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The script for Wolf in Shepherd's Clothing has finally left the alpha stage! If anyone's interested, I'll be doing a Twitch stream on April 29 to do some art and other such things. Feel free to drop by and ask questions!

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ashes to ashes, dust to dust, reeses to pieces

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Just cured my headache by eating a handful of strawberries like a fucking gnome

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Introducing: Wolf in Shepherd's Clothing

CHAPTER: 1 of 3 STATUS: alpha review (script), thumbnailing (pages), sketches (character/set design) GENRE: fantasy, adventure WORLD: Urathla

Lahar is a shepherd who lives in the foothills outside of a nearby city. With their memory loss, it's hard to say if they've seen anything that's been causing the disappearing livestock of late. Unfortunately for them, they're the harbinger of a brand new magic, and a brand new curse.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the intro post for my upcoming webcomic, Wolf in Shepherd's Clothing. Some of you may already know of its existence, and what inspires it.

Originally, this story was intended to be much shorter and based in real life Mesopotamia, or as much as I could manage, but as I continued developing the story, I realized that it was adopting more and more fantastical elements I would want to exercise full worldbuilding over, rather than rely on 'historical accuracy'. Thus it joined Urathla, a world I had created for my Arthurian legend-inspired novel, much for the same reasons.

The first chapter reckons with the shepherd and their family as they navigate regular life and regular strife, before coming to a cliffhanger I hope everyone will enjoy. The shepherd is Lahar, and their siblings are Halba, Uzalla, Myri, and Ensy. Masdaria is the four older childrens' stepmother, and Ensy's blood mother- with another baby on the way.

More details about these characters will come as soon as I can manage!

I will be posting all the pages FOR FREE on bsky, Ko-fi, and Tumblr, and hopefully if I can manage to make it work, my own website. I am not intending to post on X/Twitter or TikTok, but you're welcome to talk about it there. I may eventually share it on Webtoon or Tapas, but I'm a bit uncertain since this will NOT be a webtoon format- it will follow a page-by-page webcomic format.

The comic will be portrayed in grayscale, with possible 'pop' colors in chapters 2 and 3, like red or blue. This is still my own project, after all, and I'm going to be using that fact to help me control value and composition rather than using color as a crutch.

Further, my art style will almost certainly shift around as I continue drawing this story, and that is more or less intentional. I'm sorry to those who seek more consistent styles, but as an artist I am always learning and growing.

A pay-what-you-want (but ultimately free) HD PDF version will be available when the first chapter is completed, and a somewhat more expensive (around 3-5 USD) 'ultimate' version will also be available for those that are interested.

(Difference there being that the 'ultimate' edition will include a fancier, illustrated colored cover, no watermark across the pages, plus some other goodies like maps if I can manage to squeeze them in!)

Additionally, paid posts will be available on Ko-fi for monthly members. Namely, character and set design notes, early access to maps, and possibly even annotated pages if there's interest. I may also decide to color specific pages or panels, some of which may come to community vote if there's enough interest in that!

All the characters will receive completely free 'intro' pieces, plus simple turnarounds for those that want to make fanart. Paid posts will include sketches and more detailed turnarounds, plus my ramblings about their specific designs.

If there's enough interest, I may also combine these design notes into a PDF on the shop, but that's a later decision.

Feel free to ask questions on bsky, Ko-fi or Tumblr!

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fascism is fascism is fascism

An Australian fiction author was arrested over a book she wrote recently (read more here). The police said they did this “following reports of a fiction novel containing child abuse material”.

I haven't read the book, nor do I know anything about the author or what she's written beyond vague social media references. Readers are allowed to feel how they want about it, they're allowed to DNF it and give it bomb reviews, they're allowed to boycott the author.

But she's been arrested. She could go to jail for writing fiction. This is terrifying and it should be terrifying to everyone.

You know what books get banned if we ban CSA in books? The Colour Purple. Beloved. Lolita. Any memoirs from CSA victims.

And I know there'll be some internet warrior out there ready to tell me all the nuances and differences between these books and the arrested author's book: that her book sexualised this dynamic, it was romanticised, it was for erotic purposes, it was disgusting and triggering. You know what? Yeah. From what little I've seen, I agree. There's no comparison to be made between 'Daddy's Little Toy' and 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'. But this isn't about that; it's about the law, which eventually won't distinguish between them if the vague definition of CSAM is allowed to encapsulate fiction.

You can't make fiction illegal based on your own personal distaste for certain subjects, even if they're presented in a simplistic or sexualised or problematic way. Conservatives have been open about their beliefs that drag storytimes are child abuse, that exposing children to any form of queerness is child abuse. What if CSAM expands to include that? Do we arrest every author who's written queer young adult fiction?

The truth is, our heads are on the chopping block next. They will come for you. You can't be a little bit fascist and expect it to stop there. Alice Walker and Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou have all been banned before, which is why I used their work as examples. Black women will be first on the chopping block, right alongside trans writers.

If you support criminalising authors, but think it should be solely contained to what you find offensive and dangerous, you are doing exactly what fascism wants you to.

I'm terrified. I'm terrified that I'm seeing hordes of young, left-leaning people celebrating this across social media, to see people who love books celebrating this, to see anyone saying that is a bad thing being shut down and labelled a predator and paedophile.

This author was arrested in Australia; in the US, Trump is defunding the Department of Education and supporting mass book bans to protect children from "woke" ideology; in the UK, puberty blockers have been banned on the grounds of "protecting children". All of these things are interconnected. In our English-speaking Western world, trends catch on fast. The guise of "protecting children" has always been used as a cover for fascism.

And the irony is, children aren't being protected. As someone who's worked in child safety, I know the things we need to do to ensure children are protected from sexual abuse - and those are social security, teaching body safety from a young age, and supporting parents to watch out for the warning signs. We need to particularly support communities of colour, particularly Black and Indigenous communities, and poor communities.

But of course, we defund education and healthcare and benefits instead, we blame parents, we hush up institutional abuse. We continue bombing Palestinian children with those tax dollars instead. We continue our White supremacist hurricane.

Governments don't actually give a fuck about protecting children. If they did, they'd help the children actually being harmed. But instead, they'll ban books and arrest authors to distract you, to make you focussed on the wrong issues. And this is a two for one deal, because when they decide that you are the problem, they can use your own logic against you, because they planted it there in the first place.

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Introducing: Wolf in Shepherd's Clothing

CHAPTER: 1 of 3 STATUS: alpha review (script), thumbnailing (pages), sketches (character/set design) GENRE: fantasy, adventure WORLD: Urathla

Lahar is a shepherd who lives in the foothills outside of a nearby city. With their memory loss, it's hard to say if they've seen anything that's been causing the disappearing livestock of late. Unfortunately for them, they're the harbinger of a brand new magic, and a brand new curse.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the intro post for my upcoming webcomic, Wolf in Shepherd's Clothing. Some of you may already know of its existence, and what inspires it.

Originally, this story was intended to be much shorter and based in real life Mesopotamia, or as much as I could manage, but as I continued developing the story, I realized that it was adopting more and more fantastical elements I would want to exercise full worldbuilding over, rather than rely on 'historical accuracy'. Thus it joined Urathla, a world I had created for my Arthurian legend-inspired novel, much for the same reasons.

The first chapter reckons with the shepherd and their family as they navigate regular life and regular strife, before coming to a cliffhanger I hope everyone will enjoy. The shepherd is Lahar, and their siblings are Halba, Uzalla, Myri, and Ensy. Masdaria is the four older childrens' stepmother, and Ensy's blood mother- with another baby on the way.

More details about these characters will come as soon as I can manage!

I will be posting all the pages FOR FREE on bsky, Ko-fi, and Tumblr, and hopefully if I can manage to make it work, my own website. I am not intending to post on X/Twitter or TikTok, but you're welcome to talk about it there. I may eventually share it on Webtoon or Tapas, but I'm a bit uncertain since this will NOT be a webtoon format- it will follow a page-by-page webcomic format.

The comic will be portrayed in grayscale, with possible 'pop' colors in chapters 2 and 3, like red or blue. This is still my own project, after all, and I'm going to be using that fact to help me control value and composition rather than using color as a crutch.

Further, my art style will almost certainly shift around as I continue drawing this story, and that is more or less intentional. I'm sorry to those who seek more consistent styles, but as an artist I am always learning and growing.

A pay-what-you-want (but ultimately free) HD PDF version will be available when the first chapter is completed, and a somewhat more expensive (around 3-5 USD) 'ultimate' version will also be available for those that are interested.

(Difference there being that the 'ultimate' edition will include a fancier, illustrated colored cover, no watermark across the pages, plus some other goodies like maps if I can manage to squeeze them in!)

Additionally, paid posts will be available on Ko-fi for monthly members. Namely, character and set design notes, early access to maps, and possibly even annotated pages if there's interest. I may also decide to color specific pages or panels, some of which may come to community vote if there's enough interest in that!

All the characters will receive completely free 'intro' pieces, plus simple turnarounds for those that want to make fanart. Paid posts will include sketches and more detailed turnarounds, plus my ramblings about their specific designs.

If there's enough interest, I may also combine these design notes into a PDF on the shop, but that's a later decision.

Feel free to ask questions on bsky, Ko-fi or Tumblr!

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It's time: The second version of the demo to my indie puzzle game, Holoatypical, is out! Come give it a try!

@badscientist @curiouscalembour @writingrosesonneptune @gioia-writes-and-others

@monstrify @cowboybrunch @tsunamiscale @tragedycoded

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today's warm up: If it can't see you, it can't get you/The sale of eyemasks go up tenfold in small english town.

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one thing tumblr has unironically done to improve my mental health is completely rewrite how i view disgust as a concept. there is no higher compliment to me than being told i have something wrong with me and should be ashamed of myself when i'm just living my life in a way that is perhaps odd and hard to understand, but ultimately as harmless as you can get in our society. which probably wasn't the intention of all the advice i got in therapy to reframe my negative thought patterns as more positive ones, but it's doing great things for me.

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I just think people write out of obligation too often.

"How do I motivate myself to write through the boring part of my story?"

"How do I make this boring scene not boring?"

Don't write it.

Don't write boring things just because you think the structure of the story demands it. I promise it doesn't need to be there.

If your characters need to have gone shopping for a later part of the story to make sense you can just have a sentence about how they went shopping and move on.

You are not obligated to write the boring parts. No matter what those parts are.

You are not obligated to make the parts of your story that you're not excited to write interesting somehow.

You can just write the fun and interesting parts and gloss over and summarize boring things.

Your audience will thank you and you will thank yourself.

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happy ides of march

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art is like spaghetti, I guess

a not-really-any-better version of this comic I made at work. this is my handwriting, fam. and I cannot draw people. but I really wanted to compare art to spaghetti, so here you go.

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“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot

“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.

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Fun differences between warmups and cooldowns with grownup versions of oc children 💖

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THE VESPERTINE | wip intro

summary

Aselhi is one orphan among many on the streets of Kestramore, eking out a living as a servant in a minor household. Unlike other orphans, they're one of the vespertine, an alien people who ate through the cosmic Weft separating Moia from the other realms and setting the Causeways alight.

They also have a secret: they have the ability to whisper into the crushed velvet night and bring the power of the Causeways to their fingertips. This secret is known by few, and one they refuse to use, as it would mark them as a sage - and thus forcibly separated from society into their own class.

This changes all at once, where Aselhi saves the life of Josric, finding out that he has the same power. They promise to teach him, but when they uncover that he's a prince of Lindor, they flee. In the meantime, the sun sets on Kestramore, and everything changes as most of Josric's family is eradicated by traitors within hours.

With nowhere else to turn, Jos turns to Aselhi. Feeling somewhat responsible for the younger boy, they join his escape from Kestramore. With sagekeepers and rebel nobility on their heels, they find themselves wandering the mountains in the west, called by the Causeways to a valley hidden deep within...

setting

Moia - #moia

POV characters

Aselhi Josric (maybe?)

genres

medieval fantasy, adventure

themes

found family, blood family, good vs evil (kinda), societal roles, determination, identity

target audience

interest-based

status

on hold first draft first draft word goal: 50000

tags

#wip: the vespertine

taglist

please ask to be added/removed! [no one! ...yet!]

meta notes

I currently need to go back and seriously reassess what I have already done for Moia's worldbuilding, since it's been actually ages since I took a look at it. I don't know when I'll start on that, since I already have both my arms elbow-deep in Urathla's worldbuilding right now, and I want to make sure I start fresh.