Not much change from last month.

My final editing-and-layout-and-filler-art pass on Architect of Worlds is about half finished. As of this evening, I’ve made it through page 89 out of 188, so just short of halfway through the book. That brings me to the beginning of the “Designing World Surface Conditions” section. As I remarked a few days ago, I may be making some small adjustments to the rules in this section, but for the moment I don’t see that slowing down my progress all that much. Time commitments for my studies and my day job notwithstanding, I still think I can have the whole book ready by the end of calendar year 2023, or at least not too far into January 2024.

Matters with the potential publisher for Architect of Worlds are still hanging fire. We’ve reached an informal agreement, but until I’ve signed a contract I can’t say the deal is complete, and so I still can’t comment further on that. Hopefully we can get that out of the way shortly.

We’re still looking at a formal release date for the book sometime in March 2024.

The current list of outstanding tasks, unmodified from last month:

Editorial Work:

• Make final alterations to the design sequence or other rules for this edition, based on recent patron and reader feedback.
• Perform a final editorial pass through the complete text, correcting typos, style inconsistencies, errors in tables or mathematical formulae, and “page XX” references.
• Generate and lay out the copyright & acknowledgements page.
• Generate and lay out the Table of Contents.

Art Direction:

• Create separate “print on demand” (almost entirely greyscale) and “e-book” (full color) layers in the InDesign layout, supporting the production of two release PDFs.
• Correct all cases where space for filler art was allocated by changing the size of the page’s main text frame, as opposed to placing an explicit object frame.
• Create greyscale versions of (some) existing full-color images and place those in the layout on the appropriate layer.
• Generate additional filler art throughout the book, placing both full-color and greyscale versions on the appropriate layers.
• Create (or receive from publisher) new front and back cover images, and integrate these into the release PDFs.

I didn’t have much time to write fiction in November, and given how much of my time is spoken for, that’s probably not going to change in December. What little free time I have, I need to work on book reviews – I’ve only just finished one for October (a month late), and I need to be thinking about November and December so as to get caught up. Otherwise, right now my plan is to get Architect out the door, and only then think about what I want to do with other game-development projects and fiction. Stay tuned.