Making a post like this at the beginning of the month seems to work, at least for certain values of “work.” Insert comments about plans never surviving contact with the foe, plans being useless whereas planning is essential, that kind of thing.

Biggest change-of-plans in April involved a sudden side project for both Architect of Worlds and the “Scorpius Reach” setting. This was the “Abbreviated Architect of Worlds for Traveller” project, which ate up a lot of hours through the middle of the month. Still very productive, both by teaching me a lot of Excel Fu, and by helping me produce a document which attracted a lot of attention from Traveller fans.

So although progress on all the goals I identified at the beginning of April was a bit anemic, I’m not unhappy with how things went. I did a free minor-version release for the Architect of Worlds design sequence. I got unblocked with respect to Krava’s Legend and was able to write a few more chapters of The Sunlit Lands. I also picked up several new blog readers and patrons – welcome to all the newcomers!

Still, I think the plan for May is going to look a lot like the plan for April. As always, we’ll see how things actually go. One wrinkle is that I’m fully immunized against COVID-19 now, so I’ll be going back into the office starting Monday. That shouldn’t cripple my creative schedule – I’ve been fully on the clock, albeit working from home, for months already. Still, my daily routine is going to need some adjustment.

Here’s the agenda, more or less in order of priority:

• Architect of Worlds
  • Continued work on the current round of improvements to the existing design sequence.
  • Possibly an additional step or two at the end of the existing design sequence, to add some new parameters related to a world’s habitability and resource value for human (or other) settlement.
  • New sections for the book, on the subjects of designing maps of interstellar space and using real-world astronomical data.
• Krava’s Legend
  • At least another 10,000 words on the first draft of The Sunlit Lands.
  • Write the first item to go into my “reader magnet,” a collection of short pieces telling some of the back story for the lead characters of Krava’s Legend. The idea is to release that widely and for free, and use it to attract readers to the novel series.
  • Do more investigation toward improvements to my release-and-marketing workflow: find affordable sources for professionally done book cover art, read about techniques for book marketing on a budget that won’t take away too much time from writing, and so on.
• Scorpius Reach Sector and Game of Empire
  • Develop more of the sector map and setting bible.
  • Develop a set of characters and a rough story outline for serialized fiction, possibly to be released on the new Kindle Vella platform.
  • Begin assembling a third-edition draft of the Game of Empire rules.
• Human Destiny Sourcebook
  • Write a few thousand more words to fill out new sections of the partial rough draft.

Free updates for my patrons will probably include a minor-version release of the Architect of Worlds design sequence, and possibly a piece of Krava’s Legend short fiction. This month’s charged release, if there is one, will probably be a combination of additional chapters of The Sunlit Lands and some of the new material for Architect of Worlds.

I’ll also need to complete one or two book reviews this month. Fortunately I’ve found a few self-published novels by way of this blog’s contact form, which may lead to reviews.

Watch this space for status reports, and as always, if any of the above interests you, please consider signing up as a patron using the link in the sidebar.