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Month: January 2021

Human Destiny Sourcebook – Partial Rough Draft Released

Human Destiny Sourcebook – Partial Rough Draft Released

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Just a quick note to announce that I’ve released a first partial rough draft of the Human Destiny setting bible (and potential Cortex Prime sourcebook) to my patrons.

The Human Destiny setting is my primary space-opera universe, which has had a few short pieces published and is under continuing development.

If you’re interested in learning more, check out earlier Human Destiny posts from this blog. You might also sign up for my Patreon, which will get you updated material from this and my other projects on a (more or less) monthly basis.

Status Report (28 January 2021)

Status Report (28 January 2021)

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The past two weeks have been just about a wash for my creative work. A task at my day job pushed aside just about everything else for about a week and a half. Then, just as that was winding up, I took a nasty fall outside my house and got rather banged up. Nothing was broken and I didn’t need a trip to the hospital, thank goodness, but I collected a fair number of gouges, scrapes, and bruises. I’ve been in a fair amount of discomfort for several days. Kind of hard to focus on creative work, especially since my dominant hand is one of the parts that are stiff and sore. At this point, I’m not likely to hit some of the creative milestones I had in mind for this month.

Not all the news is bad, to be sure. I’d like to praise a couple of my readers, Brett Evill and K. Nakamura, for their work “playtesting” and providing feedback on the current Architect of Worlds draft. The two of them have been going through the current sequence with a fine-toothed comb, and they’ve already found a number of things that could stand to be fixed or improved. I plan to get back to that project in February and will probably be releasing a new minor version to my patrons fairly soon.

Another piece of the Architect of Worlds project will involve writing some material on how to use real-world astronomical data with the design sequence. If you want to build a realistic “solar neighborhood” for your SF setting, incorporating what we know about the stars and exoplanets around us, how do you go about that? I’ll probably at least start working on that next month too.

Meanwhile, since I had more than enough hours on the books at my day job, I’m taking the rest of January off to heal up from my accident and get some writing done. I’m focusing on producing a new partial draft of the Human Destiny sourcebook for Cortex Prime. Right now that’s at about the 16-kiloword mark, and I’m hoping to get a few thousand more words down before the end of the month.

The partial draft of the Human Destiny sourcebook will be this month’s charged release for my patrons. Once that’s out, they’ll get free updates as I continue to work on the project, until the rough draft is completed.

I don’t have any new original fiction to release this month, although I’m considering dressing up a bit of work from my fan-fiction period to show off. I’m also reading a very good candidate for my next book review.

Finally, I’m continuing to make slow progress on The Sunlit Lands, which will be the first sequel to The Curse of Steel. No clue yet when that novel will be finished, but at the moment I’m hoping to release it late in 2021.

The name of the game is persistence and resilience . . .

Review: The Adventures of Sasha Witchblood by Rose Bailey

Review: The Adventures of Sasha Witchblood by Rose Bailey

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The Adventures of Sasha Witchblood by Rose Bailey

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

The Adventures of Sasha Witchblood is a collection of dark fantasy stories, published in two (rather short) volumes: The Sugar House and Stars of the North. The author, Rose Bailey, has an extensive curriculum vitae in the tabletop and computer game industries. This collection draws inspiration from both the pulp-magazine fantasy of Robert E. Howard and the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm . . . but it then turns both on their heads. The result is an oddly compelling set of stories.

Sasha Witchblood is an adventurer, a brute, and occasionally a murderer. She’s not quite human, marked by the blood of a famous ancestor who was more ogre than woman. Like one of her literary cousins, Conan the Cimmerian, Sasha gets into adventures, doing her best to survive them and make a little profit along the way. Again like Conan, Sasha is not a very sympathetic character – she’s too cynical and selfish for that. Although she does have a personal code that can be relied upon. Usually.

The world she lives in looks like something Robert E. Howard might have come up with as well. Ms. Bailey uses Howard’s frequent trick, borrowing from real-world history while putting her own speculative slant on it. The result is recognizable as a late-medieval Earth, but one that has been under siege by the forces of dark magic for a long time. Cities and kingdoms have been obliterated by monstrous hordes, by encroaching forests, or by never-ending winter. It’s a tough place, and only someone as case-hardened as Sasha seems likely to succeed in it.

What adventures does Sasha find herself in? The reader will probably recognize some of them: the story of Hansel and Gretel, the story of Little Red Riding Hood, the story of Sleeping Beauty, the story of Snow White. On the other hand, none of these stories are quite as the Brothers Grimm told them. We’re in the territory of the original folktales, which were often bloody and dark and decidedly not for children. It’s not always clear which character is the monster and which the hero, if indeed any of them can be called heroes.

The reader should be aware that these are not novels. Each story in the collection can stand on its own, and in fact they’re only roughly presented in the chronological order of Sasha’s career. There’s no overarching plotline to be resolved by the end of the second volume. Better to read these stories the way one might read Robert Howard’s tales, each a dark and disturbing glimpse into Sasha’s world.

Sasha’s stories are carefully composed and well written, with clean prose and very few copy-editing problems. These two volumes should work well for anyone who might enjoy a dark fantasy take on popular fairy tales, or a different slant on the fantasy of the pulp era, or both. Highly recommended.

Status Report (14 January 2021)

Status Report (14 January 2021)

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Man, this month is just flying past. There’s a lot going on, and I’ve just about committed myself to a plan for this month’s Patreon release, so it’s time for a general update.

Architect of Worlds: I’ve been stress-testing the current draft of the complete design sequence (version 0.3, which was released to my patrons on 5 January). I’ve found a few minor bugs and tweaks, and possibly some ideas for further development, but nothing that requires major surgery at this point. Along the way, I’ve started developing a new map and gazetteer of the solar neighborhood for the Human Destiny universe. That’s probably going to take quite a while to complete.

Human Destiny: Back in December I completed a partial rough draft of the proposed Cortex Prime sourcebook, as a submission for the Cortex Creator’s workshop. I’ve gotten some useful feedback from that, and I’ve started to write some more new material for this project.

Short Fiction: I don’t think I’m going to release any free new short fiction in January. This is because I appear to be on the verge of actually selling two pieces of short fiction! I need to concentrate on writing material that will actually earn me some income. More about that if and when the deal is completed.

Krava’s Legend: I didn’t get much work done to promote The Curse of Steel in November or December, nor did I get much written on The Sunlit Lands. I’m trying to carve out some time to keep pushing forward with those tasks.

Book Reviews: Since this blog has been listed on a couple of sites for independent book reviewers, I’ve been getting lots of requests for reviews. More than I’ll be able to cover, although that’s not a bad problem to have. At the moment it looks like I’ll be covered for January and February – look for two or three new reviews here over the next few weeks.

Okay, now for patron’s business.

I’m going to institute a new procedure for certain big projects, the kind that are likely to be in development for several months with incremental drafts. It’s in my interest to let my patrons see early drafts, because I might get useful feedback. On the other hand, I’m not comfortable charging my patrons every month for access to the latest versions.

So in such a case, I’ll be charging my patrons in the first month that I release a draft, but subsequent incremental updates will be free to patrons until the draft is more or less complete and ready for publication. (Also, of course, patrons at the appropriate level of support will get a free copy of the finished product, if and when that’s ready.)

The first project to fall under this heading is the current version of the complete design sequence for Architect of Worlds. I released version 0.2 of that in December as a charged release. I updated the document to version 0.3 in early January and will continue to release the occasional incremental update to my patrons as needed. Those incremental updates will be free of charge.

The second project that will come under this heading is the rough draft of the Cortex Prime sourcebook (and setting bible) for the Human Destiny universe. I’ll be releasing a partial draft (version 0.2) to my patrons late in January, which will be this month’s charged release. Subsequent incremental updates to that document will be free of charge.

Haven’t decided what I’ll be releasing in February, but honestly, there’s a lot going on that’s not entirely under my control at the moment. I’m playing things by ear for now. More news as I figure things out.

Architect of Worlds Status (January 2021)

Architect of Worlds Status (January 2021)

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For those who are interested in the Architect of Worlds project, here’s a quick summary of its status.

After several years of sporadic work, I finished the first complete version of the design sequence just before Christmas. Over the next couple of weeks, I did some intensive testing and made two pretty significant revisions.

At the moment I have a partial draft of the book that’s in an “alpha release” state (Version 0.3), covering just the sequence for designing star systems, planetary systems, and individual worlds. It works – I’ve been generating a series of plausible and often weirdly interesting worlds with it.

My readers should be aware that this is not the version that’s currently posted to the Architect of Worlds page on this blog. That’s Version 0.1, the first complete sequence, before the last two rewrites. That version works too, but there are some problems with it – you may not want to lean on it too hard. I’m considering taking it down entirely.

As of right now, the best way to get your hands on the current release draft is to sign up for my Patreon (see the link in the sidebar). I anticipate having a complete draft of the book ready for release sometime this year, so at this point, the project is moving out of the “free to the public” phase.