Browsed by
Category: Status Reports

Growing the TBR Pile

Growing the TBR Pile

Comments 0 Comment

Last month, I got started on my new project of reviewing self-published science fiction and fantasy. I will admit to having ulterior motives there – I have work of my own that needs attention – but it’s also worth doing for its own sake.

I got started with the first three volumes of Gordon Doherty’s Empires of Bronze series, which I certainly enjoyed. Then the question arose: how to find more books for the TBR (To Be Reviewed) pile? I’m not widely known as a reviewer yet, since I’ve just started to put myself forward as such. I could always browse Amazon’s virtual shelves at random, but that’s no fun.

So I ended up doing the obvious thing: I posted a query to Reddit.

I now have a list of twenty self-published fantasy novels to choose from, already recommended by at least one reader. That should keep me going for the remainder of the calendar year, long enough to build up a back catalog of six to eight reviews that I can point to as proof that I’m serious about this. Hopefully, by then I’ll be getting the occasional request directly from other authors, and that will keep the ball rolling.

(If you have a self-published novel you’d like me to review, have a look at the Review Policy link in the menu bar, and drop me a line.)

In the meantime, I have a bunch of new novels to browse through and read, which is the fun part of this venture. Look for some more reviews to appear in this space over the next couple of weeks.

A Bit of Insight

A Bit of Insight

Comments 8 comments

I think I may have finally gotten myself unblocked with respect to one of my long-term creative projects. The project in question is the Human Destiny setting.

The premise is that sometime in the middle of the 21st century, an interstellar civilization arrives in the Sol system and (without much effort) conquers humanity. It’s a strangely benign sort of conquest, though. The aliens don’t have any interest in us as slaves, nor are they motivated by a desire to take the solar system’s natural resources for their own benefit. Their goals seem mostly to involve . . . nannying us. Their laws are fairly strict, backed up by almost-universal surveillance, but enforcement seems to be non-violent, completely incorruptible, and even-handed. Meanwhile, all of us are provided a standard of living better than ever before, without anyone being required to work for any of it.

Naturally, a lot of humans resent all this mightily, but there seems to be nothing that can be done about it. The longer-term question is why all this has happened. What motivates the aliens?

I’ve written and published a couple of stories in this setting: “Pilgrimage” and “Guanahani.” I have two or three more stories in my development pile too. I’m fairly sure there’s a robust series, maybe even a few novels, in there. Yet, even after years of cogitation, I’ve never been able to get the idea to launch.

The main problem is that the setting does away with a lot of human agency just by its premise. Great, the aliens have come along and solved a lot of our problems, including many of the ones driven by human conflict and misbehavior. There are certainly stories left to be told, but a lot of the writer’s tools for plot and character development are set aside already.

It’s probably telling that almost all the stories I’ve written in this setting so far involve breakdowns of the alien surveillance apparatus. It’s kind of like Star Trek‘s transporters – they’re so useful for short-circuiting plots that a writer often has to justify taking them off-line before a story can happen.

There’s also the aliens’ motivation. They’re here because they want us to survive and evolve into the kind of species that actually can play a role on the galactic stage. That means human psychology needs to change. We need to learn to live with each other and tolerate the Other, we need to get better at understanding and preserving the big systems that keep us alive, we need to start thinking on much larger scales in both space and time.

So how do I write stories about that, in which the aliens demonstrate their motivations through conflict and plot rather than by simply telling the reader what’s up?

I was idly thinking about this the other day – a lot of my creative work happens in the back of my mind while I’m doing something else entirely. Then my mind made a connection with what I was doing with my hands and my forebrain at the time.

I was idly playing a game on my iPad, you see.

Terraforming Mars has been out for several years as a tabletop game, and now has a pretty good adaptation as a mobile app as well. It’s one of those wonderfully thematic board games that does such a superb job of making a complex subject playable and interesting to the layman.

Terraforming Mars assumes an era of exploration and colonization throughout the solar system, starting either late in this century or sometime in the next. The centerpiece of that era is a generations-long project to, as it says on the tin, terraform Mars – transform that planet into an at least marginally habitable world, where human beings can live freely with little or no life-support equipment.

Well. Suddenly I could see a lot of possible context for the Human Destiny setting, Suppose the aliens, aside from simply providing a decent quality of life for most humans, also opened the door for this kind of expansion into the solar system? If humans could settle on Mars, cooperate with each other in a project that might not pay off for many human lifetimes, wouldn’t that be an opportunity for some of us to demonstrate the citizen-of-the-galaxy mindset the aliens are looking for?

Right away, my brain started working on ways to get my character Aminata Ndoye – the protagonist of “Pilgrimage” and a few of the not-yet-published stories – involved in Martian terraforming and solar-system expansion. That in turn gave me a whole raft of new ideas about the Human Destiny setting as a whole.

All of which is to say that I might be turning back to that project, finally. My creative plate is rather full at the moment, between working on my Krava stories, and Architect of Worlds, and wanting to flesh out the EIDOLON game system a bit more. Still, as 2020 winds down I think I might be able to revisit the Human Destiny setting, rework the core documentation for that, and start making some of that information available. Readers of this blog, and my patrons over on Patreon, can expect to see some results from that over the next couple of months.

Status Report (17 October 2020)

Status Report (17 October 2020)

Comments 0 Comment

A quick note to assure everyone that I’m still alive. I’ve been working on a lot of things this week, with the result that none of them have been pushed through to completion. Hopefully this weekend will help change that.

  • About finished with the next bit of Architect of Worlds, which will start establishing a designed world’s atmosphere and climate.
  • Still working on reviews of the second and third books in Gordon Doherty’s Empires of Bronze series, which will bring me to my goal for this first month of reviewing other people’s self-published books.
  • Picking out another piece of short fiction, to post here and send as a free reward for my patrons.
  • Also working on promotion for The Curse of Steel, and pushing forward with the first draft of The Sunlit Lands, both of which are important but aren’t likely to be visible here. Watch that progress bar, though!

Look for some results from that list over the next few days, I think.

Publication Eve

Publication Eve

Comments 0 Comment

As of this evening, The Curse of Steel has been fully prepared as a KPF-format e-book and is about three steps short of being released.

I’m not going to try to publish it tonight. I want to review the whole e-book one final time to make sure there are no last-minute errors, and that may take me a little while. Especially since I have a pile of telework to get done for my office over the next couple of days.

Still. Everything has been loaded into the Kindle Create app, and it looks very nice indeed. This is starting to feel like a real event. The book will almost certainly be released by Wednesday of this week.

Status Report (1 October 2020)

Status Report (1 October 2020)

Comments 2 comments

I’m still working on the next step in the Architect of Worlds design sequence.

This one is proving a bit thornier than usual, because I’m trying to model a very complex system. This step is doing a lot of the heavy lifting to describe the geology of a world. I need something that can handle Earth’s complex plate-tectonics geology, and the stagnant-plate geologies of Venus and Mars, and the mega-vulcanism of Io, and putative super-Earths, and can also handle long stretches of geologic time, and and and. Tall order . . . although I think I’m converging on something that will work well enough. A few more days of work on that, most likely, and then the next block of draft text will appear here.

Meanwhile, as of today the editor I hired to review the draft of The Curse of Steel has finished his work, and his assessment was both useful and very positive. The big takeaway here is that he’s confirmed my belief that the current draft does not need any more major surgery. I estimate about two more weeks of work, to finish the glossary, go through the draft one last time to pick a few more nits out of the prose, assemble the e-book files, and publish.

The Curse of Steel will almost certainly be available on Kindle Direct by the middle of October. At the point of release, anyone who’s signed up as my patron at the $2 level or above will receive a free copy of the e-book, and anyone who’s signed up at the $5 level or above will be mentioned in the Acknowledgements section of the book.

After which, I plan to spend about three days in unashamed celebration, and then it will be time to get to work on the next book in the series: The Sunlit Lands.

Dependencies in a Model

Dependencies in a Model

Comments 5 comments

Still working on the next sections of Architect of Worlds.

What’s interesting is that we’re coming to a number of items that fall into a web of dependencies. Some items affect the most likely outcome of others, and it’s not a nicely linear process. Just to give you a sample, here’s some storyboarding I’ve been doing using the Miro application online:

Where this mostly comes into play is with the order that the steps need to come in the design sequence. Fortunately, I have yet to come across any dependency loops. As long as the sequence moves more or less left to right, everything should work properly . . .

Architect of Worlds: The Next Chunk

Architect of Worlds: The Next Chunk

Comments 1 comment

While I’m waiting for my consulting editor to have a look at The Curse of Steel, I’ve turned back to a project that I’ve been neglecting for too long: the world-building book Architect of Worlds. Several sections of that book already exist in a rough draft, which can be found at the Architect of Worlds link in the sidebar.

The bulk of the material I’ve already written is a design sequence, permitting the user to set up fictional star systems (or to fill in details for real-world systems). The idea is to let SF writers, game designers, tabletop game referees, and so on design locations for interstellar SF settings, using whatever combination of random chance and deliberate choice they prefer. The emphasis is on “hard SF” realism, as far as the state of exoplanetary astronomy will permit, and no dependencies on any specific tabletop rules system.

So far, the draft system permits one to place stars, planets, and moons, and get gross physical properties (mass, density, surface gravity) and dynamic parameters (orbital radius, eccentricity, and period) for each.

The next slice of the system will involve generating the surface conditions for such bodies, at least for the small “terrestroid” worlds that are likely to provide environments for SF adventure. At this point we’re talking about things like surface temperature (average and variations), atmospheric composition and pressure, the amount and state of water (or other volatiles) on the surface, what kind of native life might be prevalent, and so on.

I’ve been mulling this section over for a few years now, since the science involved is a lot more complicated and more difficult to reduce to a set of game-able abstractions.

When I designed a system like this for GURPS Space Fourth Edition, I made a deliberate design choice to reduce all the possibilities to a specific set of archetypes. That provided some backward compatibility with earlier versions of the GURPS system, and with the older Traveller systems that were an inspiration for both. For this book, though, I want to give the readers as much detail as I can, and let them decide what to use and what to set aside. That complicates the design.

So, a very rough overall outline of what’s going to be involved for a given “world” (that is, a terrestrial planet or moon with some likelihood of a solid surface):

  • The rotation rate of the world (including cases where the world is tide-locked or resonant with a primary). As a sidebar, this gives us quantities for the length of the natural day, month, and year.
  • The blackbody temperature and incidence of stellar wind for the world, based on the properties and distance of its primary star.
  • The strength of the world’s magnetic field, and the consequences for the size and strength of its magnetosphere (if any). If the world is a moon (for example, the satellite of a gas giant planet), then the primary’s magnetic field and magnetosphere may be relevant as well.
  • The world’s initial budget of volatiles – how much in the way of possible liquid or gaseous compounds was the world left with after its process of formation.
  • Atmospheric composition – what volatile compounds are likely to be gaseous at local temperatures, and can the planet hold onto them?
  • Atmospheric mass and pressure.
  • Hydrospheric composition – what volatile compounds are likely to be liquid or solid instead?
  • Hydrospheric mass and prevalence – how much of the world’s surface will be covered by what kinds of liquid or solid stuff?
  • Average surface temperature.
  • Estimated variations in surface temperature with the position on the surface, time of day, and so on.
  • Presence and complexity of native life – which may require a loop-back to adjust characteristics of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and surface temperature.

All that’s the minimum for what the next section of the book needs to cover. There are a lot of dependencies back and forth here, which is one reason why I’ve struggled for so long to build this piece. I’m beginning to think I see how to design something workable, though. At least enough to get started. More over the next few weeks.

Editing the Novel

Editing the Novel

Comments 0 Comment

My plans regarding The Curse of Steel have evolved with remarkable speed over the past few days.

My novel-writing process seems to boil down to the following:

  • A long period of chaotic brainstorming, tinkering, and world-building work, in which the overall concept of the story can change many times. This stage can take several years and is likely to produce a lot of abortive partial drafts. Most of the novels I’ve worked on have never gotten past this point.
  • Eventually, the concept stabilizes in my head enough that I can produce the first complete draft of a novel. This has happened exactly three times in my entire career as a writer.
  • The first draft tells a complete story, but it probably has all kinds of plot holes, undeveloped characters, and vagueness of setting in it. After all, I was making it up as I went along – I seem to be much more a “pantser” than a “planner.” So now I go back and write a second complete draft, one that rounds out the story and patches most of those holes.

About eight years ago, my first mature original novel reached that second-draft stage. That was The Master’s Oath, a tale of time travel, alternate histories, and Hermetic magic that will absolutely never be seen again outside my dead files. It wasn’t until I was finished with that one that I had a “What in God’s name was I thinking” moment and realized the thing was utterly unpublishable. Decently written, not a bad adventure story, but bound to mortally offend big chunks of my audience. Lesson learned.

Now, as of last week, The Curse of Steel has reached the second draft stage. Lo, the creator looked upon his work, and he was pleased.

Now what?

Well, to be honest, my workflow doesn’t exist yet past this point. The Curse of Steel is the first original novel I’ve ever written that I honestly believe is publishable.

I spent a couple of weeks putting together a cover image for the book. While I worked on that, I thought about what the next steps should be. Should I just publish the second draft as is, and hope for the best?

The more I thought about that, the less comfortable I was with the idea.

I know my prose style is reasonably clean. When I was a freelance writer, more than one editor remarked on that. As an editor, I’ve seen enough prose from other people to be able to compare.

Meanwhile, I’ve had a few people reading my drafts, and they’ve been encouraging about the story.

On the other hand, a novel is a very different beast from a non-fiction book, there are necessary skills I may not have developed in full, and none of my early readers are experienced editors. I don’t have a decent writer’s circle to help me hammer my drafts into submission. What if I’m missing something?

No, scratch that, I know I’m missing something. Maybe two or three novels from now, I’ll have a better idea of what to do at this point. Right now I’m still not sure.

The obvious solution would be to hire an editor.

Of course, a skilled and reliable editor costs money. Not to mention, there are a lot of people out there ready to take advantage of would-be authors, offering cheap book-preparation services for top dollar without any guarantee of results. Ever since deciding to pursue self-publishing, I’ve been very cautious about laying out cash for such services.

On the gripping hand, I can afford to spend some money on the experiment.

So over the past week or so, I’ve done some research and developed two lines of attack.

One line is to search for software that can help a novelist pick nits in his prose style. Sure, everything has a spelling-and-grammar checker these days, but strong prose writing needs more than that. I need to be able to ferret out filler words, excess adverbs, phrases that I repeat too often, that kind of thing. I could do that by eye, but the process would be slow and painful, and I would be likely to miss the weaknesses in my own style.

Enter AutoCrit.

Autocrit is billed as a “self-editing platform,” and it certainly works as such. It’s essentially a web-based word processor, but it’s specifically designed to carry out a wide variety of specialized text searches and basic statistical analyses. It compares your text to a huge corpus from published novels, helping you find and carve out the flabby bits of your prose.

Using AutoCrit over the past three days, I’ve been able to rework The Curse of Steel with surprising speed and efficiency. Already I’ve cut a little over 2000 words of material, mostly filler words and repetitive phrases that didn’t add to the sense of each passage.

It’s been quite the eye-opener. Every writer needs something to rub his nose in the shortcomings of his prose style, or he isn’t likely to improve. Lacking an editor or a ruthless critique circle, something like this may be the next best thing.

AutoCrit isn’t ideal. It’s web-based, which I don’t care for. It chokes if you hand it more than 50,000 words of text at once, which means I have to edit my novel in chunks. It doesn’t handle special characters gracefully, so all my conlang words that have accents and umlauts in them get snarled up. Its import from Word, and its export back to Word, are both a little kludgy.

Still, I suspect I’ll have a third complete draft, with much tighter prose, by later this week.

The second line of attack is that I have, indeed, hired an editor. This involved a fair amount of searching through the Web, looking for editorial networks that are competent, reliable, and not outrageously expensive. The SFWA site was fairly helpful here – they don’t explicitly recommend editors, but they have an excellent checklist of things to consider in the process.

The editor I ended up with is being hired specifically to do a manuscript assessment, not a complete edit of the novel. This will set me back a few hundred dollars, and it may not end up being part of my usual workflow in the future. Still, the experiment should be worthwhile. I’m hoping he’ll be able to provide actionable feedback that I can use while producing a final complete draft – the last step in my development process before the book goes out the door.

At the moment, the plan looks like this:

  1. Finish working through The Curse of Steel with AutoCrit (to be completed by about 21 or 22 August).
  2. Wait for my editor to complete his review of the draft (probably about the end of September).
  3. Produce the final release draft (to be completed by late October).
  4. Publish the book!

So it looks as if The Curse of Steel will finally hit the virtual shelves by Halloween. There will be much rejoicing . . . and then I’ll get started on The Sunlit Lands, the second book in the series. One assumes that one won’t take nearly as long to reach fruition.

In other news, that four- or five-week gap in September, while I wait for my editor to finish his task? I think I may sit down and work on Architect of Worlds for a while. No promises . . . but I think my research, and the subconscious work in the back of my head, have reached the point where I may be able to develop a rough draft of the third chunk of the world design sequence. We’ll see how things go.

The Curse of Steel: Second Draft Finished!

The Curse of Steel: Second Draft Finished!

Comments 0 Comment

With the cover art ready to go, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks focusing on day-job work (writing and editing course material that’s going to go online) and working on the second-draft edits for The Curse of Steel.

That latter task has paid off. As of this afternoon, the novel is complete in the second draft.

What this means for the project is that I’m about to do one last editing pass, and then prepare the manuscript for release as a self-published novel. If all goes well, the novel will be released sometime in September. The one wild card is that I’m considering submitting the current draft for a manuscript assessment from a reputable freelance editor, to help me organize and direct that last editing pass. If I decide to go with that plan, that might delay the release a bit, depending on how long the assessment takes and how deep an edit it suggests I make.

In the meantime, though, the last chunk of the second-draft manuscript will be released to my patrons within a few days as the charged reward for August. All of my patrons, from the $1 level up, will get a copy of the last eight chapters of the draft (about 24,800 words). When the novel itself is released, all of my patrons from the $2 level up will get a free copy.

I’ll probably also release another piece of short fiction later this month, for my patrons and in the free-fiction section of this blog. More about that as we get closer to the end of the month.

Status Report (18 July 2020)

Status Report (18 July 2020)

Comments 0 Comment

Just a quick note today. I’ve started work on developing a cover image for The Curse of Steel. The first step was to update my model for Krava, adding muscle mass and definition, and changing her hairstyle to something more characteristic of an Iron Age culture.

To make sure the character herself looked right, I did a nude study: front and back renders of the character model in a neutral pose and without clothing. The results were pretty encouraging.

I won’t post the image here since there’s no way for me to mark it as mature content, but here’s a link to the DeviantArt page for the final image.