Sharrukin's Palace

Well, here we go, my first creative-planning message in close to six months. Now that I’m retired and have a lot more open time, I intend to get back into a regular schedule of creative work, organized as before around a loose plan that’s updated each month.

I’m going to experiment a little with the format, though, starting with this month. Instead of publishing a bullet-point list, I’m going to have a few one- or two-paragraph sections, each of which describes the current state of a project set and sets out tentative goals for the coming month.

So, without further ado . . .

University Studies

This month I’m wrapping up my university studies for the 2024-2025 academic year – this is my effort to acquire a second degree in Natural Sciences (Astronomy) and maybe acquire a graduate degree in the discipline in the coming years. The first week in June is probably going to be spent mostly on studying for my final exams, which are scheduled for 5 June and 9 June.

Therapy Writing (Fan Fiction)

The one creative outlet I managed to maintain, during that last stressful five months of my federal career, was a new burst of fan-fiction writing. That’s been in the form of a series of Star Trek: Lower Decks stories, forming a personal continuity that picks up where the television series left off. So far I’ve written five complete stories and am busy with the sixth.

If you’re interested in reading any of those:

• “Lower Decks Continues” is the series as a whole
• “Panem et Circenses” is the current effort, which will probably end up novella length before I’m finished

The objective for June is to finish “Panem et Circenses,” and maybe get started on the next story.

Architect of Worlds

Now that I have some time free, there are a few things I’ve been wanting to do with Architect of Worlds that may be rising to the top of the priority list. Most of this is just product maintenance.

The objectives for June are:

• Talk to Ken Burnside about how to approach the question of automating Architect – do we want to license one pro developer to be able to sell a piece of software, do we just want to be able to offer a seal of approval for amateur developers, or do we want to try something else?
• Reconstruct a formal errata list, so readers can see what’s been fixed in each minor-version release so far
• Start collecting new research for a potential second edition of the book, and make occasional world-building posts to this site based on that new research

The Human Destiny Universe

This is my primary space-opera setting, which has seen a few published stories already and is intended eventually to support more fiction as well as a tabletop RPG.

Lately I’ve been continuing to re-think the setting’s core premises, possibly because I’ve been on a Star Trek kick of late and I’m looking for ways to make the stories and the eventual RPG more Trek-like. For a while I was thinking in terms of a slower-than-light-only universe, but in many ways that’s a poor fit for pseudo-Trek, and it makes it much harder for any one character to have lots of interstellar adventures in their lifespan. I think I see a way to keep the over-arching premises of the setting while re-introducing FTL starships, but that will require some re-thinking of the structure of interstellar civilizations.

The objectives for June are:

• Re-work the document I have that describes the shape and structure of interstellar society in the setting
• (Tentative) Re-work the spreadsheets I have modeling the exploration and colonization of near-Sol space, now based on FTL assumptions
• Finish writing another document in the “Atlas of the Human Protectorate” series (most likely the Alpha Centauri writeup) and release that for patrons on my Ko-fi site

Re-publishing Earlier Fiction

This is probably the last item in the priority list, but I eventually want to evaluate my previously published fiction (3-4 ebooks, mostly published on Amazon Kindle Direct) and prepare to re-issue all of it. That’s going to involve removing these ebooks from Amazon, possibly giving them each an editing pass and rebuilding them, and then re-publishing them on a few less-billionaire-owned outlets. (I’m making almost no money from Amazon anyway, so I don’t anticipate losing much by moving my work elsewhere, and who knows? Sales may actually improve.)

The objective for June is probably going to be limited to researching my options for re-publishing, and starting to develop a workflow for it. I may get a first ebook re-issued this month, but that seems unlikely.