This is going to be an unusually short monthly planning message!

July worked out pretty much as I expected:

• I made quite a bit of incremental progress on the first complete Architect of Worlds draft, in that I assembled that first complete draft and began going through to polish and tighten up the text.
• I also made good progress on the new rough draft for the novel Twice-Crowned. I’m up to about the middle of Chapter Six and have about 16000 words down as of this moment.

In neither case, though, did I reach a significant milestone that would have merited a big release for my patrons and readers. So aside from a couple of small items and an about-weekly status report, you folks didn’t hear much from me in July.

August is going to be much the same, although I’m a little more confident that one or both of those projects will generate something that I can release for my patrons. So here’s the planning schedule for this month:

• Top Priority:
  • Architect of Worlds: Continue work on preparing a complete draft of the book for eventual layout and publication.
  • Danassos: Continue work on the new rough draft of the novel Twice-Crowned.
• Second Priority:
  • 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.
  • Human Destiny: Begin work on a new Aminata Ndoye story, set during her first year at the Interstellar Service academy.
• Back Burner:
  • Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
  • Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
  • 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).

So, in other words, a set of priorities pretty much identical to those of last month. Right now, I’m reasonably sure I’ll be able to release Act I of Twice-Crowned as a charged release for my patrons (at least 25000 words of fiction), and I may have a complete draft of Architect of Worlds that’s coherent enough to share, but we’ll see how the month goes.