I found this document from 2017, which was sent to modelling agencies and production members when we were setting up a photoshoot for scenes from Snowflakes. It’s never been published before in any form. It was one of my documents watermarked NOT FOR RELEASE.
You may find this interesting if you’ve read the book, or you don’t mind some deeper insights into the characters which may contain very minor spoilers. There’s no big plot giveaway. Much of this will also apply to The Signal Tower because it’s basically the same story but with timings adjusted to link in with Into The Darkness.
Some Background
Snowflakes is a story about “Four strangers thrown together to fix a world that might not be broken”.
Characters in order of perceived age in the story: Sam, Carrie, Tilly and Ayla.
The characters come from different places and times but have all survived for many years by living an isolated existence in small cottage near a river on the edge of a forest, so they have hunted for food and have repaired and patched-up whatever clothes they arrived with or could find or make. They need to be attractive and appealing characters, but all have to look good in slightly shabby costume that probably doesn’t really fit them very well – because that is all there would be in the story. Plain, simple, attractive people. There is no glamour here.
Sam, Carrie and Tilly are a threesome in terms of their relationship. Sam and Carrie were together for a short while before they came to the cottage and met Tilly, so Sam and Carrie ‘look like’ a couple in the sense that their clothes and appearance ‘match’ more closely than Sam does with Tilly. They would have had a similar style of clothes from the time they spent together at the settlement where they both first met.
Tilly first came to the cottage as a schoolgirl and grew up there on her own, learning to look after herself as best she could. When Sam and Carrie arrived she would have been mid- to late-teens and have different clothes (and outlook on life) to them. Out of necessity the two girls share Sam, something which occasionally niggles at Carrie, but Tilly doesn’t mind because she never though of Sam as belonging to her in the first place and all of them know that Sam really prefers her to Carrie anyway. Tilly is therefore the fresh-faced ‘interloper’ who is attractive, intelligent, a little bit naïve perhaps, but a lot of fun.
Ayla arrives at the cottage when Sam, Carrie and Tilly are already established there. She is a total mystery. She is a small creature, somewhat child-like in appearance. She doesn’t speak, she only draws – everywhere – she contributes a lot to the house and is very intelligent, but keeps herself away from the others as much as she can.
All this is setup in the first couple of chapters, we only need to consider the characters in the form they are when they are all living together as a group because that is when the plot begins.
The others assume that Ayla sleeps a lot, whereas in reality she climbs out of the back upstairs window and goes out hunting at night like Sam… but a different kind of hunting. Shabby most of the time, Ayla at night in the shadows is sleek, trim and cat-like.
Ayla is never referred to in first person, she is always a shape, she is always a shadow, she is always a mysterious creature. She is always there, but seemingly playing no significant role in the story, until the twist at the very end when her real purpose becomes clearer. A ‘lost soul’, ignored for most of the story it turns out that Ayla has a crucial part to play, something which she might in fact have been engineering even before she first turned up at the cottage. The entire story only works because there is an Ayla.
Sam
Male, caucasian
Age: Late twenties to early thirties (in appearance)
Height and build: Tall, slim
Hair: Black, curly if possible
Sam is a traveller, a hunter with a wry sense of humour. The girls like Sam, so he can be rugged in features but must be appealing.
Excerpts which describe the character and some contexts in which he appears:
[Carrie recounting the first time she saw him]
… a dashing figure of a man, tall and slim, with curly black hair, dressed very smartly in velvety sort of clothes with shiny buckles. When I was a child I remember seeing pictures in a book showing men who rode around on horses robbing people. I think they were called ‘highway men’. That’s what he reminded me of.
[in Fifty-Fifty]
Somewhere overhead in the rafters a couple of oil lamps shed a yellowy-orange flicker on a tall thin man wearing tidy dark clothes and black hat. He was standing near the door with his sleeves rolled up. The others were watching him expectantly as though he were about to perform some kind of magic trick.
[in Torrent of Darkness when Tilly first discovers what Sam does at night]
Sam reached his hand to the hip of the guard and withdrew the long curved sword from its scabbard. It made a satisfying swishing sound. As he held it aloft the blade shone momentarily like a ribbon of moonlight against the darkened sky. Then, shifting his grip and taking the heavy weapon with both hands he swung a wide arc at neck height, which connected directly with the pair of motionless figures, taking one of their heads clean off.
……
He raised the heavy sword over his head again with his two-handed grip, rammed the point into the ground, then turned with a flourish and ran back to the doorway where Tilly had been watching from the shadows. Behind him the crowd began to gather around the remains of the two fallen figures. Some of the children were using one of the heads as a football.
“You killed them!” squeaked Tilly.
“No,” said Sam, “Well – yes,” he added, “but not really because there are plenty of other worlds where they’re still alive.”
[in Tycoon]
On this occasion Sam had chosen his all-black outfit, with the drainpipe trousers and polo neck.
Carrie
Female, caucasian
Age: Mid to late twenties in appearance.
Height and build: Shorter than Sam, less than 5’8”, imagined to be around size 12-14-16
Hair: Dark – brown if possible rather than black*. Shoulder length or longer. Wavy.
*otherwise we’d have three characters with black hair.
Excerpts which describe the character and some contexts in which she appears:
[in Home From Home]
[compared to Tilly] Carrie always seemed to be the harder of the two older girls. She’d seen a bit more of life when she was at the settlement, was a bit older and wiser, liked to organise, liked to criticise a bit more often, and generally kept most of her feelings to herself.
[in Taking Carrie when Sam is explaining why they can’t take Carrie with them on their assassinations]
“Look, Carrie is a fine girl,“ he said very soothingly, “A fine girl who treats everyone fairly, who believes that there is good in all people and that the problems of the world would be solved if only all nations and races sat down and talked to each other, and smiled, and washed their hands before dinner and didn’t fart in bed,” he added.
…….
“Carrie’s idea of a nice world is a little farmhouse in the country, with two children, and the smell of cupcakes coming from the kitchen. She’d be singing sweetly and the little birds would be fluttering about and twittering as she hung out the washing in the sunshine, and all the animals would be her friends,” he added sourly.
[in The Moonlight Shadow talking with Carrie about Ayla’s wall drawings]
“Yes,” replied Tilly, “The blobs that look like heads seem to represent people, and then there’s some kind of added attribute to denote what person it is. So a blob with a wavy line is you [Carrie] probably because you tend to have wavy hair – that’s the most obvious feature of you that makes you different from me…
Tilly
Female, caucasian.
Height and build: Same height or a little shorter than Carrie (around 5’6” or less) imagined to be around size 12-14-16
Age: Early to mid-twenties in appearance.
Hair: Blonde, Straight, as long as we can get*.
Tilly is imagined to be quite fresh-faced, youthful in appearance. Although at times she seems like a ‘big-kid’ she comes from a science background, so she’s young, pretty, and intelligent.
*The story implies that she has waist-length hair, however we can live without that because there are not many back-shots that will show it all, and we can post-process the few that will.
Excerpts which describe the character and some context in which she appears:
[in Home From Home]
[compared to Carrie] Tilly however was a little more affectionate, had a slightly more caring and compassionate attitude to life, smiled a bit more often, and was blonde [implying that Carrie isn’t]
[in Monkey Business after falling out of a tree into the river while trying to get her arrows back]
Tilly was currently sat cross-legged facing the fire trying to squeeze as much water as possible out of a three-foot length of wet hair with a dishcloth.
[in Tycoon when Sam takes Tilly out with him on ‘business’]
...what he hadn’t considered for covert operations in the dark was how easy it was to spot Tilly in the moonlight. It was like being followed around by a big white flag.
“It doesn’t stay tucked in!” complained Tilly, trying to push a mass of blonde hair back down the neck of her roll-top, “…and when we jump around it all flies about again.”
“What do girls usually do with it when they go out on assassinations?” hissed Sam, looking around anxiously.
[in The Moonlight Shadow talking with Carrie about Ayla’s wall drawings]
“Well your hair is almost always straight,” replied Carrie [to Tilly], “But a blob followed by a straight vertical line isn’t much different from a blob followed by a wavy vertical line.”
Ayla
Female. Dark or olive skin – Indian? African? Mediterranean?
Height and build: Small, athletic, agile. Probably less than about 5’4” if we can.
Hair: Black, Straight, Long
Eyes: Big, Dark
Ayla is a totally mysterious creature. Out of place during the day but cat-like at night. Model can be late teens early twenties. She doesn’t speak but she draws – so she is a perpetually grubby little ‘thing’.
She first appears in the book as a child, but we don’t need specific pictures of her as a child because the story covers a long period of time and she is mid- to late-teens by the end of it, so we can work with a young-looking model who is actually older.
Excerpts from the story which describe the character:
[introduction]
Carrie opened the door to darkness. At first it seemed there was nothing there, but then she slowly looked down into a little dirty upturned face with big dark eyes, surrounded by long dark hair, dressed in clothes that were too tatty to even serve as rags, and very thin and cold.
The new arrival didn’t speak, and they never found out where she came from, but she was very clever.
…….
It all left the others wondering a myriad of questions. Who she was, where she came from, exactly what she understood, what she wanted, why she never spoke.
You could look at her and wonder, but there was no point in asking the questions, because the big dark eyes never gave you an answer.
[in Home From Home]
She was always alert, always ready to spring up with her grubby hands and face and kill something, or take the skin off it, or go out in the freezing rain to climb up and push a stubborn window shut or fetch another log for the dying fire. To do the things, in fact, that the others were not so eager to rush into. She didn’t seem to either like things or hate them, they just had to be done.
…….
The big wall in the downstairs room … was the wall that Ayla had taken to using for her drawings. It was a logical place because there was charcoal and ash from the fire to draw with … and she spent a lot of time scribbling and rubbing and redrawing in the evenings, so she went about with perpetually grubby hands and fingers, and a grubby face as well.
…….
At the moment she was no threat to the ménage à trois and Sam wasn’t really interested in her anyway. She was a bit too young, not particularly girl-shaped yet, and preferred to sleep on her own. Tilly and Carrie wondered whether Sam had ever tried to look at her through the eyes of another girl. He may not have, but they did quite often. They were painfully aware that this mysterious creature with the big dark eyes, beautiful long dark hair and grubby face was going to turn into something stunning one day, and when the day came that she started to show an interest in boys they’d better watch out because there was going to be trouble.
[in The Moonlight Shadow when the reader discovers what follows Sam when he goes hunting]
The shape following along behind was smaller and faster but, unlike the larger one, it didn’t need to make itself invisible against the background. It hadn’t learned to be a hunter from an early age, it had never been anything else. When it stopped it didn’t need to blend into the shadows to avoid being seen. When it stopped against the darkness it simply didn’t exist.
…….
The shape sat for a few moments contemplating the new landscape, its long dark hair drifting in the gentle breeze while its grubby fingers played with a small piece of coal it had found, before disappearing down the other side of the embankment towards the moonlit track.
…….
Some hours later as the moon was starting to set below the tops of the trees a shadow moved quickly and stealthily along the edge of the clearing towards the cottage. Reaching a point directly behind the building in the shadows it crossed to the back corner, stood on the end of a lump of timber that protruded from the log pile and leapt up onto the roof of the woodshed. Then, taking hold of the drainpipe with one hand it put one foot onto the iron fixing bracket, swung itself around to the ledge and disappeared through the upstairs window.