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Author: Sharrukin

Planning for December 2024

Planning for December 2024

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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

Neat Website for Interstellar Mapping

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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.

Kofi Site is Active

Kofi Site is Active

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As of a few minutes ago, my Kofi page is active at https://ko-fi.com/sharrukinspalace.

Aside from the standard “buy me a coffee” button, there’s a shop, currently offering five e-books in PDF and EPUB formats, with more to come. For example, I’ll soon be moving all my fiction that’s been published on Amazon into the Kofi shop.

I’ve also set up Bronze, Silver, and Gold tiers for subscriptions. The major difference is that those will involve regular monthly billing, no matter how much (or how little) new content I produce in a given month.

All three subscription tiers will get you access to free exclusive content in the future. At the moment, I plan to generate new items on a monthly basis, including:

  • Architect of Worlds-based writeups for real-world star systems in the Human Destiny setting
  • New fiction
  • In-progress drafts of upcoming game design projects

Higher tiers will also get you modest (Silver) and steep (Gold) discounts on shop purchases.

This means some minor changes here at the WordPress blog. A lot of the “free articles and fiction” have been taken down, to be integrated into the e-book collection The Shores of Night that’s now available to a wider audience on the Kofi site. In the future, I’m going to be a bit more tight-fisted about what freebies I share here. Regular blog posts won’t be affected, however – this will continue to be my preferred place for long-form blogging about my creative work.

Meanwhile, although my Patreon supporters have already been informed, I’ll say it here too: my Patreon site is going to be shut down entirely sometime in the next couple of weeks. If you want to drop a little cash to support my creative work, that opportunity is going to be over at Kofi for the foreseeable future.

A Recommended Textbook

A Recommended Textbook

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You may be aware that I’m in the process of picking up a second undergraduate degree, this time in the natural sciences with a focus on astronomy and planetary science, from the Open University of the United Kingdom. Mostly this is just to round out everything I’ve learned on the subject informally across a long lifetime. I’ve also got some notion of teaching the subject myself at the undergraduate level after I retire. I expect to finish my second BSc about 2028 or so, and maybe move on to pick up an MSc if I have the resources and the world hasn’t gone utterly insane by then.

So far I’m about a third of the way through my undergraduate work. At first, a lot of the course-work was nothing but review, time-consuming but not much of a challenge.

This year’s course on “Planetary science and the search for life,” on the other hand, has decidedly not been all review. It digs into details of planetary science and astrobiology that I’ve never picked up before. I’m already picking up bits and pieces that might (for example) make their way into a second edition of Architect of Worlds.

In particular, I’m becoming quite fond of the course’s first textbook, written by a trio of Open University instructors: An Introduction to the Solar System (Third Edition), from Cambridge University Press. It’s still at the undergraduate level, but it’s very meaty. Highly recommended for anyone else who is interested in picking up a solid grounding in planetary science.

Watch this space – I may have some more recommended texts as I work through this process.

Moving Social Media Presence

Moving Social Media Presence

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Quick note today: a lot of my social-media presence over the past few years has been on Facebook, but for several reasons that’s about to change. If you’re on BlueSky, look me up at @jfzeigler.bsky.social.

I’m probably not going to be very active for the next few days, but once I’m back up and running you can expect a short post from me there on just about a daily basis.

Planning for November 2024

Planning for November 2024

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I seem to be in the midst of an extended hiatus in my creative life: since late September I’ve been working on support for gaming conventions rather than large-scale projects.

Travellercon was pretty successful. I sat on two panel discussions and ran a GURPS Traveller: The Interstellar Wars adventure for a full table. I didn’t run myself into the ground, I had a good time, and I got to meet a lot of people in person who had just been names on the Internet before.

Ironically, one of the people I met at Travellercon was on the programming committee for another convention: Philcon 2024, set to take place 22-24 November. As of right now, I’m scheduled to sit on three panels at Philcon – one of them a solo workshop on “Worldbuilding 101” – and run two games in the evenings. So no sooner did I get finished with one convention, than I had taken on a bunch of prep work for another.

This isn’t a problem. I’m obliged to attend (and promote Architect of Worlds at) two conventions this year anyway. It gets me back into the more public side of tabletop game design and SF literature, after a very long time away. Still, it means I’m working on those short-term projects rather than any of my longer-term ones. I have several items I need to get back to, as soon as my schedule loosens up a bit after Thanksgiving.

Meanwhile, I’m giving serious thought to re-organizing and re-prioritizing my creative work even after I finish with Philcon.

Part of this is that I’ve just about determined that I’m going to be shutting down my Patreon campaign soon. At this point, my patrons may be able to expect a free release or two in November or December . . . but that may be the end of it. There are a number of reasons for this, but the three most significant are:

  1. Now that Architect of Worlds is finished and on the market, it may be a long time before I have another large-scale project that will help me make consistent monthly releases.
  2. In any case, I’m seeing a lot of patrons cancelling their subscriptions now that Architect is done, or signing up only for free subscriptions, or signing up and then cancelling in less than a month. Which reinforces that what I’ve been doing on Patreon since the Architect release is probably not holding people’s interest.
  3. Meanwhile, Patreon is showing signs of enshittification. They’ve already deprecated the payment model I’ve preferred since Day One, and I keep seeing signs of increasingly arbitrary behavior and reduced customer support from them. It may be time to move away from a service which seems to be responding more to the needs of venture capitalists than its customers.

The plan at present is to migrate over to Kofi (“buy me a coffee”). I’ll have my page set up to permit people to make one-time donations, or to sign up for a monthly support subscription (with the understanding that I will not necessarily be releasing any significant “rewards” on a monthly basis). There will also be a store-front, where I’ll be selling PDF and EPUB e-books of my fiction, and maybe a few game-design items. Regular supporters will get steep discounts on these. I’ll make interim drafts of big projects available for free as well – but those will be taken down if and when they lead to published products.

I’m not sure when the transition will be taking place – it depends on how quickly I can get a few more pieces of fiction into my store-front so there’s a substantial amount of material in place. Almost certainly by the end of the calendar year, though.

Another factor is that I think I want to buckle down and focus on writing more fiction over the next year or two, rather than working on big game-design projects. I’m sensing that’s where my creative energies are likely to be better spent for the immediate future.

So yeah, some changes in the weather are approaching.

Planning for October 2024

Planning for October 2024

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September was mostly about getting ready for Travellercon. I made a lot of the necessary progress for that, but there’s still a fair amount to get done and only a few days left to do it. It didn’t help that I was dealing with some minor health issues throughout September – nothing life-threatening, but several bouts of minor illness that were kind of distracting.

Between today and 10 October I need to get one last tranche of writing done for the day-job project that’s been taking up my time for over a year now, and get a bit of work done for the coming year’s courses at the Open University, and get everything squared away for Travellercon. So if you’re in my queue for any other action at the moment, you may need to cultivate patience until I get back from Lancaster in a couple of weeks.

Once Travellercon is over, I’ll have a little follow-up work to do for that, and I have some other items that need attention too. In particular, I owe some responses to the developer of a draft automation scheme for Architect of Worlds, which is looking very encouraging. My guess is that I won’t be getting back to serious work on (e.g.) Fourth Millenium until late in October. My patrons can therefore expect another month of no charged release, and we’ll re-evaluate in November.

One possibility is that I may take the second half of October and make a full-court press to get more of my back catalog of fiction edited, turned into e-books, and dropped into my Kofi site’s catalog. If I can get a good chunk of work done on that effort, I may be ready to start migrating patrons over to Kofi by sometime in November, when the subscription schemes start changing on Patreon.

No formal list of projects for this month. The above should give you a good idea what’s on my agenda at the moment, and the priority order for all of it.

Earth with Rings?

Earth with Rings?

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An interesting result in the current issue of Earth and Planetary Science Letters, suggesting that Earth may have had a significant ring system lasting up to 40 million years during the Ordovician period, about 466 million years ago:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X24004230

The mechanism is particularly interesting, and has implications for Architect of Worlds. At present, the design sequence simply will not produce rings around a terrestrial planet comparable to Earth. In this case, the hypothesis is that a largish asteroidal body had a near-miss encounter with Earth, within the planet’s Roche limit, and broke up to form rings. Which suggests that any terrestrial planet in a system that includes at least one planetoid belt might have a temporary ring system at any given time.

I’ll have to think about this some more, but there might be some additional guidelines forthcoming to cover this case. Not to mention that a ring system would cut back on insolation and have a profound effect on planetary climate . . .

Planning for September 2024

Planning for September 2024

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I spent most of August on the first tranche of writing and cartography for Fourth Millennium, and ended up with about 10,000 words of new material (and a snazzy master map for the setting). That all went out to my patrons on 31 August, so that hit my marks for the month. Which means several of my “front burner” items for August have actually been completed.

September is going to be a bit different. I have an obligation to run two events at Travellercon 2024 in October, so I need to focus on preparing for those.

One is going to be an Architect of Worlds “world-building workshop.” Up to six Traveller players and I are going to take four hours to work out a complete, Traveller-compatible planetary system using the Architect rules. I’ll need to do some prep work to make sure that runs smoothly and keeps the participants engaged, considering I won’t have a full-on computer on hand. After the convention is over, I’ll be writing up that planetary system in detail and sharing that with the workshop participants.

The other event will be a GURPS Traveller: The Interstellar Wars scenario . . . which will be the first time I’ve run any RPG for strangers in over twenty years. Yeah, that’s going to call for plenty of prep time too.

So I suspect most of my creative time in September will be taken up getting ready for the convention. My patrons can expect there to be no charged release for the month of September, although at some point after the con I may share my results of the two events as patron rewards.

Meanwhile, I’m working on a project to rescue a lot of my old fiction and republish it in forms that I can sell on my Kofi shop, once that opens up. As of today I’ve finished polishing up one novelette, incidentally working out the workflow for future items. This will be an “as time permits” project throughout the next 2-3 months, most likely.

So here’s the formal list for September:

  • Front Burner:
    • Travellercon: Finish designing the scenario for the adventure “Raid on Markidu.”
    • Travellercon: Complete setup work for the Architect of Worlds world-building workshop.
  • Back Burner:
    • Fourth Millennium: Write a gazetteer of major regions in the setting, tied to the master map.
    • Architect of Worlds: Finish setting up the page(s) for the book on this site.
    • Architect of Worlds: Start making at least one post per month (errata, edge cases, new material) supporting the book.
    • Publishing: Continue polishing and reformatting legacy fiction for publication via Kofi, as time permits.

More news as the month unwinds, no doubt. I hope to get back to Fourth Millennium as my primary project after the convention, in mid-October.

Minor Site Update: “Science!”

Minor Site Update: “Science!”

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As part of the slow-but steady process of upgrading the site’s organization – the better to support Architect of Worlds in particular – I’ve just created a new tag: science!

The purpose of this tag will be to focus on posts that are mostly about specific results in the scientific literature, as they pertain to world-building for fiction. Most of these will have obvious relevance to Architect of Worlds.

The architect of worlds tag will remain, but that tag will also include posts about the process of writing, editing, selling, and maintaining the book. If you’re mostly interested in reading what I’ve had to say about astronomy, exoplanetary science, and so on, look for the science! tag instead.

Yes, the exclamation point is required. If you like, read it in the voice of Magnus Pyke in mad-scientist mode.