In the past few months I've had more questions than usual (that is to say, I've actually had a few questions) about reusing my ideas or reposting my my work. Just so it's very clear, I'm very easy-peasy about it all. Here are some rules of thumb:

• When it comes to my characters/stories/artwork completely attributable to me, you are welcome to reproduce or use them in whatever way you see fit. That means you can repost them wherever you like without, you can sell them on posters or t-shirts, you can remove my signature, you can claim it as your own. I don't mind, and you don't need to ask my permission. I would love to see where it ends up to see how it gets used and/or what people say, but it's not a requirement. By doing so you agree that you also have no exclusive claim to the characters/stories/artwork, etc. etc. It's public domain/creative commons licensing.

• If you've commissioned something from me, you are free to repost it as you'd like and where you'd like, with or without attribution. You are free to modify or change it, and free to have other artists redraw characters I've created for you. I assume that if you've had other characters that don't belong to you included in your artwork, you've asked their permission as well; I can't grant that.

• If you want to reuse/repost/etc. a commission, request, or depiction of another person's character that I've made, you need their permission, but not mine. If you are unsure who that other person is, or unsure if a particular work of art is a commission, ask me. I'm happy to answer. I'm nice.

I think that covers 90% of the cases. Basically, I'm very copyleft, and happy to share!

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Along those lines, I have some thoughts on the way art 'should' work that put me at odds with the majority of the artistic community, I think. I am against false scarcity. I'm against scarcity at all, really - I thing working toward a post-scarcity world is an unambiguously good thing (in the classical, philosophical, ethical mandate sense of good, not just something that would be nice, dear) - but at least for the time being, scarcity is undeniable real. There is hard limit to the available real estate on earth. There is only so much aluminum accessible within our crust. A person has a non-infinite number of seconds to work with in their life. Trading for scarcity, as long as it exists, is reasonable and sensible. I have no complaints there.

What I don't like is creating scarcity. Once I've drawn something or written something, it can be reproduced indefinitely without diluting the original. Someone else could repost it at a thousand other sites, and it would still be available wherever I posted it. In a real sense, the artistic community is one of the few places (along with education), where post-scarcity can currently exist. I can post a story digitally that can be reproduced indefinitely, and you can repay me with a non-scarce currency: favorites, or comments, or upvotes, or whatever medium the particular site uses.

But scarcity is inextricably tied to economy. It's not a direct relationship - some people may give me scarce economic currency (real money) as incentive or reward for my time. But it's really not reliable; record companies are shooting themselves in the foot for prosecuting downloaders, but they'd be out of business if the stopped trying sell things. Is that so bad? Do we owe the record companies a living? Do we owe artists a living? Indubitably the quality of art out there is significantly higher because it's been monetized, but I don't know that it's a sufficient argument. There are a lot of artists out there who I really admire, who make a living off creating and selling their work. I mean them no disrespect, and I'm glad they're able to do what they love for a living. But, ethically, creating false scarcity to support a business model is something I have a difficult time with.

I am not, and I would never argue taking a vigilante approach and just defying laws (or even artists' wishes) about reproduction of their artwork. I'm not trying to or expecting to change anyone's mind about creating scarcity to support themselves in an artistic field. I don't think less of anyone for having a different philosophical position on economics and art than I do.

But this is one of the most compelling reasons I decided not to pursue a career as an author or artist (not that I'm saying I have the skills to be a shoe-in in either field). I've written a couple of books now, and I started shopping one of them around before I really sat down and thought about how I feel about it. For-profit publishing is definitely the best distribution model we have currently. I'd love to have my stuff read by ten-thousand people instead of a hundred or so. But I feel like participating in that economical model would just be wrong... for me.

This is the same reason I haven't made an adoptables yet. I love the idea of adoptables. And I could just do them for free, really, just to make people happy, and open up for donations if I really wanted to. But I would feel wrong about handing something I'd made over to another person exclusively - it's creating scarcity.

Commissions ride the other side of the line. Those, in my opinion, are safe. I'm not trading art for money, I'm trading my time. That is always fair - so long as I really am trading time.

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Before I get too long-winded (too late!), let me move on to the final point: What's next! Just like after I finished the Monster-girls project, I have a few things lined up I want to work on for myself and my friends, and I might take a commission here or there. But there's another project I've been thinking about that been lurking in the back of my mind: Sphinxes of the world. I love sphinxes - the way the look, the way they act, the role they play in mythology. That's especially true of the traditional Phix of Oedipus fame, but all kinds of sphinxes are great. I've reduced them to a concept and an algorithm to my satisfaction, and I want to apply those to other regions of the world, and other mythological domains.

And I'd love to do this as another project like monster girls, where I work for people and take a fair, minimal amount of money to keep me on track and keep people interested. (I turn around commissions much faster than personal work on average, stay on track with the projects for much longer, and get a lot more interest in the form of comments and favorites.) But how could I do this? They'd be perfect for adoptables, but... I don't feel like that's right (see the above). I could do them as commissions, but who would want to commission characters I've come up with and designed. I don't think I could successfully describe the necessary features of a sphinx successfully enough that anyone who wanted one would get it in the way I think is 'right'.

I'm really open to suggestions here. I don't really want to abandon the idea of 'Sphinxes of the World', but I'm positive if I just do it for myself I'll end up dropping the project - maybe even before it gets started.