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Category: Status Reports

Status Report (16 September 2019)

Status Report (16 September 2019)

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Not much concrete to report for the moment. I’ve been making superb progress on the first draft of The Curse of Steel, hitting the 33% mark this past weekend. While I’m working on that, though, other projects that might be interesting to blog about are on the back burner.

This week is going to be a bear. I’m teaching one course, wrapping up work on writing a second one so we can hold a pilot offering for it, and otherwise likely to be buried at the office. I hope to get at least a few hundred words down per night, but we’ll see how things go.

It is looking as if I’ll be participating in National Novel Writing Month this year, for a change. I suspect I’ll still have at least 50,000 words to go on the first draft at the end of October. It will be interesting to see if I can keep up that kind of pace for a month, but if I can, I should have the complete first draft finished well before the end of this calendar year.

Status Report (2 September 2019)

Status Report (2 September 2019)

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Another very productive weekend for The Curse of Steel. I had to go into the office on Saturday and didn’t get much writing done, but I more than made up for it yesterday and today: two whole chapters down in rough draft, about another 5,700 words in all.

I’ve now finished what might be considered Act I of the story, in which Kráva learns that she’s a hero of divine descent, first shows some of the power of her heritage, and (most importantly) starts to get used to her new role. At this point, she’s kind of enjoying it, it’s starting to go to her head a little. Now for Act II, in which things are going to go rather spectacularly wrong for her.

In other news, I’ve been browsing around for assets I can use to assemble digital art of Kráva and her world. This is a lot harder than you might think, given the size of the market for fantasy-related art. The problem is that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of assets available for female figures . . . and 99% of them seem to be oriented toward producing soft-porn or pinup art, rather than practical and realistic female warriors. Such is the way of the world, but it’s rather frustrating given what I want to accomplish.

Still, I have a digital model that I’m fine-tuning to match the way Kráva looks in my head, and I think I can kit-bash decent armor and gear for her too. I might have a test render to show off later this week.

Of course, the next couple of weeks are going to be slightly frantic at the office – I’m going to be teaching offerings of two courses, and I’m facing a deadline to pilot a third course that I’ve been writing. Hopefully, this won’t bring progress on The Curse of Steel to a crashing halt, but I’m going to just take it one day at a time.

Status Report (29 August 2019)

Status Report (29 August 2019)

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Since last Friday evening, I’ve been able to put down something like 5,600 words on The Curse of Steel.

This is a pretty good rate of work for me. My personal best was probably the time I produced the last seven chapters of a Mass Effect fan-fiction novel in a single three-day weekend – over 24,000 words in those three days. Usually, I’m lucky to get more than a thousand words down in a day, and that’s assuming it’s a weekend day when I don’t have to worry about the office.

But then, this is why I do a lot of world-building.

As a writer, I seem to be able to produce very short pieces off the top of my head, doing all the scene-setting and character development in the back of my mind and just pouring the vignette down on the page. Most of the vignettes I wrote as flavor text for various GURPS books were done this way.

As soon as I get into the longer forms, though – pretty much anything above the level of the short story – I always get bogged down in setting detail and have a hard time proceeding. Unless I spend the time and effort to build those details in advance: constructed language and culture to help me get into characters’ heads, maps to help me see how places and people are related to each other, astrophysics for SF stories, and so on.

One reason fan-fiction always seems easier for me is that most of the work of setting up the story has already been done. Any original details I want to add, I can just graft them onto the existing structure and keep moving. I can concentrate on just writing story, and the words just flow. As witness that amazing, enormously satisfying weekend of something like 8,000 words per day.

I spent months wrestling with backdrop for The Curse of Steel, never writing more than the one chapter that started the story (which, by no coincidence, worked pretty well as a short story on its own). I tried several times to move forward, but every attempt failed until I had the setting worked out to my satisfaction.

Now the investment pays off. There’s a good chance – knock on wood and hope I don’t jinx it – that I’ll be able to put down about half the novel, a total of 80,000 words or so, without a pause. If the current rate of progress keeps up, that sounds like it should be doable by the end of the calendar year.

Feels good. I will admit to kicking myself sometimes, for being the writer of stories who never seems to actually write a story. If I’m starting to find ways to hack my creative mind and get actual stories written, that can’t hurt.

Status Report (22 August 2019)

Status Report (22 August 2019)

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Meanwhile, I think I’ve done enough work on constructed language, development of names for tribes and places, and filling in details on my overview map. At least for the moment. Now I can get back to the story and write . . . probably about half of the planned length for The Curse of Steel.

Here’s the result: a clipped piece of the overview map, still missing some details around the edges but more than enough to help me keep all the pertinent features in mind.

Ravatheni tribal lands, and their neighbors

The first part of the plot has Kráva and her companions traveling from Taimar Velkari (“hill-fort of the wolves”) across Ravatheni territory, into and through the Silent Forest, and over a mountain pass into the western lands by the sea. With plenty of detours and adventures along the way, of course. As the raven flies, it’s a distance of about 220 miles, maybe eight or nine days’ journey if everything goes well. Everything is not going to go well.

Status Report (16 August 2019)

Status Report (16 August 2019)

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Busy week at the office – I’ve been teaching a course most of the week – so not much time or energy left over for writing or world-building work. I’ve been plugging away at my regional map, at least.

As time permits, one thing I’ve been tinkering with is an application of the draft Architect of Worlds material to design an alternate Solar System for the world where The Curse of Steel takes place. I want the setting to be just a little exotic; just as this alternate Earth has different geography, different landforms and seas than ours, I also want it to have a different sky. To this end, I’ve designed a primary star almost identical to Sol, and a habitable world almost identical to Earth, so that the day-to-day environment isn’t clearly alien – but the system is otherwise different in a lot of details.

More detail on that design later. For today, I’ll note that in conjunction with this work, I’ve been using a virtual-planetarium application that I highly recommend: Space Engine.

Space Engine has been in development for several years, almost entirely by the Russian astronomer Vladimir Romanyuk, although he recently released a beta of the application on Steam to raise money for further development. It’s unique in that the entire universe notionally resides in the engine – while the vast majority of it is procedurally generated, known stars, exoplanets, and so on are also in the engine’s catalogs. It’s a great toy for exploring the universe from the comfort of your desktop.

It’s also not all that difficult to insert your created star systems and worlds into the Space Engine catalogs, and have the engine render them in place in the virtual universe. Space Engine uses somewhat different world-building assumptions than I do, but the differences are pretty minimal. It’s not at all difficult to take the results of work with Architect of Worlds and drop them into the Space Engine universe. So I’ve done that, with the intention that I’ll be able to use the simulation to determine what the sky looks like at any given point of the story.

For example, here’s a rough-draft render of the alternate Earth where Kráva lives and will have her adventures. Really astute observers might be able to figure out about where I’ve placed her world in the real galaxy:

An alternate Earth, hanging in space.

I think it’s possible to create new planetary textures and bump-maps for created worlds in the engine, but that’s beyond me so far, so the landforms you see here are not definitive. Still, I can “land” the viewpoint on the planet at any given point in latitude, longitude, and time, and see what a character standing at that spot would see in the sky. For example, here’s an early-evening image from a latitude roughly equivalent to where the story begins:

The bright object low on the horizon is the system’s secondary star, a red dwarf orbiting at a comfortable distance of 100 AU or so. Brighter than our own Moon, it doesn’t wax and wane, and I think it may even be circumpolar so it’s always visible in the northern hemisphere. Handy for characters who need to move around at night!

Space Engine can do a lot of things for me – model an alien sky consistently and in great detail, tell me with a mouse click what apparent magnitude objects might have, and so on. For a few hours of investment, I can include the kind of exotic but consistent astronomical perspectives that (e.g.) Tolkien needed endless painstaking pencil-and-paper work to provide.

More about all this later, if and when it seems appropriate while I work on the story. I must say, though, it’s nice to find tools that can make the obsessive world-builder’s attention-to-detail easier.

Status Report (10 August 2019)

Status Report (10 August 2019)

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I’ve got a weekend more or less to myself here – no need to go into the office, and my wife and our daughter are out-of-state visiting family, so it’s just me and my son doing the bachelor thing. Good time to get some work done on The Curse of Steel.

The major project right now is a map of the main area of action for this first novel. Decent progress thus far:

Work in progress . . .

Still need to finish marking in terrain features, although the main line of the Blue Mountains is in place. Then it will be time to put down forest icons to mark wilderness areas. I think I’m going to be sparing with that, since almost the entire map is wilderness to some degree! Then a few settlements and place names, and I’ll have enough to push forward with the novel. I imagine the map will get filled in further as I write this (and hopefully future) stories.

Meanwhile, I’ve posted the first chapter of the draft novel – a short story titled “Kráva and the Skátoi” – to the “Free Articles and Fiction” section in the sidebar. Here’s a link to the page as well.

I think tomorrow I’ll continue to work on the map, and I might start looking for art assets I can use to create images of Kráva and her world.

Status Report (7 August 2019)

Status Report (7 August 2019)

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Work proceeds apace on The Curse of Steel – I’m making unusually good progress on it for the moment. I’m very happy with the divine pantheon I’ve developed for my protagonist’s home culture. I’m also continuing to build a more detailed map of the field of action for most of this first novel. Most importantly, I’ve knocked out two more chapters of the first draft, and as soon as I resolve a couple of questions about the future plot I should be able to keep going.

I think the critical step was to embrace the notion of having activist gods and divine-blooded heroes in the setting. You’d think this would be obvious; after all, those concepts were universal among the Indo-European peoples I’ve taken as a model for the world-building here. Yet I’ve tended to avoid the trope in my own work thus far. I’m not sure why. Possibly it’s because of my background in tabletop roleplaying games. I tend to think in terms of well-defined and limited mechanics for character power, and “he’s the son of a god” is a bit too free-form for my taste.

I will admit to taking some inspiration from the Scion roleplaying game that I recently picked up to read. That game is kind of a hot mess when it comes to rules organization and mechanics, but it does provide a nice framework to clearly define the powers of heroes and demigods. I still haven’t decided to use Scion as a tool for actual plotting, but I think I’m coming around to the idea.

Besides, if my protagonist is the child (or grandchild, actually) of a god, that fits in very nicely with the themes I’m working with for this first novel. Part of what I’m trying to do here is to examine some of the consequences of the power fantasy that’s common in genre fiction. Okay, so Kráva acquires a magical weapon that makes her an immensely powerful warrior, and almost in the same breath, she learns that she’s of immediate divine descent. Great! Except “with great power comes great responsibility,” the weapon comes with a rather nasty curse, and the lives of the gods’ children tend to be glorious and very short.

Lots of potential here. I’m almost eager to see what happens next.

Meanwhile, I think I may push a couple of chapters of the draft over to the “Free Articles and Fiction” section of the sidebar. Look for that as soon as I have a little time to spare.

Status Report (31 May 2019)

Status Report (31 May 2019)

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My main project at present continues to be the development of plot for the novel The Curse of Steel. That’s moving along at a reasonable pace. Off to the side of that task, though, I recently found myself struggling with a different obstacle.

The Curse of Steel is going to be a bit of pseudo-historical fantasy, set in an alternate Iron Age world rather like Tolkien’s Middle-earth or Robert Howard’s Hyborian Era. Part of the project has involved the development of a small set of partial “constructed languages,” mostly for the derivation of names and a few scraps of vocabulary to act as cultural markers.

The process I’ve been using has been to develop an ur-language that somewhat resembles a simplified version of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). I then apply sets of sound-change rules to develop words in my planned collection of daughter languages. The result should be consistent and pleasing to the ear, even if it doesn’t work as a complete conversational language. All of this is fairly routine.

The problem has been that I’ve been doing all of this by hand, and the project has gotten large enough that I can’t keep it all straight in my head. I can’t always remember which word-roots I’ve already used, and the documents I’m using to record them aren’t exactly user-friendly. Meanwhile, whenever I tweak the rules for word formation or sound-changes, I find I’m not applying the tweaks consistently. I’m getting snarled up.

Okay, I realized a while ago, a lot of this would really be better done by a computer. Computers are great at tedious tasks that involve applying procedures consistently across a lot of data. Couldn’t I find a tool that I could use to keep track of my word-roots, record my expanding vocabulary, apply inflectional rules and sound changes, all of that?

So I went looking for software tools that other people had used for language construction. Unfortunately, I didn’t find anything I thought would be useful . . . but earlier this week I realized I had all the tools I needed to build my own.

Years ago I was a professional coder. I did most of my work in the C language and a UNIX environment, but I also taught myself a language called Perl, which is ideal for processing text strings and applying well-defined procedures to them. Couldn’t I build Perl scripts to generate all the possible word roots, apply inflectional rules to them, develop daughter-language vocabulary?

Okay, it’s probably been almost twenty years since I wrote a lot of Perl, but I still have my books, and coding is a little like riding a bicycle. You never entirely forget the skill once you have it. Meanwhile, there exists a nice free implementation of Perl for the Windows environment (Strawberry Perl). So over the last few days, I’ve been starting to build a Perl library that I can use to manage the language construction task – at least well enough to get past the immediate obstacle.

Early results are promising. I’ve just about got a script written and debugged, which will generate all the word roots in my ur-language, according to the PIE-like structure I’ve designed. Once that’s finished and I pull the output, I’ll dump that into an Excel spreadsheet where I can record the meanings I select for different roots. Then I should be able to put together another script that will apply the sound-change rules I’ve designed.

I may show off some of the results of this work over the next few days. Once this side project is done, the conlang process shouldn’t get in the way so badly. If I need a name or a piece of vocabulary, I will be able to generate it quickly, record it, and get right back to writing story.

Not to mention, it’s kind of neat to be writing code again. It’s been a while.

Status Report (21 May 2019)

Status Report (21 May 2019)

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Just a short note this evening. I think my writer’s block of the last couple of months is finally starting to come unstuck, all thanks to the Muses.

Over the weekend I managed to finish a chapter of the Silmarillion fan-fiction novel I’ve been poking at for a long time. Might be able to push that forward a bit more smoothly in the next couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been fairly successful in using FATE to rework the plot of The Curse of Steel. I’m using the game as a structure to work out setting, characters, and plot, and it seems to be effective. It’s unabashedly a brain-hack, something to keep my creative mind focused on actually producing story rather than slipping back down the rabbit-hole of purposeless speculation and world-building. A little more work on that project and I may be able to re-write the first quarter or so of the draft novel without pause.

Every evening I try to set aside an hour or two before bedtime to make some forward progress. Cross my fingers that it keeps coming together.

Status Report (11 May 2019)

Status Report (11 May 2019)

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There have been some recent developments. In particular, I’ve finally come out the far side of a roughly six-week period of really busy time at the office. Next week I’m helping to teach one of my own courses, and then there’s not much on my calendar for the rest of the summer. While I will still have plenty of other projects to occupy my day-job time, I won’t be putting in so many long days, weekend hours, or business trips for a while.

Meanwhile, the creative juices seem to be flowing again at home, so I’m starting to get some world-building and writing work done again.

In particular, I’ve been experimenting with a new approach to world-building for the literary projects I have on the docket. My preferred tabletop game for many years has been GURPS, flagship RPG from Steve Jackson Games. That’s not likely to change, but recently I’ve turned to another “generic, universal” game to do basic world-building. That game is FATE, published by Evil Hat Productions, a sophisticated and highly polished version of the venerable FUDGE system.

GURPS is deeply simulation-driven, largely derived from the tabletop wargaming thread of the origins of roleplaying games. FATE, on the other hand, is deeply narrative-driven, encouraging its users to do only as much world-building as they need to generate cool characters and drive their stories forward. Definitely worth considering for someone like me, who tends to fling himself down the world-building rabbit-hole to the exclusion of actually writing and publishing stories.

Unfortunately, while I understand GURPS inside and out, FATE is a pretty different approach to the problem of world-building and story prep. I’ve had trouble in the past wrapping my head around how it works. In the last few weeks, though, I’ve made a concerted effort to force myself to go through FATE‘s world-building and character-creation processes, with one of my literary projects in mind (the gritty-fantasy setting I’m calling The Curse of Steel). The results are starting to feel fairly promising. More about that over the next few days, I think.

None of which is to say that you won’t be seeing anything more from me about GURPS in the future. Still, if this experiment pans out, I may end up doing a lot of literary prep work with FATE instead. I might then come back and write things up in GURPS terms, but only after I’ve made good progress with a story that’s on track for publication.

It has also not escaped my notice that it would be a lot easier for me to self-publish material for FATE than to do the same for GURPS. Self-publishing GURPS-based material for profit certainly isn’t impossible, and I do have a long (if rather stale) history as a published GURPS author if I wanted to make a proposal to Steve Jackson Games. On the other hand, the FATE system is available under an Open Gaming License or a Creative Commons license. To be explored if and when I have something that might be worth publishing.