Hello World

More sky creature designs because they're fun to draw

The Ambulon Lives Zine is now officially free to download!

Enjoy 60 pages of art, fic and more, all exploring universes where Ambulon didn't die on Luna 1... and if that's not enough for you, there's also an exclusive Q&A with James Roberts about Ambulon, his fans, and what could have been!

Give zero fucks about what anyone else is doing.

Seriously.  I mean it.  Because inevitably you will love something that no one else loves.  Or you will love something that everyone loves and people will shit all over it because it’s “so trite and unimaginative and done.” Or you will love something that no one else has ever heard of.  Or you will love something dark and edgy and or obscure and people will roll their eyes and say, “What, do you want people to think you’re dark and edgy and obscure?”

Alternatively, you will not love the thing that everyone else loves, and you will wonder what precisely is wrong with you that the sight of that thing is aggravating the shit out of you now when the whole world sings its praises as one.

People will irritate you.  They’ll irritate you with headcanons that make no sense and misinterpretations of canon.  They will make the same jokes 500 times.  They will overwhelm your corner of fandom with something you either are tired of hearing about or don’t care about.  They will post art that isn’t theirs.  You will meet people who think you are the greatest person ever and bombard you with messages  only to wander off when they find someone new or shinier; you will meet people whom you admire and who do not really seem to notice you exist. 

Cow in the tide: Writing one sentence is more progress than writing no sentences

Horse staring at the sea from just above the tide: Every deranged story starts with a single deranged word

Leopard(?) staring at the tide from just beyond it: Write enough paragraphs, and you'll find places to use semicolons and emdashes

Hippopotamus raging at the crashing tide: If you love it, it's a good story

If your dialog feels flat, rewrite the scene pretending the characters cannot at any cost say exactly what they mean. No one says “I’m mad” but they can say it in 100 other ways.

Wrote a chapter but you dislike it? Rewrite it again from memory. That way you’re only remembering the main parts and can fill in extra details. My teacher who was a playwright literally writes every single script twice because of this.

Don’t overuse metaphors, or they lose their potency. Limit yourself.

fallout takes that warped, post-war idealism, the “gee whiz!” charm of suburbia on lithium. and drags it through the dirt, showing us what happens after all the white picket fences melt into radioactive slag. in a world shaped by that specific brand of McCarthyist exceptionalism, the future isn’t flying cars and robot butlers, it’s a dinky holotape of your last moments before the bombs hit, looping forever. like vault 11, the one where the final recording plays after everyone’s already dead, revealing the whole “sacrifice one person every year or everyone dies” mandate was a lie. a loyalty test. a sick joke. and the vault passed, right before it failed, because paranoia and desperation had already eaten them alive.

that’s fallout. not just the end of the world, but the punchline that comes after the moral.