Work on Architect of Worlds proceeds at a deliberate pace – I’ve made a bunch of incremental changes to the draft, and left myself notes for sections that need additional content. Every day I work on that feels like it gets me a few more meters toward a set of goal-posts that keep receding into the distance.

The biggest holdup there is that I’m trying to redesign Steps Nine through Eleven of the design sequence. That is, starting with the structure of the protoplanetary disk, then figuring out how the planets form, how they migrate across the disk, and how they end up being arranged in a stable final situation. That’s a part of the design sequence that has gotten tweaked and adjusted many times, responding to observed exoplanetary systems in the real world and changes in the best available theory. Honestly, the current state of that piece of the sequence is an enormous kludge and I can’t help thinking that there’s a better way to do it, more streamlined and yet at least as good at reflecting all the diversity we’re seeing in exoplanets.

The upshot of all this is that the integrated draft is not going to be ready to share with the audience in September. There will therefore be no paid release for my patrons this month, and we’ll see how October goes.

I did share a freebie with my patrons earlier this evening – an update to my alternate-history timeline for the Danassos setting, incorporating the results of a bunch of tabletop simulations I’ve been running over the last few months. That’s probably reached a stopping point for the foreseeable future, so hopefully more time and brain-cycles for me to work on Architect over the next few weeks.