Kid Penicillin is a character I made up a few years ago when I was just doodling on a quiet afternoon. Full disclosure: I have the drawing skills of a small child who’s never been near a crayon before – but like a lot of people, I still enjoy doing it from time to time as a way to relax and allow myself to be creative with absolutely no pressure to produce anything good or “usable”. Free time stuff, gotta love it.

Anyway, I made a colored pencil drawing of a giant Space Bacteria holding a ray gun in its flagellum with the caption, “Kid Penicillin: The Baddest Space Pirate In The Galaxy”, and I thought it was funny and the character stuck with me and grew over time. So, when I was looking to come up with an example for the Lit Bits Storytelling Project, the Kid was the first thing that popped in my head – and so I figured I should start with an Origin Story and so wrote his to fit the parameters of the Lit Bits Project.

And I gotta say, it was a lot of fun. While the illustrations aren’t like what an actual artist would produce, I think they turned out pretty good, and I actually like the general aesthetic of it and I’m happy with how it turned out overall.

In fact, I think I will do some more when I can squeeze in the time – I already have some of the other crew drawn up in similarly amateurish doodles that I need to do the whole photshop thing to and work some other stories into a Lit Bit format, but little by little I do want to continue with this little Side Quest. Because it’s fun, and a big reason why I put this site together in the first place is to have a place for people to share the stuff they enjoy making – and last I checked, I’m people, so I’m taking myself up on the offer.

As things move along and I can start to move more Projects to the front burner, one of the things I definitely want to do at Generation Apocalypse Webzine is to publish good short stories in the more traditional sense. I feel that there can’t be too many places for that kind of thing in this world, and I definitely want the Webzine to become a member of that ecosystem. But I’m taking my time with that project so that it can be done well, but that requires a serious commitment of time and focus and I just have too many other little tasks on my plate at the moment. Soon though, hopefully.

At the same time, I don’t want to wait for a devoted (and competent) fiction department at the Webzine before publishing some form of storytelling on here. I started the UnQuesting Fire stories, but those (a) needed to be back-burnered until I have a couple weeks where that’s the only project I need to focus on; and (b) it’s basically a solo project and I want a bunch of random projects where various people can share their versions.

So I thought up Lit Bits as the first of these random little projects – which I do hope to get a bunch more going, but not just storytelling projects. This is where I hope to bring in some collaborators on the site soon, so that they can run their own little projects in music, food, fashion, etc, etc.

My thought process is that’s the part of shows like Top Chef or Ink Master that I love – you give creative people a very specific project in the general field that they’re really good at, and then see what amazing things they come up with. Honestly, if this was what Reality TV was – and without all the competition bullshit that has never made one of those shows even slightly better – then imagine how much more watchable tv would actually be, these days.

Anyway, I hope that some folks enjoyed my first attempt with Kid Penicillin & The Escape From The Amoebius Strip, and maybe got an idea for one of their own. If this is you: then make it and submit it – even if you’ve never done something like that before. Have fun making something and then share it with other people who also like that sort of thing! That’s how people are supposed to live. It’s the End Of The World – if we don’t try living like we’re human now, then when?

If you decide you do want to submit one, check out the full submission guidelines on the Lit Bits page. Hope to see you soon.