Status Report (22 October 2022)
Between a very busy time at my day job, and a bout of illness over the last week, I’m feeling under the gun to get anything creative finished this month. I think I have a couple of milestones that are feasible to reach in the next nine days, but a lot depends on whether I can carve out enough time.
The first milestone is to finish rewriting a big section of Architect of Worlds, reworking the process of placing planets in a star system under development. We’re talking about what is now Steps Nine through Twelve, although I’m breaking up a few of those and the final result will be Steps Nine through Fifteen instead. That’s making decent progress. I’m currently working Step Fourteen (determining the mass of planets) and once that’s finished the last step is almost a cut-and-paste from the previous draft. I think that’s going to come out to be about 7,000 words of reworked material – no examples, no modeling notes, just the bare sequence – but I think that will be one part of the release this month for my patrons and beta readers.
The other item is probably going to be a few new chapters of Twice-Crowned, set after Alexandra arrives in Athens as a penniless exile for the first time. I actually wrote this next section a couple of years ago, so it’s just going to need a once-over and a coat of polish. That should come to about 13,000 words. I think that will be easy enough to get ready by month’s end.
So, in all, we’re talking about 20,000 words of extensively reworked or completely new material. Kind of a patchwork for my patrons for this month, but enough to justify making the combination a charged reward.
I’m also plowing through a new indie novel for review, and with luck that will be done by the end of the month too.
Now, if I can just get all that done and juggle a rather terrifying number of projects for the office, all at once . . .