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Month: November 2020

Architect of Worlds: State of the Project

Architect of Worlds: State of the Project

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I haven’t posted any new Architect of Worlds material for a few days, but the project is still moving forward. The main issue is that I’m being required to ramp up my day-job telework to full-time status, so I need to make some adjustments to my time management. That’s being worked out, so I should be able to make progress on several of my creative projects over the next couple of weeks.

To review the bidding: since early September, I’ve written and posted the first drafts for Steps Fifteen through Twenty-Three of the design sequence. At this point, the reader should be able to get some of the broad outlines of a generated world’s surface conditions: blackbody temperature, the prevalence of water, geology, and some information about the composition and density of the atmosphere.

What’s left? Well, we still need the world’s actual surface temperatures, the prevalence of dry land if the world has oceans, the final composition of the atmosphere, and the presence and complexity of native life.

There are some complex interdependencies between those items, not to mention a bunch of special cases. In particular, I want to build in the possibility of a robust carbon cycle for a more-or-less-Earthlike world. The hypothesis is that the climate of Earth, or any similar planet with large oceans and life, will tend to self-correct over long periods. Carbon dioxide, in particular, will move into or out of the atmosphere in such a way as to keep the world in the proper temperature range for plentiful liquid water. That suggests a feedback loop that may require some special logic in the world-design sequence.

So I’ve been doing some storyboarding (kind of like what’s going on in this post from September) and roughing out the proper sequence of steps. I think I may end up with six or seven more major steps in the sequence. Seven would make a nice round thirty steps for the complete sequence, but if I end up with a weird prime number or something I suppose I’ll have to live with that.

In any case, I hope to break through the logic here and start posting the last chunk of the design sequence later this month. The third major piece of the sequence may be ready for PDF and posting to the Architect of Worlds page before Christmas.

That doesn’t mean Architect of Worlds, the book, will be ready. There’s a lot more I want to write before I’m ready to think about a publishable draft. How to plan an interstellar setting, how to work with real-world astronomical data, how to build star maps, that kind of thing. Still, I could see a first edition of the book finally making its appearance – most likely on DriveThruRPG.com – sometime next year.

Looking Backward: The Silk Revolution

Looking Backward: The Silk Revolution

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Current events have me going back to re-read an old work of mine.

“The Silk Revolution” was the last significant piece of fan-fiction I wrote during that period of my creative career. Since I finished that story, I’ve been trying to spend the bulk of my time on original work. The plot centered around a set of elections in a fictional republic, but it included plenty of action-adventure scenes and a romantic subplot as well.

Not to mention an authorial experiment. “The Silk Revolution” was a novella-length work without a single significant male character appearing anywhere in it. Men appear in the background, men are referred to in dialogue, but no men have any dialogue of their own, nor do they take any significant action to further the plot. The protagonists are female, the villains are female, every supporting character is female. I asked my readers to figure out what was different about the story, and not one of them took notice of the casting. I considered that something of a victory for my art; I must be getting better at “writing the other.”

“The Silk Revolution” was, of course, influenced by the US elections of 2016. Going back and re-reading it now, I’m finding echoes to the events of today as well. I’m also detecting the onset of a certain cynicism about politics in the authorial voice. No artist can remain entirely detached from the world around him, and it’s folly to try. That’s a point those who get angry about political elements in art need to consider.

Growing the TBR Pile

Growing the TBR Pile

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Last month, I got started on my new project of reviewing self-published science fiction and fantasy. I will admit to having ulterior motives there – I have work of my own that needs attention – but it’s also worth doing for its own sake.

I got started with the first three volumes of Gordon Doherty’s Empires of Bronze series, which I certainly enjoyed. Then the question arose: how to find more books for the TBR (To Be Reviewed) pile? I’m not widely known as a reviewer yet, since I’ve just started to put myself forward as such. I could always browse Amazon’s virtual shelves at random, but that’s no fun.

So I ended up doing the obvious thing: I posted a query to Reddit.

I now have a list of twenty self-published fantasy novels to choose from, already recommended by at least one reader. That should keep me going for the remainder of the calendar year, long enough to build up a back catalog of six to eight reviews that I can point to as proof that I’m serious about this. Hopefully, by then I’ll be getting the occasional request directly from other authors, and that will keep the ball rolling.

(If you have a self-published novel you’d like me to review, have a look at the Review Policy link in the menu bar, and drop me a line.)

In the meantime, I have a bunch of new novels to browse through and read, which is the fun part of this venture. Look for some more reviews to appear in this space over the next couple of weeks.

Minor Site Reorganization

Minor Site Reorganization

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

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.