Once more, my creative situation hasn’t altered much since last month . . . but that is about to change dramatically.

At the moment, I am only a few days away from being ready to hand Architect of Worlds off to my publisher at Ad Astra Games. Last night I reached the end of the draft in this final editorial-art direction-layout pass. That doesn’t mean I’m finished just yet, but I can now do things like resolve the last “p. XX” references, build a Table of Contents, and so on. I’m guessing I may be ready to send the production PDF files over to Ken Burnside by the end of next week.

Now, the rest of my life is uncommonly busy at the moment.

My day job is as an instructional designer and instructor; I do research, write course materials, and occasionally teach. At the moment we’re about to begin a pilot offering for the biggest single course I’ve ever designed . . . and we plan to pilot two more courses after that, stretching through most of 2024, courses I haven’t even started on yet. Let’s just say I’m likely to be putting in a lot of hours on evenings and weekends over most of the coming year.

Meanwhile, I’m also working toward a second bachelor’s degree, and eventually my first graduate degree, with a plan to complete the course of study about the time I’m ready to retire from my day job. So far my coursework has been almost entirely review, but it does take up some time. For example, this weekend I’m working through some material I hadn’t had time to stay caught up on throughout the month of December.

So that’s the background noise that’s going to stay consistent, even while I put (the first edition of) Architect of Worlds on its final glide-path to release. Still, once those PDFs are out the door, a big slot will open up on my calendar for new forms of creative work. How completely I’ll be able to pivot in the month of January remains to be seen, but by the end of the month I hope to at least get started on some new creative work.

What’s that going to involve? At the moment, I think I’m going to get back to working on my more-or-less-hard-SF universe, under the working title of The Human Destiny. Which will involve some combination of:

• Doing a zero-based review of the existing setting material, some of which I’ve decided to rethink from scratch. For example, elements of the history of the galaxy and the structure of interstellar civilizations, some of the specific aliens I designed back in the day, and so on.
• Revisiting, revising, and possibly repackaging some of the fiction I’ve already written in that universe, in part to fit the revised setting assumptions.
• Writing some new fiction, most likely centered around my character Aminata Ndoye, the first human to become an officer aboard an alien starship. I’m planning to start releasing some of that online as serialized fiction, through vehicles like the Royal Road website. Hopefully that will help build a bigger audience that I’ve had so far.
• Starting to collect material for a tabletop RPG treatment of the setting, most likely structured around a licensed game system such as Monte Cook’s Cypher or (more likely at present) Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying.

I’m not going to try to build a formal task list, as I’ve done in previous “planning for the coming month” posts. Things are too much in a state of flux at the moment. It’s safe to say that January 2024 will involve two major themes: (1) finishing Architect of Worlds at last and putting it in the hands of my publisher; and (2) pivoting to resume work on the Human Destiny setting. Exactly where I stand on 31 January will inform the more structured planning messages for February 2024 and onward.

For my patrons: There may be a charged release at the end of this month, for the first time in quite a while. It depends on whether I can produce enough new or substantially revised Human Destiny material to justify that. You can probably count on charged releases resuming on a more-or-less regular monthly basis by February 2024.