December 2024 – Sharrukin's Palace

2024 in Review

December 30, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

2024 had its ups and downs, and the completion of a big project left me kind of unfocused for several months. I’d have to say it was a decent year, though.

Past as Prologue

The biggest item, of course, was the final completion and publication of Architect of Worlds, now out as a 192-page softback and PDF from Ad Astra Games. Sales have been pretty decent, resulting in probably the most profitable year for my creative life since I quit working for Steve Jackson Games about 2006.

With Architect done, I kind of flitted from one project to another for the second half of the year, making some progress on several items but never quite settling on one.

Then the US federal elections took place in November, and bang my Muse had me focusing almost entirely on the Human Destiny universe. Which was probably predictable: that universe involves a benevolent alien empire coming to conquer Earth to save us from the weight of human folly, so every time a lot of human folly happens in the world I start thinking about it again.

Meanwhile, I started a transition away from using Amazon KDP and Patreon to get my work in front of an audience, largely because Amazon has been utterly useless in that regard and Patreon has made some policy changes that don’t fit my “business” model. Instead, I’ve set up a Ko-fi page and shop and will be moving almost all of my finished work to that venue. That’s where I’ll also be releasing draft and partial material, some of it free for all subscribers, some restricted to the higher tiers.

Meanwhile, the entire calendar year had me working on the single largest curriculum-development project of my entire career, first working with a senior official, more recently independently. This is a project that will probably occupy the rest of my tenure as a civil servant, however long that may be. I’m also continuing to work toward a second undergraduate degree and (possibly) a master’s from the Open University in the UK. I’m not feeling quite as stressed as I was in late 2023, but I certainly have no difficulty filling up my days.

The Year’s Blog Traffic

The top ten posts for 2024 turned out to be:

Looks like the most popular posts from the past year were a mix of status updates, posts about SF mapping and worldbuilding, and items related to Architect of Worlds. Which makes sense.

Looking Forward

So – objectives for the new year? I’m probably going to be focusing on Human Destiny projects for the time being, including publishing regular updates to the RPG book and (once again) trying to get some new fiction written.

In particular, I intend to publish early-draft material for the putative Atlas of the Human Protectorate, in the form of short writeups for individual worlds or star systems. The first of these, a description of the sigma Draconis star system, has already been posted to my Ko-fi shop and is free for Silver- and Gold-tier subscribers.

I also have in mind to assemble the first of several “supplements” for Architect of Worlds, laying out improvements and additions to the existing material. Look for that sometime this spring, maybe – it depends on how much I decide to include, and how long it takes to write and edit. These may or may not be released through Ad Astra Games.

In any case, new items will be appearing at my Ko-fi page and shop, some free for subscribers only, some with a modest price tag attached (but subscribers at the Silver and Gold levels will get discounts on those).

As for my social media presence, occasional long-form posts and status updates about my creative work will continue to appear here, while daily slice-of-life items and short updates will appear at my BlueSky profile. I’m also investigating Mastodon, but that hasn’t come to fruition yet. I fully expect my Facebook account will be moribund for now, and may be shut down entirely if Meta implements some of the changes they appear to be planning.

A lot depends on how things in my non-creative life go – that is, my family commitments, my day job (subject to the whims of the new US administration), and my university courses. I’m trying not to make big commitments for the coming year, and will be taking things one day at a time.

Thanks for sticking with me, regardless!

Planning for December 2024

December 1, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 1 comment

Well, that was a big month.

First, to address the elephant in the room. Yes, I think the people of the United States made an enormous mistake in this year’s elections, and all of us are going to suffer as a result. Eight years ago, a similar event threw me into such a state of shock that I very nearly gave up my creative life. Didn’t work on a single creative project for months, including serialized stories that had been under way before the election. I eventually got over it, but that was a big gap.

Not this time. Not sure what’s changed in my emotional balance since 2016, but in 2024 I’m not in a state of shock. Deeply angry, maybe, but not in a state of shock. And it turns out that being angry can feed your muse just as effectively as more pleasant emotions. So no hiatus this time.

Second, I spent a big chunk of the month getting ready for Philcon 2024.

Another successful convention! I sat on three panels, including delivering a solo “Worldbuilding 101” seminar to a full room. One of the two tabletop games I had written didn’t happen – it was scheduled for Friday evening, after a day of truly miserable weather that kept a lot of people at home. The other one, on Saturday evening, went off without a hitch. Meanwhile, I got to promote Architect of Worlds a bit, sold one of my author’s copies, and had some good conversations with other pros. Some people actually knew who I was without me having to run through my CV for them, which was nice.

Most importantly, I scarfed up information about several conventions coming up in 2025, all of them a bit closer to home than the two I visited this year. Definitely going to take steps to be on the program for at least some of those.

Now that my convention season for this year is over, and I’ve just about finished all the minor medical procedures I need to have done, I’m ready to get started in December with a clean slate. And there are going to be some minor changes around here.

I’ve already mentioned this, but I’m moving my main social-media presence away from Facebook and onto the new BlueSky platform. Look for me there at @jfzeigler.bsky.social. I usually post there at least once per day, so if you want day-to-day news that’s the best place to look.

Also, as I said a few days ago, I’m in the process of shutting down my Patreon site for good. My new interface, for anyone who might want to drop a little cash to support my creative work, is at the Ko-fi page for Sharrukin’s Palace.

The main tool for me to share content on Ko-fi will be the shop, which already has several e-books of my old fiction in place. I’ll be moving more existing fiction there, and posting new stories as I finish them. Subscribers at the Silver or Gold levels will get discounts on shop content. I’ll also be placing freebies on the shop, a few for all subscribers, some specifically for the Silver/Gold tiers.

Now, as to what creative projects I’ll be working on over the next few months:

My Human Destiny space-opera universe involves a vast interstellar empire that goes around saving young civilizations from their own folly. It seems to live in my head more strongly when there’s a lot of human folly in evidence around the world. Probably no surprise, then, that my muse has been focusing on it a lot over the past few weeks. So I plan to spend at least the next 3-4 months working on several Human Destiny items:

Reworking the setting bible, to match some new historical and technological assumptions, and to focus on the Star Trek-like aspects of the setting (interstellar exploration and adventure)
Reworking the core tabletop RPG rules for the setting, again for more focus on interstellar adventurers
Starting to produce Architect of Worlds-based writeups for specific star systems in the setting – in effect, starting to produce the Atlas of the Human Protectorate that I envisioned a while back
Writing some new stories!

All of those items will appear on the Ko-fi shop as they’re finished. At the moment, I think core RPG material will be free for all subscribers for now, while star system writeups will be free only for Silver/Gold tiers. New fiction will not be free, although again, Silver/Gold subscribers will get discounts on that.

For the month of December, I think the following plan will do:

Produce a writeup of the star system and planet generated during the Architect of Worlds seminar at Travellercon 2024, share that with seminar participants and post as a freebie to Ko-fi
Produce the first writeup of a star system for the Atlas of the Human Protectorate, post as a freebie for high tiers on Ko-fi
Start work on revisions to the setting bible and core RPG rules
Start (or resume) work on at least one new Human Destiny story
Continue to collect existing material for posting to Ko-fi at various levels

First two items are hard-and-fast objectives, the other three are “as time permits.” My ultimate goal is to be able to post at least two new items per month to Ko-fi, but we’ll see how events and other commitments work out.

Neat Website for Interstellar Mapping

December 1, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

I recently came across a neat website by Kevin Jardine: Galaxy Map.

It’s an odd site. It’s not clear how it’s all organized. It looks as if the site’s owner planned to write a book about mapping our galactic neighborhood, but the project got abandoned at some point. Nevertheless there’s a lot of interesting data and some gorgeous maps there, if you dig around a bit for them. In particular, Mr. Jardine has used the Gaia data tranches to do some really interesting mapping of relative star densities, the location of clusters and major nebulae, and the location of super-bright stars.

The most immediately useful page on the site appears to be at Galaxy Map Resources, but there’s also a collection of maps at Galaxy Map Posters that includes the one I included at the top of this post.

Really neat material there, if you’re at all interested in writing near-solar neighborhood interstellar fiction.

Sharrukin's Palace

Building fantastic worlds of the mind

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Month: December 2024