Metaposts – Sharrukin's Palace

“Architect of Worlds” Page Under Construction

February 7, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

With the imminent release of Architect of Worlds, I’m starting to rework the page for that project on this site.

First and foremost, the partial draft once offered from that page has been taken down. The release draft is significantly different, and at this point I want to encourage people to pick up the actual book once it’s available. I’m not going to take down any of the original blog posts in which I posted a very rough draft of the design sequence – if anyone wants to page through those, they’re welcome to it.

Meanwhile, moving forward I intend to use the project’s page to offer long-term support for the book: a place to ask questions, a (hopefully well-maintained) errata list, and a place to collect any blog posts I make about new science or more detailed world-design techniques. There’s some possibility I’ll be looking to produce a second edition of the book in five or six years, and the rebuilt page will be a good place to collect material for that project.

In the meantime, if you haven’t seen it already, here’s a link to the Ad Astra Games catalog page for the book. Pre-orders are under way!

Meanwhile, here’s a link to the first (glowing!) review the book has received, from Amazing Stories.

Special Status Report for Patrons (29 June 2023)

June 30, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

This one is specifically for my patrons (and regular blog readers who might be interested in my creative projects).

As I mentioned on 23 June, we’re currently fighting a flooded basement which has knocked out my primary living area and home office. I haven’t been entirely cut off from the Internet, obviously, but I’m spending 12-15 hour days just keeping up with my day job and doing pack-and-move work here. Not much time left over for creative work, so (e.g.) Architect of Worlds is pretty much on hold for now.

Architect didn’t get enough new layout done before the disaster struck to justify a new update. There will therefore be no free update for patrons at the end of this month.

I also may or may not generate a planning message for July at the beginning of the new month. Things are too much in flux for me to be able to plan anything with a straight face.

The primary effort right now is to prepare our basement for a crew who will be coming in, starting on 5 July, to do foundation repair and waterproofing work. To that end I’ve packed up just about the entirety of my library and moved it to storage. Over the next few days we’ll be policing up any remaining small items, and moving the larger pieces of furniture aside so the crew has access to get their work done. After the foundation work is finished, we’ll need to paint the new drywall, get all the carpeting replaced, and then move everything back into place. I expect all this to take up the bulk of the month of July. It might even overlap into the first week or so of August.

I’m not entirely cut off. We’re also working to ensure I have a small home-office space elsewhere in the house while the work is being done. If that works out, I may be able to get back to some creative work in a limited way, even while all the repair and rehab are being done. I’ll keep everyone posted as things progress.

Status Report (23 June 2023)

June 23, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 2 comments

Only a short note today, to report that I’m likely going to be getting little or no creative work done for at least a few days, possibly as much as a few weeks.

My living quarters and home office are in the finished basement of our home, and as of yesterday afternoon, that basement is being flooded. So far it’s not too bad – only a few of my possessions have been water-damaged, and the bulk of my library of books and tabletop games is safe for the moment. On the other hand, the bulk of the carpeting is water-logged and we’ve had to shift a lot of furniture around. As I sit at my workstation right now, the carpet under my feet is soggy and wet.

(No, the image above is eye-catching, but it’s not actually that bad. Even if it’s starting to feel that way.)

We have a specialist coming this afternoon to make an assessment and estimate what would be involved in repairs. I suspect we may need to move most of the furniture and items from my space into storage for at least a few days, cutting me off from my primary work machine and resources while repairs get done. In particular, if the flooding worsens, we may need to move everything to save my equipment and prevent significant losses to my library. In the worst-case scenario, it may be several weeks before things are back to normal.

All of which is to say that work on Architect of Worlds and other projects is at a standstill until I get my space back. I can’t even promise any free updates for this month, and I may miss my monthly book review for June. We’ll see how things go. I’ll post again as soon as I know more, and have some idea how long I’ll be offline.

Updates to the Progress Bar(s)

February 7, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Just a quick note this evening, to point out that I’ve added a new progress-bar widget to the sidebar on this site. The “In Progress” section should now indicate progress both for layout for Architect of Worlds and for the first draft of Twice-Crowned. Those are the two major creative projects right now, and the ones for which I suspect readers and patrons are most interested in seeing the state of play.

The widgets are a little ugly at the moment, for which I apologize. At some point I think I’ll try to streamline that section and try for a neater appearance. For now, at least, the data are up where I can easily update them after each day’s work and my followers can keep track of how things are going.

The Indie View

December 20, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

As of today, Sharrukin’s Palace has been listed as a book-review site on The Indie View, a clearinghouse site for independent book reviewers.

With any luck, this will bring in more candidate books for me to review over the next few months.

Some Important Links

November 10, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Since I have a fair number of new readers these days, I thought it might be worthwhile to reinstate a few cross-links in the sidebar and point those out. (Thanks to Jürgen Hubert for indirectly encouraging me to overcome inertia and get this set up.)

There’s now an Important Links widget at the top of the sidebar. The links here will point you to other places on the Internet where I maintain a presence:

Patreon page. Patrons get links back to posts on this site, and (at least for now) one article or piece of short fiction each month, all for free. In some months, I make one charged release of at least 10,000 words of new content (excerpts from a novel in progress, draft world-building material, and so on). Charged releases are based on whatever I’m working on at the time – there’s no overarching theme. Patrons also get free copies of some or all of the work I self-publish, depending on their level of patronage.
DeviantArt page. This is where I’m likely to post any character art, cartography, or other visual art I produce in support of other projects. Some of that will also appear here, but that’s not guaranteed.
Amazon author page for John Alleyn. Exactly what it says on the tin. Here’s where you’ll find my more recent, self-published original fiction.
Amazon author page for Jon F. Zeigler. You’ll mostly find links to my non-fiction work here, especially old GURPS books that are still on sale via Amazon. Also, at least one short-story collection to which I contributed under my legal byline.
Fan Fiction archive. This points to my profile page on FanFiction.Net, which has its drawbacks but is the only place you can find all of the fan-fiction I wrote during that period of my creative career (roughly 2012 through 2018). Mostly Mass Effect stories, along with a bit of fantasy fiction in several settings.

All of these links should be working properly, but if any of them look strange to you, drop me a note and I’ll see if I can fix them.

Minor Site Reorganization

November 1, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

I’ve just finished doing some minor shuffling of pages on this site:

Architect of Worlds is now a top-level page.
The “Building a Better Barsoom” article has been filed under Free Articles and Fiction.
The Sharrukin’s Worlds page has been eliminated. All new articles will most likely be filed under Free Articles and Fiction for the time being.

The Pages widget has been eliminated from the sidebar, but you should be able to access the major sections of the site from the menu bar at the top. I’m not sure anyone was using the widget anyway.

This process may have broken a link or two, but you should be able to reacquire without too much trouble. Hopefully, this should make navigation a bit easier in the future.

R-Day Plus One Week: Site Changes and Reviews

October 11, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Well, The Curse of Steel has been on the market for about a week now. Sales have not been overwhelming, but I didn’t expect them to be. In any case, the book has already earned me more in royalties than my last two ventures into self-publishing put together. This is a slow business, which doesn’t reward you for obsessively checking your KDP reports.

(Have I been obsessively checking my KDP reports? Yes, yes I have.)

So, on to next steps.

I’ve started work on the first draft of the next novel in the series, The Sunlit Lands. Progress on that can be tracked in the sidebar.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on promotion for The Curse of Steel. One thing I’ve become aware of is that there’s a whole ecology of reviewers for new books, and especially for self-published books. New books that don’t have many professional or customer reviews don’t do as well, but as you might expect there are always more new books coming out than there are available reviewers.

After thinking about that problem for a while, I’ve decided to add a new thread to this blog: reviews of new self-published fiction.

I’m going to try to have at least one substantive review of an indie novel or series per month. Those reviews will be posted as blog entries here, and if the book(s) being reviewed are being published on Amazon I’ll cross-post the reviews there too. Look for the first of these by the end of October – I’ve already found a very promising novel series that will almost certainly get a review.

This is something of a departure for me; this blog has never done many reviews in the past. It will involve some formal work over the next few days as I set things up. I’ll have to develop and post a review policy, and I’ll also be advertising this blog on some of the review-clearinghouse sites to attract more attention to the project.

As another point, I’ve just taken some steps to (hopefully) make this site a little easier to navigate. You’ll notice the white top-bar now provides several menu options. These links will take you to some of the most important (or popular) pages on the site, notably the Architect of Worlds landing page. I’ll be expanding that menu a bit over the next few days, possibly converting a couple of the items into drop-downs to further improve navigation. There may be some tweaks and additions to some of the pages as well. Feedback is welcome as to ways to improve all of this functionality.

Sharrukin’s Palace Now Secure

October 2, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Just a quick note: at the suggestion of a reader, I’ve moved this site to operate under secure HTTP with an SSL certificate. That was surprisingly easy to set up, so I’m kind of kicking myself for not getting it done some time ago.

Old links should still work through a redirect, but an HTTPS URL is probably preferred from now on. Please drop me a line if anything doesn’t seem to be working properly.

Note that the old Sharrukin’s Archive site, or what’s left of it, is probably still non-secure, but that site is going away at some point anyway.

Sharrukin's Palace

Building fantastic worlds of the mind

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