Status Report (1 October 2020)
I’m still working on the next step in the Architect of Worlds design sequence.
This one is proving a bit thornier than usual, because I’m trying to model a very complex system. This step is doing a lot of the heavy lifting to describe the geology of a world. I need something that can handle Earth’s complex plate-tectonics geology, and the stagnant-plate geologies of Venus and Mars, and the mega-vulcanism of Io, and putative super-Earths, and can also handle long stretches of geologic time, and and and. Tall order . . . although I think I’m converging on something that will work well enough. A few more days of work on that, most likely, and then the next block of draft text will appear here.
Meanwhile, as of today the editor I hired to review the draft of The Curse of Steel has finished his work, and his assessment was both useful and very positive. The big takeaway here is that he’s confirmed my belief that the current draft does not need any more major surgery. I estimate about two more weeks of work, to finish the glossary, go through the draft one last time to pick a few more nits out of the prose, assemble the e-book files, and publish.
The Curse of Steel will almost certainly be available on Kindle Direct by the middle of October. At the point of release, anyone who’s signed up as my patron at the $2 level or above will receive a free copy of the e-book, and anyone who’s signed up at the $5 level or above will be mentioned in the Acknowledgements section of the book.
After which, I plan to spend about three days in unashamed celebration, and then it will be time to get to work on the next book in the series: The Sunlit Lands.
2 thoughts on “Status Report (1 October 2020)”
One of the things I have tried to consider for geology is how the water cycle affects geology, and how geology affects the carbon cycle. On an Ocean or Garden world, water lubricates the tectonic plates and lets them keep moving. I don’t know whether other liquids can do that. But my understanding is that losing its water and then losing its tectonic movement contributed to Venus’ vicious cycle.
Exactly so. That’s one reason why I already built a step to determine how much water a world has on hand – in the step I’m working on, a world that has plenty of internal heat but lacks water is much more likely to end up with stagnant plate tectonics and possibly an “episodic resurfacing” regime.