Since the beginning of this month, I’ve returned to my day-job office on a mixed schedule that allows for a couple of days of telework per week. It’s been an adjustment, but so far the results have been pretty good – I’m continuing to be productive on my creative projects. So here’s the state of things as of mid-month.

Biggest push right now is to write a completely new section of Architect of Worlds. This is a section titled “Working with Astronomical Data,” and it’s intended to document most of the tricks I’ve learned over the years for taking real-world data and turning it into plausible star system designs and maps of interstellar space.

So far I’ve got about 4500 words down on how stars are named, what the best data sources are for information on stars, and where on the Web one might go to lay hands on useful star catalogs. That piece is about finished. Then I’m going to start working on material describing how to read star catalogs and other data sources, and translate those data into inputs for the main Architect of Worlds design sequence. I’m hoping to have this whole section finished in rough draft by the end of May, at which time it will probably be this month’s charged release for my patrons.

This is a big deal! This section is one of the three blocks of material that still needs to be written before I can seriously start thinking about laying out Architect of Worlds and getting it ready for release. (The other two blocks are “how to design maps of interstellar space” and “special cases that aren’t explicitly covered in the main design sequence.”) I still have no clear idea as to when the book will be ready for its first-edition release, but I’m increasingly confident that will be either late this calendar year, or early in 2022.

Meanwhile, I’m continuing to investigate improvements to my process for publishing new fiction. Right now I’m focusing on finding a reliable source for book cover designs – the cover I designed for The Curse of Steel was okay, but it didn’t pop, and I suspect it’s one reason why sales have been a bit disappointing.

I’m also continuing to work on development of some serialized fiction to be published through the new Kindle Vella outlet, based on the Scorpius Reach setting. I had a big step forward on that a few days ago – more about that once things come closer to fruition – and I suspect I may be in a good position to have a story in place once the platform is released to readers.

Finally, of course, I’m continuing to work on The Sunlit Lands as time permits. That might be a back-burner project for what’s left of May, since I released a few chapters to my patrons last month and I’m focusing hard on Architect for the moment.