweep the country/planet/ship, pick something that’s easily communicable. 

Also consider the incubation period. How long until someone shows symptoms? Are they already infectious to other people before showing symptoms or still after they stopped? As mentioned above, illness symptoms are in most part immune responses and the immune system needs time to get up and run. Give it that time.

And while we’re at it… there are symptoms that aren’t immune responses. For example the cramps that accompany tetanus are caused by a toxin the bacterium produces that damages/destroys nerve cells. Viruses can cause tissue damage when they insert in cells, replicate in there and destroy the cell on exit. Think of how HIV can wreak havoc on the human immune system by killing of a specific kind of cell. Depending on where your viruses likes to replicate it can massively impact the look of it. Something that destroys liver cells will look different (and if survived may come with different long term damage) than something that prefers skin or muscle cells. If it’s alien also consider how it might behave differently in its original host. 

Fantastic post, I can relate to OP 100%. More points:

Nothing makes me groan harder than a made-up plague which gives anyone X diseases within seconds to MINUTES. I’m looking at you, most zombie movies. And if your alien/synthetic/sci-fi pathogen is at all like a virus (read: no metabolism of its own, just genetic material of some kind which it uses to reprogram host cells), then the rate at which it mupltiplies is limited to what normal human cells can do. Now, viruses can multiply pretty damn fast. But give you symptoms within MINUTES? Nope.

So long as we’re on the subject of epidemiology, and speed:

 "Oh no, patient died less than a day after being infected! We’re all doomed!“ Wrong. While that SOUNDS scary, a plague that kills that quickly would not actually be that dangerous, and would be unlikely to have evolved to begin with. A disease needs to pass itself on to at least one other person, on average, before it kills its host, or it’s doomed to extinction. Any virus that kills its host before it has a decent chance of being passed on will basically quarantine itself. (Of course, you CAN do this if you handwave its origins as being made in a lab or whatever, just know it won’t realistically pose a truly terrifying threat on a population level.)

Mmore ideas for a realistically scary made-up plague:

- Long incubation period (say, a couple of weeks), making quarantine much more difficult, disruptive to everyday life, and unlikely to succeed. - Infectious period != symptomatic period, i.e. someone can spread the disease before they appear sick. (Note: if this condition is met, then dying very rapidly after *manifesting symptoms* becomes plausible again, more plausible than dying quickly after being infected.)

- The possibility or relative prevalence of healthy carriers - think Typhoid Mary. I.e. rare people who skip the symptoms part entirely but are still infectious.

- The disease is transmitted through an animal that is hard to keep out, the definition of “hard to keep out” would depend on the setting here. Poor water sanitation means waterborne bacteria and microscopic parasites would be a huge danger. Insect or arachnid (e.g. tick) bites could be a danger in almost any setting..

- As an alternative to above point: the bacterial/viral/parasite/whatever can form spores that are fucking EVERYWHERE. (Read: the reason for both tetanus and botulinum poisoning.)

- The pathogen is both dangerous and impossible to fully exterminate through vaccination because it has a huge population of reservoir hosts. (Reservoir hosts are entire SPECIES that can carry and propagate the disease without being affected much by it.) Same way the Black Plague is still out there because a shitton of rodent species passively carry it.

And many more things if you do some research for inspiration! Pathogens are scary, fascinating things, and I really wish we had more realistic fictional representation of them than “virus which causes zombie behaviour in 3 seconds flat” (looking at you, 28 Days Later) and “virus which can MIND-CONTROL people who view the main carrier through a COMPUTER SCREEN” (wtf???) (looking at you, Jessica Jones).

…man though, it’d be so *easy* to come up with an alien disease that made people break out in green and purple spots and have it make sense? bioengineered living tattoos! boom, done!

you know what trope i just go maximum apeshit for every goddamn time?

when a character has to improvise a weapon under urgent circumstances.

Writing systems in the world

A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication. There are about 4,000 languages that make use of an established writing system.

All writing systems require:

Generally, threre are three major types of writing systems: alphabets, syllabaries, and logographies. There are a number of subdivisions of each type, and there are different classifications of writing systems in different sources.

Alphabets use a standard set of letters representing the consonants and vowels of a spoken language. The correspondence is almost never one-to-one. Usually several different letters represent one phoneme and/or several phonemes are represented by the same letter. Alternately, a sequence of two or more letters can represent a single phoneme. Abjads differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, and in abugidas or alphasyllabaries each character represents a consonant-vowel pairing.

Syllabaries consist of symbols that represent syllables (which are considered to be a basic building block of the words).

Logographies use characters corresponding to words, morphemes or other semantic units.

Alphabets typically use a set of less than 100 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have several hundred, and logographies can have thousands of symbols.

Segmental systems

A segmental script has graphemes which represent the phonemes (basic unit of sound) of a language.

Alphabets

Alphabets, or phonemic alphabets, are sets of letters that represent consonants and vowels. The word “alphabet” is derived from alpha and beta, the first two symbols of the Greek alphabet.

Alphabets currently in use include Armenian, Cyrillic, Georgian (Mkhedruli), Greek, Korean (hangŭl), Latin/Roman, N’Ko, and Tifinagh.

Abjads

The first type of alphabet that was developed was the abjad. An abjad is an alphabetic writing system where there is one symbol per consonant. Abjads differ from other alphabets in that they have characters only for consonantal sounds, although vocalization is used in specific contexts, such as in religious books and children’s books. The term “abjad” takes its name from the old order of the Arabic alphabet’s consonants ‘alif, bā’, jīm, and dāl.

Arabic, Hebrew and Thaana are the only abjads currently in use, but Samaritan and Syriac are used to a limited extent.

Abugidas

An abugida is an alphabetic writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one. The graphic similarity of most abugidas comes from the fact that they are derived from abjads, and the consonants make up the symbols with the inherent vowel and the new vowel symbols are markings added on to the base symbol. The name abugida is derived from the first four characters of an order of the Ge'ez script used in some contexts.

Abugidas that are currently in use include Bengali, Burmese/Myanmar, Cree (Nêhiyaw), Dehong Dai (Tai Le), Devanāgarī, Fraser, Ge’ez (Ethiopic), Gujarāti, Gurmukhi (Punjabi), Inuktitut, Kannada, Khmer, Lao, Malayalam, Naskapi (Innu Aimun), Ojibwe (Anishinaabe), Odia, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, and Tibetan. 

The ones used to a limited extent are Balinese, Batak, Bilang-bilang, Blackfoot (Siksika), Buhid, Carrier (Dulkw’ahke), Chakma, Cham, Dhurwa, Ditema, Gondi, Grantha, Hanifi, Hanuno’o, Hmong, Javanese, Jenticha, Kaithi, Kerinci, Khoiki, Kirat Rai, Kulitan, Lampung, Lanna, Lepcha (Róng-Ríng), Limbu/Kirati, Lontara, Lota Ende, Manipuri (Meetei Mayek), Mon, Mwangwego, New Tai Lue, Ranjana, Rejang, Sasak, Satera Jontal, Saurashtra, Shan, Sharda, Siddham, Sorang Sompeng, Soyombo, Sundanese, Syloti Nagri, Tagalog, Tagbanwa, Tikamuli, Tolong Siki, Tigalari, and Varang Kshiti.

Syllabic systems

A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words.

Syllabaries currently in use include Cherokee (Tsalagi), Hiragana (Japanese), Katakana (Japanese), and Yi (Nosu).

Logographic systems

The symbols used in logographic systems often represent both sound and meaning. These scripts can also be called semanto-phonetic, logophonetic, morphoprhonemic, or logosyllabic.

They may include the following types of symbol:

Pictograms and logograms

Pictograms or pictographs resemble the things they represent. Logograms are symbols that represent parts of words or whole words.

Ideograms

Ideograms or ideographs are symbols which graphically represent abstract ideas.

Compound characters

Compound characters include a semantic element, which represents or hints at their meaning, and a phonetic element, which shows or hints at their pronunciation.

The semanto-phonetic writing systems currently in use are Chinese (Zhōngwén) and Japanese (Nihongo), while Naxi is used mainly for decorative, ceremonial or religious purposes.

Directionality

Scripts are also graphically characterized by the direction in which they are written. Egyptian hieroglyphs were written either left to right or right to left.

The early alphabet could be written in multiple directions: horizontally (side to side), or vertically (up or down). Prior to standardization, alphabetical writing was done both left-to-right and right-to-left.

The Greek alphabet and its successors settled on a left-to-right pattern, from the top to the bottom of the page. Other scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew, came to be written right-to-left. Scripts that incorporate Chinese characters have traditionally been written vertically (top-to-bottom), from the right to the left of the page, but nowadays are frequently written left-to-right, top-to-bottom, due to Western influence.