Reviving an Old Project
I’ve been rather blocked for the past month or so, as witness the lack of updates in this space for about that long. So I’m going to try something that often works for me: turn to one of the other projects that’s currently on the back burner, and see if I can push it forward for a while. By the time I run out of steam on that, I usually find I can turn back to the first project and make progress with it once more.
One of the items I’ve had on the back burner for a while is a novel, possibly first in a series, with the working title of The Curse of Steel. This is a foray into writing Robert E. Howard-style pulp, set in an Iron Age world that’s reminiscent of our own prehistory without being tied to it.
The protagonist is Krava, “the Raven,” a female warrior from a pseudo-Celtic society, kind of a younger Boudica. After a battle against orc-like raiders, in which her father is slain, Krava comes into possession of a magic sword. She soon finds it an uncomfortable weapon to own, one which pulls her into a struggle of ancient magic and foreign gods.
I have maybe 25 kilowords of the first novel down, including a first chapter that I posted here a while back. Unfortunately, I got blocked on that because I couldn’t converge on a consistent picture for
Yet as often happens, since I’ve left that set of ideas on the back burner for a while, now I think I can clarify and push them forward a bit. I’ve got a plan to develop some back story and a more focused map, enough that I can move ahead with the first novel when time permits. The plan involves some
3 thoughts on “Reviving an Old Project”
I’ve been noodling around for some months with the world building process in GURPS Traveller, with the intent to create a system catalog generator in python. I got sidetracked implementing 3D mapping, which is leading me into weird places. I’ll eventually emerge from that rabbit hole…
I saw your AoW work here, and began to return to the system catalog creator again. One of the conceits I’ve pursued is writing as much of the process as possible as functions of continuous random variables rather than discrete ones (die rolls). The hardest part is often fitting the curve to align with projected outcomes of the tables in GT (more recently) AoW.
For step one, I managed to find a decent IMF library that implements Kroupa.
The curve of base effective temperature vs initial stellar mass that I plotted from your table in step six has me stumped. Is that based on the curve for main sequence stars on the HR graph?
Yeah, the IMF shouldn’t be hard to implement, since it’s defined as a continuous distribution in the first place.
The relationship between effective temperature and initial stellar mass was determined “empirically” using the EZ-Web software at R. Townsend’s web site. That’s software he developed to do detailed numeric simulation of stellar evolution. I applied it by running it for each initial mass value and checking the effective temperature of the simulated star about two or three ticks in, to make sure it had settled down a bit. It should go without saying that the model for stellar evolution in my manuscript is drastically simplified, but for greater realism I would have had to generate and incorporate enormous look-up tables, and so far I’m trying to avoid that.
Ye gods and little fishes… I got to the part about “spatial gradients are replaced by finite-difference approximations represented on a discrete grid of points”, and realized that that 1964 paper may have been the one my father got inspiration from for his work in the 80s on finite methods in heat transfer simulations. I remember it was related to space research or astronomy (vague, yes. I was a teenager, with the focus of a goldfish). I’m going to take a look at these resources further. Thank you!