I don't have to go to work tomorrow! And then I'm off for a week!!!!!
UJ--"Just my own contributions come to over a thousand pages in standard manucript format." Now, where have I heard that? Oh, yeah. It's a thousand pages, give or take a few. I'll be writing more in a week or two. Live long and write.
Sara King--Maybe you have, not an antagonist, but an antihero?
Anna White and Ken Schneider--Scratching in the dirt sounds useful for communication. Anna, by the way--does the alphabet in your world have to look like the Western alphabet? An alphabet with lots of straight vertical strokes would be easier to produce with claws. Or, think Roman numerals. Or, at the most basic--a 5 made with 4 verticals and 1 horizontal slash. An animal could produce 4 verticals by chance, but the slash is a deliberate addition.
YMMV.