Thank you alycecaswell for all the helpful information and advice. Also, for the motivation to make drawings for this story via my other story. Anyone reading please go and read her stories. You won't be disappointed, she's a very talented writer.

Thank you HeptAgon77 for also offering helpful hints, all the fun commentary and voting on my stories.
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This story was written for several contests, but a portion of it had to do with repetitive dreams. Mostly about giant rats and my cat. Except—for whatever reason, though I have a suspicion—I was my cat in the dream and the rats were ominously surrounding me.

This was also an interesting experiment with something new and different for me. I can now say: that I will never write in a colloquial, third person limited, present tense style again! [Yes, that was a fit.] Unless, it's demanded within a prompt, with a 2000 word limit and an extremely, extremely enticing topic. Why? Because the style feels very detached. Awkwardly, far away from the reality of the character, almost as if reading the story from an alternate-dimension-kind-of-far. If I have difficulty attaching myself to the characters throughout the start and end of a story, the readers most certainly will as well. For that reason, I find it to be an inadequate writing style for me, but I can place a check mark on my list of "styles to try". Colloquial, first person, present tense narration might be fine [dependent on the story or target audience] and contains the immediacy required.

It does require a good amount of editing, I know.

Now that I've explained all that, fancy a look at the process of the drawings?

They're all drawn on 215.9 by 279.4 mm white sheets of paper. Fine lines first drawn with a 0.7 mm mechanical pencil [messy filling, shadowing, initial "gesture" style sketches were with a regular pencil], inked with an Extra Fine Pilot pen and even finer lines with a Bic Intensity Fineliner 0.4 mm point. For all those that like detailed descriptions of tools.

Start of Claire and Derek [rubber bits included]:

Inking of Claire:

Reduced the length of her leg and closed his legs more [accidentally went a little over with the lip crease, unfortunately, making her look older]:

Finished [Derek making a silly monkey face, poor chap's in pain and suffering joyously]:

Forgot to save this while it was all in pencil [Richard at the end of the hall]:

Finished:

Richard inked [some bloke my friend knows was the "model". Since, she wouldn't say whether she was dating him, we'll call him "indeterminate bloke"]. The beginning of Sarah:

Sarah almost done in pencil [inspiration for Sarah's fashion was Martha Stewart]:

Finished:

Final example [the dogs]
Beginning:

[I don't remember why I started with the poodle's head in that last one, perhaps to force the height?] Finished:

You have reached the end of this segment. I rarely share the process of my drawings with people, unless they're my closest friends, so this is something else that's new for me. Thank you for viewing!