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Author: Sharrukin

Planning for January 2023

Planning for January 2023

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December went about as expected – I spent a lot of time learning Adobe InDesign and starting to plan the book design and layout for Architect of Worlds, and didn’t produce much of anything new.

At this point I think I’ve learned enough that I can at least start putting together the final design for the book. The immediate objective is going to be a “toy” version of the book, no more than 18-20 pages of excerpts from the complete draft. That won’t contain anything resembling a usable subset of the draft, but it will show off all the bits of design and layout I need to assemble: blocks of text, section headers at different levels, chapter title pages, a title page and acknowledgements page for the book as a whole, tables, diagrams, mathematical formulae, filler art, and so on. The idea is to have something to show off for patrons and interested readers, while building a framework on which I can hang the whole book. That’s going to be the big project in January. Whether I’ll finish this month remains to be seen – this is a very new endeavor for me.

Meanwhile, in my spare time I’ve been playing around with my Danassos setting, the alternate-historical fantasy world in which my novel-in-progress Twice-Crowned takes place. I spent odd moments in November and December using some of my tabletop games to generate an alternate history for the setting, up through about 50 BCE. In the process, one of the Muses seems to have inspired me – I think I see how to build that setting into a very playable tabletop RPG, as well as a backdrop for more stories.

The working title for that setting book is probably going to be something like The Fourth Millennium, because the current end-date for the timeline is right around the year 3000 by the setting’s dominant reckoning. It’s got a lot of interesting features: a Mediterranean world divided between Hellenistic and Latin empires, plenty of internal conflict in each empire and the possibility of a big war between them, barbarian peoples around the fringes looking to take bites, new gods and religious movements, magic, new technologies of clockwork and steam, the possibility of monsters lurking in the shadows. It’s a world in which we could adventure at the height of the imperial era without being beholden to the actual course of ancient history. Best guess is this would make a good Cypher System game, published under Monte Cook Games’ new open license.

That’s not going to be a top priority any time soon – I’m focusing on Architect over the next few months – but it might occupy some spare cycles. Not to mention I want to make more progress on Twice-Crowned and maybe write a couple other stories in that setting.

Here’s this month’s priorities:

  • Top Priority:
    • Architect of Worlds: Finish studying book layout techniques.
    • Architect of Worlds: Begin setting up a “toy” design for the book.
  • Second Priority:
    • Danassos: Continue work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
    • Danassos: Write a short story drawn from the setting timeline.
    • Danassos: Produce a new interim draft of the setting timeline, and otherwise gather notes for an eventual Fourth Millennium book.
    • Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
    • Human Destiny: Produce a map of late 23rd-century Mars for the Atlas.

As before, the “second priority” items are likely to function as a list of smaller creative projects that I might work on in odd moments while I focus primarily on Architect. It remains unlikely that any of this will amount to a charged release for my patrons this month, but there may be a couple of smaller freebies. We’ll see how the month goes.

2022 in Review

2022 in Review

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For all the chaos out in the world at large, 2022 was a decent year for me as a part-time creative and blogger. Traffic to this blog continues steady, although there wasn’t quite as much as during the previous year. I still have a couple dozen patrons who are supporting my work.

I also managed several major accomplishments this year. In particular, I finished writing the first full draft of Architect of Worlds in 2022 – not bad for a project I’ve been working on for over six years at this point. There’s a near-certain chance I’ll have that book ready for release sometime in 2023.

Meanwhile, I did some work on the Human Destiny setting, putting together early partial drafts of the core book and the Atlas of the Human Protectorate. These seem likely to be tabletop RPG releases at some point, most likely under the Cepheus Engine system. Once Architect of Worlds is released, this is likely to be a good candidate for more attention.

I also revived an old novel project, Twice-Crowned, and got perhaps 40% of the first draft of that written. That’s another good candidate for more progress in the coming year, especially since its alternate-historical fantasy setting has been growing on me at a rapid pace. I may start writing that up as another tabletop RPG setting in the coming year, most likely as a Cypher System RPG under Monte Cook Games’ creator program.

Meanwhile, I got a round dozen book reviews done. I seem to be a success at that – I’ve been able to push out a review every month like clockwork for a couple of years now, and those reviews seem to be bringing at least a little attention to my other work too.

One thing I didn’t do much of this year is short fiction. I did push a couple of short items to this site as free stories, but those were mostly old writing being given a new venue. I’ve got several concepts for new short fiction that I want to work on soon, if I can get Architect moving toward release.

The top ten posts for 2022 turn out to be:

  1. Rethinking the Placement of Planets
  2. New Release for “Architect of Worlds”
  3. Architect of Worlds: The “Special Cases” Outline
  4. Breakaway!
  5. New Models for Gas Giant Formation
  6. New Models for Planetary Formation
  7. Review: Lurkers at the Threshold, by Jürgen Hubert
  8. Status Report (16 April 2022)
  9. Review: Obelisks: Dust, by Ari Marmell
  10. Status Report (29 March 2022)

Interesting that most of the high-traffic posts all had to do with Architect, although I’m not overly surprised at that. A couple of my book reviews, a couple of status reports, and a side project (the Space: 2049 setting that I’m playing with). Fairly typical.

My objectives for the coming year should be pretty straightforward. I want to get Architect ready for release, and that currently involves teaching myself Adobe InDesign and some basic book-design principles. I want to make progress with at least one novel-length project, and maybe write a few pieces of shorter fiction. And once some of that is well in hand, I may start looking at publishing one of my settings as a tabletop RPG book. Plenty to keep me busy, that’s for sure.

Review: Write Magic Systems Your Readers Won’t Forget, by Stant Litore

Review: Write Magic Systems Your Readers Won’t Forget, by Stant Litore

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Write Magic Systems Your Readers Won’t Forget by Stant Litore

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

This is a rather different review than my usual. The book in question isn’t a work of fiction, it’s a coaching toolkit for would-be authors who want to write fiction.

I first came across Stant Litore when I read his book on Scriptural exegesis, Lives of Unforgetting. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that he was also a genre author, and that he has written a lengthy series of “toolkits” for writers. Many of these have titles of the form “Write [X] Your Readers Won’t Forget,” and for the most recent book in the series, the “X” is magic systems.

I’ll confess that when I write fantasy fiction, the notion of developing a “magic system” mildly repels me. I think of magic as wonder-working and miracle, not the kind of formal, rule-based endeavor that ought to be governed by a “system.” To my delight, this book addressed exactly that tension on the very first page, which was enough to pull me into the rest of the text.

The book is organized in a very workmanlike manner. Each section addresses a single question that the writer needs to think about when developing a magic-infused world. What is magic like, how do people in the world experience it? How do magicians experience it, and how is that different from everyone else’s understanding? How do magicians fit into the community, if they do at all? What are the personal and other costs of magic? And so on.

In each section, Stant Litore discusses the issue at hand, explaining why it’s crucial to the author’s vision for their fantasy world. He provides plenty of options and examples, quoting from well-known works of fantasy fiction. Then the section is closed out by one or more writing exercises, encouraging the reader to work through the details for their own fantasy setting. The book closes with a sample worksheet, collecting in one place all the considerations discussed throughout.

I don’t normally find books of this kind to be all that useful, but I suspect Write Magic Systems Your Readers Won’t Forget is going to be an exception. I’m considering formally working through it to help flesh out the two fantasy settings in which I work. If I have any quarrel with the book in its current state, it might be that it’s too short. Just on first reading, I can see several ways to expand on what Stant Litore has done here.

Still, I suspect anyone interested in developing a fantasy setting, whether for gaming or literary purposes, will find this a useful resource. And if the quality of this book is any indication, I would seriously consider checking out the rest of the Litore Toolkits for Fiction Writers. Very highly recommended.

Cover Mockup for “Architect of Worlds”

Cover Mockup for “Architect of Worlds”

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This isn’t the first mockup I’ve produced for the cover, but it’s the first one I’m happy with. It includes the design elements I most wanted – spiral galaxy, starfield, alien landscape with other worlds visible in the sky. The elements come from different sources, but I think I’ve managed to blend them together reasonably smoothly, and the composite image seems to work. This may or may not be the final cover, but it will certainly do for now.

The font is called Nasalization, and it’s based on a 1970s-era NASA logo. I think it’s clean and readable, and has the right aesthetics. I believe I’ll be using the same font for chapter and section headers inside the book.

Meanwhile, I’m continuing to poke at Adobe InDesign, looking at a variety of worked examples too, and I think I’m getting a grip on how the project needs to go. By early January I’ll probably start to put together a toy layout that will include all the features that I’ll need to put in the final book – text passages, chapter and section headers, sidebars, mathematical equations, citations to scientific papers, tables, diagrams, filler art, the whole nine yards. Once I have that put together, I’ll be able to show it off and then take what I’ve learned and apply it to the bigger problem of building the complete book.

Progress!

Planning for December 2022

Planning for December 2022

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November saw a big milestone: the first complete rough draft of Architect of Worlds, shared with my patrons and a few selected readers on the last day of the month.

That accomplishment doesn’t mean the content of Architect has been finalized, by any means. While I don’t expect any more big changes to the “rules” mechanisms, I’m almost certainly going to polish the prose, clean up the mathematical formulae, and produce a number of graphs and diagrams to help support the text.

The big task, though, is going to be to start laying the book out for publication. Layout is a completely new skill set for me, so I expect to spend a fair amount of time mastering the basic skills before there’s substantial progress on the book. That’s where most of my creative time in December of 2022 is likely to go.

So, here’s this month’s priorities, arranged the same way as in November:

  • Top Priority:
    • Architect of Worlds: Study and master book layout techniques.
  • Second Priority:
    • Danassos: Continue work on the new rough draft of the novel Twice-Crowned.
    • Danassos: Write a short story drawn from the setting timeline.
    • Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
    • Human Destiny: Produce a map of late 23rd-century Mars for the Atlas.

As you can see, the “second priority” items are likely to function as a list of smaller creative projects that I might work on in between studying Adobe InDesign or examining other small-press products for layout pointers. At this point I find it kind of unlikely that any of this will amount to a charged release for my patrons this month, but there may be a couple of smaller freebies as pseudo-holiday-gifts.

Incidentally, I’ve already mentioned this elsewhere, but for my patrons and anyone else who’s interested: last month is the last time I plan to charge my patrons for any Architect of Worlds content. Any further changes to the draft are going to be incremental, in service to getting the book ready for release sometime in (hopefully the first half of) 2023. My patrons at the $2 and above can expect to get a free copy of the book if and when it’s ready.

What’s in store for Architect after it gets released? Well, I’ll almost certainly continue to keep an eye on the science as it develops, and I may write the occasional blog post here on the subject. Good chance there will be a second edition of the book in a few years, too. That endeavor isn’t going to be a “once and done” project, I suspect.

Review: Obelisks: Dust, by Ari Marmell

Review: Obelisks: Dust, by Ari Marmell

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Obelisks: Dust by Ari Marmell

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

Obelisks: Dust is the first volume of what appears to be a planned duology, set after the world falls into a very unusual apocalypse.

At the beginning of this story, the astronauts aboard the International Space Station are engaged in normal operations. Flight Engineer Cynthia Han, our protagonist, is a member of the current six-person crew. When we first meet Cynthia, she is helping to welcome several guests aboard the ISS, while also concealing a growing medical problem that she fears will end her spaceflight career.

After a difficult day, Cynthia retires to her bunk. When she awakens, everything has changed. Even a quick glance out the ports shows that Earth has changed drastically. The planet’s surface is invisible, shrouded in a thick layer of airborne dust. Meanwhile, the ISS has lost contact with the ground; only a few radio stations are still on, and those are broadcasting nothing but noise.

The astronauts and their guests wait a while, to see if the situation changes, but eventually they are forced to make an emergency return to Earth. They soon find most of the human population missing, the environment harsh and hostile. Strangest of all, mysterious obelisks have appeared throughout the landscape . . . and to even glance at one of them from a distance is to risk madness and death.

Cynthia and her colleagues struggle to deal with conflicts among their own group, while surviving in the hostile landscape, searching for other survivors, and trying to figure out just what has happened to the world. The story that follows is bleak, with plenty of moments of horror, but it also promises a glimmer of hope.

Mr. Marmell’s world-building and plotting are well-done, with a fast-moving and suspenseful plot. He’s adept at ratcheting the tension upward; every time the audience thinks we’ve gotten a handle on the strangeness of the situation, another wild card gets dealt. The story is framed as “horror,” and there are certainly a lot of very ugly moments in the narrative. Yet the focus is always on Cynthia and her colleagues, using their wits and skills to survive. Despite their flaws, the characters are sympathetic and resourceful people, and I found myself rooting for them to resolve their differences and push forward.

The prose style here is very clean, with high-quality copy- and line-editing. I didn’t find myself being distracted by editing errors. Viewpoint discipline is good, with the story told almost entirely from Cynthia’s perspective. Exposition is subtle and clear. This is an accomplished writer working in good form.

If I found anything to quarrel with here, it’s that the book is a bit short – it was clearly written as the first half of a longer narrative. Nevertheless, this story does work as a stand-alone novel, with a number of subplots resolved as of the end of the book.

I found myself pushing through this story in a single sitting, unable to put Obelisks: Dust down, and I really do want to see the sequel. Very highly recommended.

Planning for November 2022

Planning for November 2022

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October turned out to be somewhat productive – I finally broke through that logjam that was holding up forward progress on Architect of Worlds, and I finished another few chapters of Twice-Crowned.

I think I’m going to concentrate on Architect this month, trying to flesh out the text where it’s incomplete (extended examples, modeling notes, and the few sections that are still just stubs instead of completed prose). The goal, as always, is to get to a more-or-less complete nd integrated draft so I can start a final editorial pass and get started with layout of the finished book.

Meanwhile, I’ll probably try to write a few more chapters of Twice-Crowned this month, or maybe write one of the short stories that’s been hovering in the back of my brain. I might also tinker with some more items for the Atlas of the Human Protectorate – that hasn’t gotten any new material in a while.

The planning schedule for this month is pretty much the same as last month. I’m going to trim out some of the low-priority and “back burner” items – which isn’t to say that I’m abandoning those, but I suspect I’ll be focused enough on my top priorities that I won’t be spending any cycles on the rest for now. Once I get one of my top items – the book-length projects – finished, I’ll re-evaluate what might rise back toward the top of the queue.

  • Top Priority:
    • Architect of Worlds: Continue work on preparing a complete draft of the book for eventual layout and publication.
  • Second Priority:
    • Danassos: Continue work on the new rough draft of the novel Twice-Crowned.
    • Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
Review: The New Empire, by Alison McBain

Review: The New Empire, by Alison McBain

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The New Empire by Alison McBain

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

The New Empire is a novel of alternate history, telling the story of a young man caught between worlds and struggling with the contradictions of his life.

In the prologue of The New Empire, we see what appears to be the final minutes of a young man named Jiangxi. He confronts an older man named Onas, with whom he clearly has a complicated relationship, but they share only a brief moment and have little to say to one another. Then Jiangxi goes out to meet the firing squad which is there to carry out his execution. The rest of the story is about who Jiangxi is, and how he got to be in such a fix.

When next we see Jiangxi, he is a young boy, a slave, being shipped across the ocean to a distant land. American readers may think they already recognize the narrative, but it turns out that Jiangxi is Chinese, and that the land to which he is being sent is somewhere in what we would call California.

This isn’t the world we know, but one in which the Ming Dynasty “treasure fleets” discovered the Americas in the early 15th century. Three centuries later, contact between China and the peoples of North America has led to the formation of a “new empire,” a loose confederation of peoples that spans the continent. Influenced by Chinese culture and technology, the confederation is putting up strong resistance against the encroachment of European colonialists. The story later mentions armed conflict against the Europeans, especially the Spanish, led by a real-world historical figure (the missionary Junípero Serra). Yet we never see any of them, and the only part they play in the story is as distant barbarians who threaten the order of the confederation.

Jiangxi is purchased by Onas, an influential religious leader and statesman among the Ohlone peoples of the California coast. At first it seems that Jiangxi is going to be treated as a common slave, assigned menial tasks and brutally punished when he disobeys. Soon, however, Onas begins to educate him, teaching him skills he might need to be more than a simple slave. It becomes clear that Onas has something specific in mind for Jiangxi . . . but the Chinese boy develops ideas of his own, which may wreck all of Onas’s plans for him.

The alternate-historical setting of The New Empire is extremely well done. Chinese and Native American history are not my specialties, but what little research I was able to do while reading this novel seemed to support what we see in the story. It’s a very plausible setting. In particular, alternate-history authors often make the mistake of idealizing the cultures they write about, but there is none of that here. These are slave-holding cultures, backed by ruthless violence, and even sympathetic characters seem reluctant to condemn this.

Only Jiangxi is an eternal rebel against the injustices of his setting, and this is a key to understanding his character. He’s a mass of contradictions – originating from the very highest family in China, sold into slavery, forced to adapt to an alien civilization, eventually granted a position of privilege there. He lives in several different worlds and is at home in none of them, and the contradiction eventually drives his tragedy to its conclusion.

If there’s one aspect of The New Empire that didn’t quite work for me on first reading, it was the ending. Jiangxi’s story comes to a conclusion that feels very abrupt at first, and it’s not at all a happy one. On further reflection, I suspect that was intentional. It’s Jiangxi’s well-established character traits that lead him to his fate – this is a tragedy very much in the classical mode.

The prose style here is very clean, and the copy- and line-editing is quite good. One or two errors did catch my eye, but these never quite pulled me out of the story. Viewpoint discipline is good; the story is told very strictly from Jiangxi’s perspective. Exposition is done almost entirely through character action and dialogue, with no big clumsy blocks in authorial voice, and the reader is trusted to figure out the details of the setting on their own.

I very much enjoyed immersing myself in the world of The New Empire, and I would be interested in seeing what else Ms. McBain might attempt in this genre. Very highly recommended.

Status Report (22 October 2022)

Status Report (22 October 2022)

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Between a very busy time at my day job, and a bout of illness over the last week, I’m feeling under the gun to get anything creative finished this month. I think I have a couple of milestones that are feasible to reach in the next nine days, but a lot depends on whether I can carve out enough time.

The first milestone is to finish rewriting a big section of Architect of Worlds, reworking the process of placing planets in a star system under development. We’re talking about what is now Steps Nine through Twelve, although I’m breaking up a few of those and the final result will be Steps Nine through Fifteen instead. That’s making decent progress. I’m currently working Step Fourteen (determining the mass of planets) and once that’s finished the last step is almost a cut-and-paste from the previous draft. I think that’s going to come out to be about 7,000 words of reworked material – no examples, no modeling notes, just the bare sequence – but I think that will be one part of the release this month for my patrons and beta readers.

The other item is probably going to be a few new chapters of Twice-Crowned, set after Alexandra arrives in Athens as a penniless exile for the first time. I actually wrote this next section a couple of years ago, so it’s just going to need a once-over and a coat of polish. That should come to about 13,000 words. I think that will be easy enough to get ready by month’s end.

So, in all, we’re talking about 20,000 words of extensively reworked or completely new material. Kind of a patchwork for my patrons for this month, but enough to justify making the combination a charged reward.

I’m also plowing through a new indie novel for review, and with luck that will be done by the end of the month too.

Now, if I can just get all that done and juggle a rather terrifying number of projects for the office, all at once . . .

Rethinking the Placement of Planets

Rethinking the Placement of Planets

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The TRAPPIST-1 planetary system, from a distance

The core of the Architect of Worlds design sequence is the series of steps in which the user places planets in orbit around a given star. Right now, that’s Steps Nine through Twelve:

  • Step Nine: Structure of Protoplanetary Disk
  • Step Ten: Outer Planetary System
  • Step Eleven: Inner Planetary System
  • Step Twelve: Eccentricity of Planetary Orbits

This is the section of the design sequence that’s been rewritten the most times, largely driven by the discovery of new exoplanets or new planetary systems in formation over the past few years. It works . . . but it doesn’t work well. Frankly, it’s a mess, it requires a lot of complicated and fiddly special cases, and I’m told it’s a bear to try to automate.

I’ve been thinking about doing yet another rewrite, as part of the process of producing a fully integrated draft of the book for the first time.

Now, as often happens, this gets into a peculiarity of my design process. There are times when I go for days or even weeks without writing a single word on a given project, because I’m chewing on some thorny problem. In a novel, it might be a bit of plot or character development that isn’t coming clear. In a game design, it’s a mechanic or subsystem that doesn’t want to work the way I would like. In either case, I do a convincing imitation of a writer who’s creatively blocked – but that’s not really the case. What’s really happening is that my brain is mulling over the problem with every spare cycle. Eventually, usually at the subconscious level, some inspiration comes along and I see a way forward.

I’m not quite at that point with this piece of Architect, but I think I’m getting close.

The way the system works now, you start by sketching out the mass and structure of the protoplanetary disk. Then you place planets roughly in the order in which they form – gas giants due to disk instability first, then gas giants due to rapid accretion, then rocky terrestrial worlds in the inner system. The results of each step can affect the parameters of the next, of course. That means lots of special cases where you have to put constraints on a mechanic, or where you have to fiddle with the outcome to make it fit.

This gets particularly annoying when the mechanics for planetary migration (i.e., movement inward or outward across the disk during formation) interact with the final placement of planetary orbits. Easy to get a case where you’re placing planets later in the process and you get an arrangement that interferes with planets you placed earlier on. Annoying.

So it occurred to me, possibly some night recently while I was drifting off to sleep, that I could just turn the whole process on its head. Instead of placing the young planets and then using a bunch of rules to shift them around due to disk migration and other factors, why not just do something like the following:

  • Determine with a few random numbers and table lookups how many planets survive the formation process in each of the three categories (disk-instability gas giants, rapid-accretion gas giants, rocky terrestrials). Assume these three categories of planets always fall in that order, outer orbits to inner.
  • Determine the orbital radii of the innermost planet and the outermost planet.
  • Space all the other planetary orbits more or less evenly in between, using a procedure that won’t generate impossible cases that have to be fixed.
  • Then, and only then, generate the masses of each planet.

One of the neat features of a system like this is that it can take into account things like disk migration and a Grand Tack for the system’s largest gas giant, without having to explicitly recapitulate all that evolution. If there aren’t any rocky terrestrials, that must mean that your innermost rapid-accretion gas giant migrated inward and stayed close to its primary, a “hot Jupiter.” If there are several rocky terrestrials, then that gas giant either didn’t migrate in very far, or it got pulled back outward by a Grand Tack. Done – no need to work through a several-step process, full of exceptions and special cases, to capture all the possibilities.

Hopefully this will be quite a bit easier to use. Ought to be a lot easier to automate, too. I can already hear K. Nakamura cheering, off in the distance.

I’m not quite ready to start rewriting this section of the sequence – I still need to work through some of the implications in my head first – but I might start taking a crack at it within a few days. If it works out, that will be a big step toward having a complete version 1.0 draft of the whole book that I’d be willing to share with my beta readers and patrons. Stay tuned.