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Month: August 2019

Status Report (29 August 2019)

Status Report (29 August 2019)

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Since last Friday evening, I’ve been able to put down something like 5,600 words on The Curse of Steel.

This is a pretty good rate of work for me. My personal best was probably the time I produced the last seven chapters of a Mass Effect fan-fiction novel in a single three-day weekend – over 24,000 words in those three days. Usually, I’m lucky to get more than a thousand words down in a day, and that’s assuming it’s a weekend day when I don’t have to worry about the office.

But then, this is why I do a lot of world-building.

As a writer, I seem to be able to produce very short pieces off the top of my head, doing all the scene-setting and character development in the back of my mind and just pouring the vignette down on the page. Most of the vignettes I wrote as flavor text for various GURPS books were done this way.

As soon as I get into the longer forms, though – pretty much anything above the level of the short story – I always get bogged down in setting detail and have a hard time proceeding. Unless I spend the time and effort to build those details in advance: constructed language and culture to help me get into characters’ heads, maps to help me see how places and people are related to each other, astrophysics for SF stories, and so on.

One reason fan-fiction always seems easier for me is that most of the work of setting up the story has already been done. Any original details I want to add, I can just graft them onto the existing structure and keep moving. I can concentrate on just writing story, and the words just flow. As witness that amazing, enormously satisfying weekend of something like 8,000 words per day.

I spent months wrestling with backdrop for The Curse of Steel, never writing more than the one chapter that started the story (which, by no coincidence, worked pretty well as a short story on its own). I tried several times to move forward, but every attempt failed until I had the setting worked out to my satisfaction.

Now the investment pays off. There’s a good chance – knock on wood and hope I don’t jinx it – that I’ll be able to put down about half the novel, a total of 80,000 words or so, without a pause. If the current rate of progress keeps up, that sounds like it should be doable by the end of the calendar year.

Feels good. I will admit to kicking myself sometimes, for being the writer of stories who never seems to actually write a story. If I’m starting to find ways to hack my creative mind and get actual stories written, that can’t hurt.

Status Report (22 August 2019)

Status Report (22 August 2019)

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Meanwhile, I think I’ve done enough work on constructed language, development of names for tribes and places, and filling in details on my overview map. At least for the moment. Now I can get back to the story and write . . . probably about half of the planned length for The Curse of Steel.

Here’s the result: a clipped piece of the overview map, still missing some details around the edges but more than enough to help me keep all the pertinent features in mind.

Ravatheni tribal lands, and their neighbors

The first part of the plot has Kráva and her companions traveling from Taimar Velkari (“hill-fort of the wolves”) across Ravatheni territory, into and through the Silent Forest, and over a mountain pass into the western lands by the sea. With plenty of detours and adventures along the way, of course. As the raven flies, it’s a distance of about 220 miles, maybe eight or nine days’ journey if everything goes well. Everything is not going to go well.

An Interesting Result

An Interesting Result

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Just a short note, to call your attention to an interesting result in recent astrophysics that’s quite relevant to the Architect of Worlds project.

It’s well known that we’ve discovered thousands of exoplanets in the last couple of decades. Now the state of the art is approaching the point where we can get clues about the environment on those planets. For example, one recent result (here’s an article in Scientific American) is the first indication we have of the kind of atmosphere that exists around an Earth-sized rocky exoplanet. In this case, the planet is in its primary star’s habitable zone, and it’s more than large enough to retain a significant atmosphere against thermal or Jeans escape. Yet there doesn’t seem to be much if any atmosphere there.

I’ve long since worked out a model for Jeans escape; that much was in the world-design system I wrote for GURPS Space back in the day. (If you’ve used that system, you may recall a “minimum molecular weight retained” or MMWR calculation. That’s specifically relevant to Jeans escape.)

The problem is that thermal loss isn’t the only way a planet’s atmosphere can get stripped off. If the primary star is prone to flares and has an energetic stellar wind, that will do the trick too. This is specifically relevant to red dwarfs, like the star LHS 3844 which has the planet mentioned above. Red dwarf stars punch well over their weight in the stellar-wind and flare department, especially early in their lives. Thus, any rocky planet close enough to be in the liquid-water zone will probably get a serious sandblasting early on.

This is kind of a new area in astrophysics, and there are a lot of competing models out there. Some scientists are predicting that Earth-sized planets should be able to retain their atmospheres in at least some cases, others are much less sanguine. The LHS 3844 result certainly seems to support the pessimistic case.

For Architect of Worlds, I’ve been thinking in terms of assigning each planet a “volatiles budget” from its formation and early years, modified by things like the planet’s MMWR, whether it formed inside the snow line, whether there’s a dominant gas giant to fling comets in-system, and so on. A big random factor as well, since it looks as if this feature is strongly subject to chance. Then we would reduce that volatiles budget to reflect non-thermal processes of atmospheric escape, photodissasociation of water molecules, and so on. (Hmm. Maybe have a separate budget just for water, since that goes through some significantly different processes and might not be correlated with atmospheric volatiles.)

The devil’s in the details, of course, and for all my tinkering I have yet to come up with a model that satisfies me (or even fits all the cases we know about). This might actually be the biggest obstacle to getting the third section of the design sequence hammered out.

Status Report (16 August 2019)

Status Report (16 August 2019)

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Busy week at the office – I’ve been teaching a course most of the week – so not much time or energy left over for writing or world-building work. I’ve been plugging away at my regional map, at least.

As time permits, one thing I’ve been tinkering with is an application of the draft Architect of Worlds material to design an alternate Solar System for the world where The Curse of Steel takes place. I want the setting to be just a little exotic; just as this alternate Earth has different geography, different landforms and seas than ours, I also want it to have a different sky. To this end, I’ve designed a primary star almost identical to Sol, and a habitable world almost identical to Earth, so that the day-to-day environment isn’t clearly alien – but the system is otherwise different in a lot of details.

More detail on that design later. For today, I’ll note that in conjunction with this work, I’ve been using a virtual-planetarium application that I highly recommend: Space Engine.

Space Engine has been in development for several years, almost entirely by the Russian astronomer Vladimir Romanyuk, although he recently released a beta of the application on Steam to raise money for further development. It’s unique in that the entire universe notionally resides in the engine – while the vast majority of it is procedurally generated, known stars, exoplanets, and so on are also in the engine’s catalogs. It’s a great toy for exploring the universe from the comfort of your desktop.

It’s also not all that difficult to insert your created star systems and worlds into the Space Engine catalogs, and have the engine render them in place in the virtual universe. Space Engine uses somewhat different world-building assumptions than I do, but the differences are pretty minimal. It’s not at all difficult to take the results of work with Architect of Worlds and drop them into the Space Engine universe. So I’ve done that, with the intention that I’ll be able to use the simulation to determine what the sky looks like at any given point of the story.

For example, here’s a rough-draft render of the alternate Earth where Kráva lives and will have her adventures. Really astute observers might be able to figure out about where I’ve placed her world in the real galaxy:

An alternate Earth, hanging in space.

I think it’s possible to create new planetary textures and bump-maps for created worlds in the engine, but that’s beyond me so far, so the landforms you see here are not definitive. Still, I can “land” the viewpoint on the planet at any given point in latitude, longitude, and time, and see what a character standing at that spot would see in the sky. For example, here’s an early-evening image from a latitude roughly equivalent to where the story begins:

The bright object low on the horizon is the system’s secondary star, a red dwarf orbiting at a comfortable distance of 100 AU or so. Brighter than our own Moon, it doesn’t wax and wane, and I think it may even be circumpolar so it’s always visible in the northern hemisphere. Handy for characters who need to move around at night!

Space Engine can do a lot of things for me – model an alien sky consistently and in great detail, tell me with a mouse click what apparent magnitude objects might have, and so on. For a few hours of investment, I can include the kind of exotic but consistent astronomical perspectives that (e.g.) Tolkien needed endless painstaking pencil-and-paper work to provide.

More about all this later, if and when it seems appropriate while I work on the story. I must say, though, it’s nice to find tools that can make the obsessive world-builder’s attention-to-detail easier.

Status Report (10 August 2019)

Status Report (10 August 2019)

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I’ve got a weekend more or less to myself here – no need to go into the office, and my wife and our daughter are out-of-state visiting family, so it’s just me and my son doing the bachelor thing. Good time to get some work done on The Curse of Steel.

The major project right now is a map of the main area of action for this first novel. Decent progress thus far:

Work in progress . . .

Still need to finish marking in terrain features, although the main line of the Blue Mountains is in place. Then it will be time to put down forest icons to mark wilderness areas. I think I’m going to be sparing with that, since almost the entire map is wilderness to some degree! Then a few settlements and place names, and I’ll have enough to push forward with the novel. I imagine the map will get filled in further as I write this (and hopefully future) stories.

Meanwhile, I’ve posted the first chapter of the draft novel – a short story titled “Kráva and the Skátoi” – to the “Free Articles and Fiction” section in the sidebar. Here’s a link to the page as well.

I think tomorrow I’ll continue to work on the map, and I might start looking for art assets I can use to create images of Kráva and her world.

Status Report (7 August 2019)

Status Report (7 August 2019)

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Work proceeds apace on The Curse of Steel – I’m making unusually good progress on it for the moment. I’m very happy with the divine pantheon I’ve developed for my protagonist’s home culture. I’m also continuing to build a more detailed map of the field of action for most of this first novel. Most importantly, I’ve knocked out two more chapters of the first draft, and as soon as I resolve a couple of questions about the future plot I should be able to keep going.

I think the critical step was to embrace the notion of having activist gods and divine-blooded heroes in the setting. You’d think this would be obvious; after all, those concepts were universal among the Indo-European peoples I’ve taken as a model for the world-building here. Yet I’ve tended to avoid the trope in my own work thus far. I’m not sure why. Possibly it’s because of my background in tabletop roleplaying games. I tend to think in terms of well-defined and limited mechanics for character power, and “he’s the son of a god” is a bit too free-form for my taste.

I will admit to taking some inspiration from the Scion roleplaying game that I recently picked up to read. That game is kind of a hot mess when it comes to rules organization and mechanics, but it does provide a nice framework to clearly define the powers of heroes and demigods. I still haven’t decided to use Scion as a tool for actual plotting, but I think I’m coming around to the idea.

Besides, if my protagonist is the child (or grandchild, actually) of a god, that fits in very nicely with the themes I’m working with for this first novel. Part of what I’m trying to do here is to examine some of the consequences of the power fantasy that’s common in genre fiction. Okay, so Kráva acquires a magical weapon that makes her an immensely powerful warrior, and almost in the same breath, she learns that she’s of immediate divine descent. Great! Except “with great power comes great responsibility,” the weapon comes with a rather nasty curse, and the lives of the gods’ children tend to be glorious and very short.

Lots of potential here. I’m almost eager to see what happens next.

Meanwhile, I think I may push a couple of chapters of the draft over to the “Free Articles and Fiction” section of the sidebar. Look for that as soon as I have a little time to spare.