#I'd like to develop an actual alphabet system for this world but for now it's just nonsense

[woodsplinter]

Some creatures I thought would commonly be used to advertise things like shops or events, or just a sturdy friend for traveling merchants.

[script-a-world]

Pylon Bios!

As we've added some new team members, please allow us to introduce ourselves!

First of all, we call ourselves Pylons. What the heck is a pylon? Well, outside of this blog, it’s an upright structure for holding up something, usually a cable or conduit. When this blog was started more than five years ago (whoa), the group chose the word Pylon to describe ourselves collectively, as a fun little nickname. Whee!

Without further ado, meet the current Pylons! (in alphabetical order) (For retired Pylons, please visit the Historical Pylons page.)

Addy: Howdy hey, I'm Addy! I dabble in many (many) things, but I'm most familiar with civil engineering and general logistics, along with some knowledge about vernacular architecture and neat ruins. Beyond that, I have some pretty eclectic knowledge from a lifetime of Wikipedia binges. I tend to lean towards fantasy, but do have an interest in sci-fi. 

My favorite thing in worldbuilding is taking an "unrealistic" premise (eg, a flat world) and finding a way to make an internal system that makes sense. No matter what you do, you want your system to run by consistent rules - beyond that, there's a lot of freedom.

Brainstormed: Hey there, call me RB or Brainstormed, and you can find me at @thunderin-brainstorm. Any pronouns will do. I'm a student, illustrator, and world traveler currently back in the US. Worldbuilding has been my hobby for quite a long time and I'd love to give you some tips and tricks that I've learned, or take your idea and turn it on its head to perhaps show you a new perspective. The many projects I've developed have been lifesavers for me, as they allowed me to harness my Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder and use it as a positive tool for creativity. Aside from drawing and daydreaming, I spend a lot of time biking, hunting for cool rocks and bones, binge reading any scholarly article that catches my eye, and memorising completely useless random facts that I spout at any given moment in lieu of remembering actual important information.

Constablewrites: My name is Brittany, and I'm a California girl living in the Midwest. I use she/her pronouns. I've always loved stories with rich and detailed worlds, whether in movies, books, games, or something else entirely. I'm the kind of writer who will spend hours researching to confirm a minor detail. Naturally, I not only write SFF, but my recent projects have all required worldbuilding on more than one axis (like multiple types of magic, or time travel on top of historical) because I am apparently something of a masochist. I'm a walking TV Tropes index and a whiz at digging up random useful knowledge, both of which come in handy as a Pylon. Other random facts: I'm a trained actress and singer, I used to work at Disneyland on the Jungle Cruise (among other attractions), and a laptop held together with duct tape is responsible for my day job in tech support. I blog about writing as @constablewrites and about random things that amuse me as @operahousebookworm.

Ebonwing: Hi, I’m Ebonwing. I’m a writer and worldbuilder, and sometimes a worldbuilding writer or a writing worldbuilder. I gravitate towards fantasy, though I’m not going to say no to the occasional stint in scifi, and as I’m also a giant language nerd, I enjoy making conlangs for my creations. Other than that, I’m also an artist and indulge in any number of other crafting hobbies, and if I’m not doing any of those things, I can probably be found playing video games. 

Feral (she/her): Hi! I'm Feral, and you can find me @theferalcollection where I reblog things nearly exclusively or on my website theferalcollection.com where I post original writing content and offer freelance editing services for indie comic books. I work in the interiors & home furnishings industry and have previously earned degrees in comparative literature and theatre & drama. 

I’ve been writing and worldbuilding for over twenty-five years now (jfc). I used to consider myself a fantasy writer, but I’ve been writing almost exclusively science fiction for the past six years. My first love was Star Wars, so I think it will always be a little of both. 

My worldbuilding philosophy is that internal consistency matters more than just about anything else, and it really all comes down to the story you want to tell with your world - whether it’s told to others or just yourself.

Licorice: Hi, I’m Licorice. I’ve worked as a full time secondary school teacher of social studies for several decades now; my specialism is world history, but I also know a fair bit about law, politics, philosophy, anthropology, the history of medicine, and current affairs generally. My current academic interest is Chinese history. In my free time, one of my hobbies is writing fanfiction. I have travelled all over the world, and spent long periods of my life living in cultures not my own, mostly in Europe and Africa. I speak English, French, and beginners’ Japanese.

Miri: Miri here, with my main tumblr @asylos and my writing tumblr @mirintala. I am a Canadian Pharmacy Technician by day and a small time ePublisher and gamer of many types by night. Mostly wandering around the Internet helping to organize events in the FFVII tumblr fandom (modding at @ff7central and @ffviifandomcalendar), and stumbling around in various video games with my friends. I use she/they pronouns

Synth: I’m @chameleonsynthesis on Tumblr, but that’s a mouthful, so just call me Synth. Any pronouns work. Born and raised in Canada, but living in Norway since late 2007. Been worldbuilding in one form or another for some thirty-odd years now, with a predominantly science-fantasy bent. I’m of the artsy creative type, with way too many projects on the go at any given time, and enjoy long walks through Wikipedia and getting caught in TV Tropes. The best thing is when I stumble across some strange factoid that can justify aspects of my many weird alien species. When I’m not working on my worldbuilding or my art or at band rehearsal I can often be found exploring the hiking trails in the mountains surrounding the city.

It seems I have become the main “space ask” person ‘round these parts.

Tex: Hello, I’m Tex. Most of my hobbies are centered around fandom and worldbuilding for it, particularly on the science side, though I also like cooking and reading up on fiction and non-fiction whenever I have the time.

Utuabzu: Hi, I’m Utuabzu, I previously was part of ScriptMyth (RIP) where I tended to take the lead on Mesopotamia and Egypt related asks. I’m most of the way through a Bachelor of Linguistics, e parlo italiano und ein bisschen Deutsch. I have a deep and enduring interest in the history of the ancient world, particularly the ancient Near East, and I’m also a bit of a nerd for politics, which is helpful when it comes to worldbuilding. My random adhd-fueled 2am research binges have resulted in my knowing a lot of odd things. I enjoy traveling and experiencing other cultures, however as I am Australian this unfortunately requires flying, which I hate a great deal, and a fair bit of money, which I don't have. I expect to one day be crushed beneath a pile of my books. It is a demise I am ok with. If I must be referred to in the third person, he/him is fine, but don't stress about it. Other pronouns are more likely to cause confusion than offence. I have an unfortunate tendency towards really long sentences.

Wootzel: Hi, I’m Wootzel, or @wootzel-dragon! I use she/her pronouns. I'm a writer and artist of various flavors of fantasy, when I'm not being swallowed by life's obligations. My favorite thing about worldbuilding is making things as realistic or pseudo-realistic as possible, and finding a justification for everything. Sometimes, this is also my least favorite thing about myself, because it can make things very hard! But, it can also be really rewarding when I get things to work out in a way that I enjoy. 

My other hobbies include trying to rehabilitate my anxious dog, starting ambitious sewing projects on a whim, and wondering where all my time goes on a daily basis. I am still unsure about what I want to do with my life, except that it’ll always have writing in it somewhere. 

[comicaurora]

This question has almost certainly been asked before, and apologies if it has, but I've been thinking about creativity and creative endeavors and such and I was very curious. This comic has clearly been in development for a long time, so my question is, what was the creative process of developing this world and story like for you? Where did you start, stuff like that?

Like many projects, it started because I was bored and unhappy and I wanted a fun place to put my brain. I was eleven-ish, socially isolated, ADHD-undiagnosed, internet-free and entertainment-deprived. When I read Diana Wynne Jones's Tough Guide To Fantasyland for the first time I had a sudden burst of clarity and realized if I couldn't have entertainment I liked, I could make it. (A lot of my issues were permanently resolved as soon as I got an internet connection, for the record. It's like an IV drip for an ADHD brain.)

I started building a fantasy world, initially just by throwing in everything I liked and every idea I thought was fun. It was like I'd just discovered the concept of drinking water for the first time - there was no strategy and no higher plan at the beginning, I just really needed it. At the time I thought my end goal was to create a comic I could read and enjoy, but I realized gradually that it's impossible for an artist to ever be their own audience - instead the enjoyment I was getting from the process was the actual act of creation itself. I liked having ideas and having somewhere to put those ideas. I liked fitting ideas together and finding bigger, more coherent patterns in the mess. I shifted away from "piling on every single thing I liked" and towards a more coherent strategy - building a world that actually held together, a magic system worth exploring, and a gradually-expanding cast of characters that were fun to play with.

At this point I'd say this wasn't too far off from how a kid would play with dolls. You have characters and dynamics and maybe even an overarching plot, but ultimately it's freeform; you're not aiming to construct a coherent narrative, you're having fun. But the idea that someday this world would be something I actually made was very useful for me, because it became something of an unreachable star I could orient towards.

As a side effect of Who I Am As A Person, I have a lot of trouble learning skills if I don't have a reason to want to know how to do them. The process would be incredibly slow and incredibly tedious until I was given something I could tangibly connect the skill to, at which point I would suddenly pick it up startlingly fast. For instance, I was initially slow to pick up how to read - I had the alphabet down, but putting the characters together into words was hard and boring. I could pick out the names of storefronts, but who cares what a store is called? And then my dad started reading me Harry Potter as a bedtime story and I got so invested I decided he was getting through it too slowly, and somewhere in that fugue state I apparently just learned how to read so I could get to the good stuff faster.

So before I had the beginnings of this world, I had been taught how to sketch and how to write, but in my head those skills were tedious to learn and pointless to master. I didn't want to sit down and draw owl wings from every angle, and I had no stories I wanted to write, so the good-natured attempts from my parents to teach me those skills were just deepening the tar pit of my constant, crushing (undiagnosed ADHD) boredom. But now I had a concept I wanted to create - and more than that, I wanted to do it justice. And that meant I had a lot of stuff I was suddenly very invested in learning how to do.

Art was the big one. I was also obviously bad at writing, but that was harder for me to notice. I knew when I tried to draw things they didn't turn out the way I saw them in my mind, and that frustrated me. This is when my habit of doodling in class went from a minor distraction to a full-on menace, and also when I started contemplating the logistics of actual comic creation and distribution. I knew from my mom that the comic industry was a huge pain in the butt and not a good way to get your story told the way you wanted it, and I also knew many comics were having newfound distribution success as webcomics, which at the time was a fairly new form of the medium. So that meant I had to learn how webcomics worked, and I had to either get really good at physical art or I had to start looking into the also-new field of digital art.

It kinda continued on like this. I got better at sketching, won a gift card in an art competition and used it to buy my first digital drawing tablet, honed my skills and continued to work on the lore and story of the world, which at this point was threatening to become too massive and unwieldy to do anything with. Some of my early digital art went into my college application art portfolio, so somewhere on some eight-year-old uchicago computer there's a very dramatic drawing of Falst and Kendal fighting in the rain. I was juggling a lot of different things at this point - the channel was just starting to become A Thing, so that was taking up some attention, and I was developing an interest in voiceover and prepping for college, so the story sort of ended up on the backburner for a bit. I think this was good, because a lot of projects like this really need time on the backburner so your subconscious can look them over, clean them up and drop in some editing notes for the next time you pick it up.

When I got back into it in the first year of college I'd started experimentally drawing comic shorts, character intros and chapter covers. I had the cast and overarching plot pretty solid at this point, so with the basic framework of the story ready to go, I just needed to make sure the art was up to snuff. And it wasn't. So I took a few more years, honing my skills by drawing lots of video frames and more test comics and getting acclimated with Clip Studio Paint's tools, and after I graduated when I was in the post-college haze of Suddenly Absolutely No External Stressors And Schedules, I said "fuck it" and bought the domain name.

This story, in a very real way, grew up with me. It provided structure and stability that my mind needed, and in return I could refine and rebuild it better and better over time. I didn't want this to be A Good First Try, I wanted to be good enough to make it good. I was a tool to make the story better, and the story was a tool to make me better.

I have no idea if this is applicable to literally anyone else, but that's basically been my process. All things considered, I'm quite happy with where we've ended up.