I’ve just pushed a copy of the slides I’ll be using on Saturday, 22 November, for a seminar at Philcon 2025. The title is “Foundations of Worldbuilding: Getting the Astronomy Right,” and it’s a quick review of some recent results from exoplanetary science and the GAIA astrometry mission. Feel free to pull down a copy of the PDF for yourself.
October was a mixed bag, unfortunately. My top priority has been to stay ahead of schedule with my university courses, and I’ve been doing okay on that. My creative work has been a bit spotty, though. Hoping to improve on that in the next few months, especially after Philcon 2025 is over.
Here’s the tentative plan for November.
I did good work on this block of objectives – I’m well ahead of schedule on both courses. Staying that way is my top priority for the foreseeable future. (For the record, differential equations are annoyingly difficult . . . although I do seem to be making better progress with them now than I did forty years ago.)
Objectives for November include finishing Topics 2 and 3 and the second graded assignment for my astronomy course, and finishing units 3-5 and the first two graded assignments for my mathematics course.
Writing fan-fiction hit a snag in October. I did write a complete short story, but I wasn’t comfortable with it and it got almost no engagement from readers, so I decided to delete it and move on. Chalk that down as just being off on the wrong track.
Fortunately, late in the month I got an idea for a seasonally appropriate new story, and I managed to post the first chapter of “The Spooky Season” on Halloween. So finishing that is going to be the objective for the coming month.
The objective for November is to complete “The Spooky Season” and maybe start on the next story, although that next story is likely to be a big project, so it’ll likely have to wait until after Philcon.
October saw a major re-design of the “Cultural Evolution Game,” and that’s been getting a lot of favorable response from my collaborators and playtesters. So I think I’m very close to an actual release candidate for that. At the very least, I ought to be able to start writing the supporting material – all the tools a user will need to interpret the outputs of the Cultural Evolution Game in terms of an alien culture’s history. Tentatively I want to have a complete first draft for my section of the book by the end of the year.
The objectives for November are:
I’ve decided to give this project a zero-baseline review and rewrite, rather than continue trying to make incremental progress with it.
Back in 2024 I produced a version 0.53 of the “Human Destiny Sourcebook,” which got shared with my then-patrons and submitted to a Chaosium design contest. Recently I’ve been reviewing that, and I suspect I’ll do better to rewrite it from the ground up. So that’s the primary objective at the moment.
The objective for November is to start work on a version 0.60 of the “Human Destiny Sourcebook,” with the understanding that it may be December or even early in 2026 before I have a complete draft to share.
My schedule for Philcon 2025 has been finalized: one seminar, four panel appearances, and two RPG sessions. I’ll be keeping busy that weekend!
Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to finish putting together my Dune: Adventures in the Imperium scenario in October – made progress with it, designed the pre-generated characters for it, but it’s nowhere near finished yet.
The objectives for November are:
After Philcon is over and we’ve gotten through the Thanksgiving holiday, I may be able to do some re-allocation of effort in December and later. Mostly I’ll have to see how things are going with my university courses.