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 . . .