April came down to the wire, but on the last day of the month I was able to both post a book review and push out the first section of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate.

For the month of May, I think the Top Priority item is going to be Architect of Worlds again. There’s one more section of the book I need to write from scratch, and the “special cases” section needs more love. I suspect between those two items I’ll have plenty of new material, so a combination of them is likely going to be a charged release for the month of May.

The remarkable thing is that if I can hit that mark this month, that will mean that Architect of Worlds will be more or less complete, at least in an initial rough draft. That’s quite a milestone! I think if all goes well, June may see a release of a full rough draft of Architect, all in one document, a true v1.0 for the entire project. That will be a free release for my patrons, since they’ve already seen all the individual pieces.

The book won’t be anywhere close to finished at that point – I anticipate a lot of polishing, production of diagrams and graphics, and layout before I can even consider trying to publish it – but that’s still a big step forward. I begin to think there’s a chance Architect may arrive on virtual store shelves before the end of calendar year 2022.

All that being said, here’s the formal planning list for May:

• Top Priority:
  • Architect of Worlds: Write a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings. Also carry out further additions and revisions to the “special cases in worldbuilding” section. These two tasks are expected to give rise to a charged release, assuming they amount to at least 10,000 words of new material.
• Second Priority:
  • Architect of Worlds: Further additions and revisions to the “working with astronomical data” section. May lead to a free v0.2 update, or may simply be integrated into v1.0 of the complete book.
  • Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
  • Human Destiny: Design additional new rules systems for the Player’s Guide and add these to the interim draft.
  • Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
• Back Burner:
  • Human Destiny: Begin work on a new Aminata Ndoye story.
  • Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
  • Krava’s Legend: Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
  • Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
  • Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine).