I think I may have diagnosed the long-period creative slump I was in for most of the fall.

About mid-November, I summarily ejected an unproductive activity that had been taking up some time every day since the height of the pandemic: playing one or another MMO online. Back when I was on extended medical leave, working from home if at all, spending an hour or two a day gaming wasn’t an issue. Once I was back in the office full-time, and especially given that my workload there has stepped up a bit since the summer, it was crowding out time and energy that could have been spent on creative work. One day I decided to shut the most recent game down cold turkey – gave away all my in-game assets, closed out my account – and almost the very next day I found myself getting unblocked. We often don’t realize what’s damming the creative flow until we find the problem and patch it.

So November was yet another month with no big milestones and no major releases, but December is already looking like a big improvement. I have a Human Destiny novelette that’s well on its way to completion in first draft, and I’m making good progress on a new section of the setting bible for that universe.

So, without further ado, here’s the outline for the month of December.

• Top Priority (“this is how I’ll judge whether the month has been successful”)
  • Human Destiny: Finish the new novelette “Roanoke” for eventual collection and publication.
  • Human Destiny: Research and produce a timeline for the terraforming of Mars in this universe.
  • Human Destiny: Produce a high-level map of terraformed Mars for the Cortex Prime sourcebook and setting bible.
  • Human Destiny: Write a few thousand more words of the Cortex Prime sourcebook and setting bible.
• Second Priority (“work on this as time permits”):
  • Krava’s Legend: Write a few new chapters of The Sunlit Lands.
  • Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings.
  • Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section of special cases and additional worldbuilding material that doesn’t fit into the design sequence.
  • Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
• Back Burner (“work on this only if everything else gets blocked”):
  • Architect of Worlds: Return to improvement and polishing of the Introduction and Design Sequence document, leading to a new minor-version release. This work may involve updating all of the worked examples, and making mathematical notation more consistent.
  • Krava’s Legend: Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
  • Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller.

Clearly the Human Destiny material is going to get the lion’s share of my attention this month. I should be able to finish “Roanoke” within another week or so, and that’s likely to be at least 10,000 words of new material all by itself. The setting bible is going to get a big chunk of new material as well.

Most likely, my patrons are going to get a final draft of “Roanoke” as a charged release this month, with the understanding that there’s also going to be a free update to the Human Destiny setting bible that incorporates a bunch of new material. We’ll see what else might make progress as well over the next few weeks.