Will Ariel

Studson Studio does incredible work, and I think this one is my favorite so far. So well done. An incredible tribute to a Studio Ghibli design.  I'm a writer (although I have done some of the same kind of thing that Studson does, on a much, MUCH smaller scale) but there are principles in all of art that are the same. I watch and connect with people in lots of different creative disciplines, because I learn things that apply to my writing in all of them, and it feeds my soul. I love to see the process of a creation going from artist to artist. Howl's Moving Castle started life in a novel, which was then adapted into a film, and now another creative has made it into a model. I love to watch a creation be loved, and not just loved, but embraced and then added to in a way that honors the work done before. There's something beautifully connective about that.

  Ancient Norse culture is really interesting to me. Setting pop culture perceptions aside, there's this (to me) bizarre mix of honor and brutality in what we frequently call 'Viking' culture that is completely alien to my way of thinking. The values are different from mine. The perception of fairness, of justice, and of proper living are all different, so different as to be alien.  I've been working on a fantasy story inspired by the flavor of Norse mythology. I can't really call it a Viking story though, or even a Norse or ancient Scandinavian story, because I've made up quite a bit. There is a god that one of the characters referenced on the first page who, as far as I know, does not appear in Norse mythology. This god is a god of passage, a psychopomp, like Charon of Hades. She carries the dead into the afterlife in her shallow-hulled, misty ship that can traverse river and ocean and the black waters of death, through to the after life.  She's only menti

When I'm trying to do something big... say... write a novel, it can be too big and I just don't do it. This is the case with an epic trilogy that I have been poking at for seven years. I've completed many other small projects since the seed of that epic space trilogy came to me, and if I tally up the word counts for all those other projects, it's very clear that I could have written that space trilogy. But... in the past I have tried to take it all on at once, at least mentally,  as a trilogy . Which, to say kindly and in an effort not to shame my past self, was a mild sort of insanity. :) You may have been in that kind of mild insanity too. If you did, I believe you had valid reasons for it, as I did.  But... valid reasons or not, it didn't get us the results we wanted. At least, it didn't work for me. To date my space trilogy is still not finished. I forget that it's okay to do small things. In fact, I think the only things I really can do are small things

 Great video I found yesterday from a working artist. TL,DR: Just do the work.  I like that.

  Illustration by Poppins . She's creative, easy to work with, and delivers on time.  These episodes (short novels, or novellas) are really fun to do. No spoilers, but this adventure is going to be insane.

Here's an excellent video about Middle-Earth, by GirlNextGondor , a YouTuber who (at the time of writing this) has only 6k subscribers. It isn't going to stay that way, because the quality of her work is so high. I'm currently writing about a culture that takes oaths and curses far, far more seriously than our modern society does, because their oaths bind them even after death.  Words have tremendous power for good and evil, they always have. Living in a state of healthy recognition of the power that we have as subcreators, and therefore the responsibility we have. Albus Dumbledore was not wrong when Rowling had him say, "Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it." Personally... I'm going to leave oaths alone whenever possible. :) I'd rather not risk the power they have, and I'd prefer to live by a simple 'Yes, sure, I'll do that,' or 'No, I won

Updates! I published the first episode of Rogue Story! A little while ago, but it's still worth telling. Ever owed a gambling debt to a couple of annoying wizards because you have poor impulse control? Eila has. She still does, in fact, and since she's as broke as an elf can get, there's no way for her to pay them back with cash. But they don't want cash. They want her to use her particular set of skills (lockpicking, to be precise) to break into a probably cursed, probably impossible to find, probably very dangerous vault, somewhere out in the wilds. Yep. It's a bad idea. It has bad idea written all over it, in multiple languages. But Wisdom and Intelligence are different stats, and Eila Yileathar's track record of turning down bad ideas is real, real poor. Can she turn things around for herself amidst trap checks gone wrong, disturbing monsters and a dysfunctional adventuring party?  Find out in the first episode of  Rogue Stor y ! This was super fun, from beg