With the release of “Pilgrimage” I was thinking that my next major project would involve getting the next Aminata Ndoye story (“In the House of War,” a roughly 20,000-word novella) polished up and out the door.

Going back and reviewing the most recent version of that story, though, I think I may need to do some world-building work first. I’ve done a fair amount of research since I first wrote that story, and my ideas about how interstellar civilization is structured have evolved a bit.

So, new plan of action:

• First item will be to revise and improve the planetary-system design sequence for Architect of Worlds. I’ll be publishing the revised material here over the next week or so.
• Then I’m going to re-work my current map of the interstellar neighborhood (and the associated database of nearby planetary systems). Along the way I’m going to double-check my computations from about 2014-2015 about the galactic density of habitable planets, sentient life, high-tech civilizations, and so on. It’s possible that my new design sequences will give rise to a somewhat different set of assumptions.
• I may also do at least a sketch map of the local galactic spiral arm, just to give me a better idea of the “terrain” in khedai space.
• Once I have all that done, I should be able to revise “In the House of War” for publication, and I might have a clearer picture to support further stories in the setting too.

Looks as if my fantasy novel, The Curse of Steel, will be going on the back-burner for a while. That’s okay. I’ve learned the hard way to let my muse go where it wants to go at the moment. At least I’ll be making progress on Architect of Worlds, and I should be able to get another Human Destiny story out the door at the end.