Sharrukin's Palace

An Experiment: Chapterbuzz

September 19, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Anyone who’s trying to write and self-publish creative work will soon come to the realization that the market for potential readers’ attention is insanely competitive. It’s tough to find readers when there are millions of other people all doing their best to drown you out. I can attest to this: the few short pieces I’ve already self-published via Amazon have maybe sold enough copies to buy me one meal. A cheap meal at that.

Now, there are plenty of “services” out there that promise to help you past that obstacle. The vast majority of those are effectively digital vanity presses. They charge the would-be author fees for every step of the process, and there’s no guarantee that anything they do will actually help. As a result, a lot of hopeful authors end up spending a pile of money out of their own pockets for no result. Manutius Press is the only party that wins.

Still. Self-publication means that you’re going to have to take some risks and make some investments, of time and energy if nothing else. So I’m going to try an experiment, one which I can shut down if it becomes obvious that it’s not going to be to my net benefit. The experiment is going to involve the Chapterbuzz site, operated by Timothy Pike.

I’ll be posting first-draft chapters of The Curse of Steel to Chapterbuzz, which means you’ll be able to read them there as I work on the novel. Probably the best way to find the work there is to go to my author profile page: John Alleyn on Chapterbuzz, and look for the link for The Curse of Steel. You can also click on the Chapterbuzz icon in the sidebar to get to the same place.

Feel free to read the work in progress there. Won’t cost you (or me) a thing. If you’d like to help me along as I work on the story, there are a couple of things you could do. As you read each chapter, you’ll probably see a “Buzz” button; if you’re enjoying the story, click on that to give it a little push. That may give you the opportunity to get email notifications for new chapters as I post those. You can also comment on chapters as you read them; that will help too.

We’ll see how this turns out. As you may be able to tell, I’m skeptical about sites like this, but so far it looks less predatory and more actually helpful than most. If it can get me some useful feedback, and maybe even a leg up when it comes time to publish, then it should be a useful investment.

Status Report (16 September 2019)

September 16, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

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.

Minor Changes

September 7, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

A couple of minor tweaks to the blog format today:

I’ve added an “In Progress” widget to the top of the sidebar, to track current progress on any major projects. For example, work on the first draft of The Curse of Steel is being tracked there now. I’m not entirely happy with that widget – notice that the header isn’t using the same format or font as the others – but it will do for now.
I’ve removed access to the “Sharrukin’s Archive” site from the top bar. That site is badly out of date and I won’t be maintaining it anymore; the only content there that doesn’t also exist here is some outdated material for the “Human Destiny” space-opera setting. New content will be placed under the “Sharrukin’s Worlds” pages here from now on.

Introducing Kráva the Swift

September 4, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Here’s my first attempt to generate imagery for The Curse of Steel:

This young woman is my protagonist, Kráva the Swift, close to the beginning of her story.

I’m pleased with how her face, body, hairstyle, and coloring all came out; I was able to make her look almost exactly like the image I had in my head. Clothing and gear, not so much. It’s very difficult to find precisely the look I want for those, among the digital assets that are available for DAZ Studio. Her gear is supposed to suggest a pseudo-Celtic culture, but at the moment she looks kind of generic. This isn’t a bad first approximation, though. Later I’ll try to get her hauberk to look more authentic, improve the sword a bit, add a cloak, a scabbard, and the bow and arrows she also carries, and so on.

Here’s a link to the DeviantArt page where this image was also posted. You should be able to get higher resolution there, and some technical notes that I left out here.

Status Report (2 September 2019)

September 2, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

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)

August 29, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

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)

August 22, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

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.

An Interesting Result

August 21, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 2 comments

Just a short note, to call your attention to an interesting result in recent astrophysics that’s quite relevant to the Architect of Worlds project.

It’s well known that we’ve discovered thousands of exoplanets in the last couple of decades. Now the state of the art is approaching the point where we can get clues about the environment on those planets. For example, one recent result (here’s an article in Scientific American) is the first indication we have of the kind of atmosphere that exists around an Earth-sized rocky exoplanet. In this case, the planet is in its primary star’s habitable zone, and it’s more than large enough to retain a significant atmosphere against thermal or Jeans escape. Yet there doesn’t seem to be much if any atmosphere there.

I’ve long since worked out a model for Jeans escape; that much was in the world-design system I wrote for GURPS Space back in the day. (If you’ve used that system, you may recall a “minimum molecular weight retained” or MMWR calculation. That’s specifically relevant to Jeans escape.)

The problem is that thermal loss isn’t the only way a planet’s atmosphere can get stripped off. If the primary star is prone to flares and has an energetic stellar wind, that will do the trick too. This is specifically relevant to red dwarfs, like the star LHS 3844 which has the planet mentioned above. Red dwarf stars punch well over their weight in the stellar-wind and flare department, especially early in their lives. Thus, any rocky planet close enough to be in the liquid-water zone will probably get a serious sandblasting early on.

This is kind of a new area in astrophysics, and there are a lot of competing models out there. Some scientists are predicting that Earth-sized planets should be able to retain their atmospheres in at least some cases, others are much less sanguine. The LHS 3844 result certainly seems to support the pessimistic case.

For Architect of Worlds, I’ve been thinking in terms of assigning each planet a “volatiles budget” from its formation and early years, modified by things like the planet’s MMWR, whether it formed inside the snow line, whether there’s a dominant gas giant to fling comets in-system, and so on. A big random factor as well, since it looks as if this feature is strongly subject to chance. Then we would reduce that volatiles budget to reflect non-thermal processes of atmospheric escape, photodissasociation of water molecules, and so on. (Hmm. Maybe have a separate budget just for water, since that goes through some significantly different processes and might not be correlated with atmospheric volatiles.)

The devil’s in the details, of course, and for all my tinkering I have yet to come up with a model that satisfies me (or even fits all the cases we know about). This might actually be the biggest obstacle to getting the third section of the design sequence hammered out.

Status Report (16 August 2019)

August 16, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

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:

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)

August 11, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

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:

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.