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@hope-mcclellan AHHH. . . if you ever need a beta reader. . . I’m always looking for distractions from my schoolwork, especially ones as fascinating as this one! 😀 I’d love to see more of Asmund. I’ll bet he and Firn have an interesting character dynamic XD. And. . . agh, they just all sound so interesting! Hydra’s already got me smiling, because my sister is an ENFP, too. And Cillian. . . he intrigues me. . .

You’re going to have such a fun story when you’re done! 😀

And heh, Kiet’s kind of my favorite character, too. XD Don’t tell Grace. It took me forever to properly develop her because he distracted me so much. But hey, she likes him too, so I can’t imagine she’d mind TOO much.

Kedori has been fun to write! I’m actually learning ASL myself (I’m almost done with ASL 2) using Lifeprint.com. How did you learn it?

One of my issues/things to play with in my story is that in his world, there’s not exactly a Deaf community like you can find here. There’s more of a stigma around being deaf. His biggest support was his mother, who came up with a sign language so they could communicate easily and taught him a lot of school stuff since he didn’t go to school in his hometown (whether that’s because the teacher didn’t want to deal with a deaf kid in the classroom or for some other reason I haven’t thought through yet). It hit him pretty hard when both she and his father died. After moving to Layra to live with his aunt, he was pretty dedicated to learning, not just because he enjoyed it (although he did), but also because it helps him feel close to his mother.

But anyway, to answer your question! Since he’s the only one besides his mother that really knows his sign language, he mostly just writes to other people on a slate, and that’s fairly easy to just communicate with italics. His friends do try to learn some sign, but they can only communicate so easily like that to start, and he’s kind of used to having to write things down. However, when he gets upset, he sometimes just starts signing. And sometimes when he does that, you can tell the basics of what he’s saying even if you don’t know much sign!

(I do wish I could think of a way to communicate the essence of sign in writing, though! Because just putting down the complete English translation doesn’t capture the flavor of it, but describing every sign step by step is pretty overboard. *sigh* )

And last but not least, I love the Kiet picture and love sharing it with anyone who will look! XD