It looks as if the project on which I am least blocked this month is the Human Destiny setting, my more-or-less-hard-SF universe, in which humans are living as a (very minor and subordinate) part of a vast and sophisticated interstellar civilization.

I started out this month just planning to add a few thousand words to the Human Destiny setting bible and Cortex Prime sourcebook, while I spent most of my time working on other items. Still, the more I went digging into my reserve files, the more Human Destiny material I realized I already had. This weekend, I’ve been collecting content from about a dozen separate documents, all generated over the past six years or so. All it needs is some organization and polishing.

The last partial draft of the setting bible that I released to my patrons (version 0.2, in January) was about 18,000 words. As of today I’m up to about 25,000 words, and I suspect I’ll end up with quite a bit more by the end of the month. The result will remain nowhere near finished, but that’s still a fair chunk of new material.

Meanwhile, I’ve resurrected a Human Destiny novella that I originally wrote back in 2015, and I’m polishing that up for release. Depending on how the edit goes, that should be something like 20,000 to 22,000 words of new fiction that my patrons haven’t seen before. The title of that story is In the House of War, and it’s the tale of my heroine Aminata Ndoye’s first deep-space assignment.

Looks as if this is going to be the release plan for August: version 0.3 of the Human Destiny setting bible as a free update for my patrons, and In the House of War as a charged release. Probably close to 30,000 words of new material in all. I’m thinking I may then prepare the novella for self-publication, using some of the new processes I’ve been researching, so my patrons at the $2 level and above will get that for free once it’s released. Most likely next month.

I really need to get some more work done on other projects, but this is what seems to be moving at the moment, so I’m going to run with it.