Sharrukin's Palace

Fairly short planning message this month – things are straightforward at the moment. Getting Architect of Worlds into people’s hands is taking a little longer than I expected, but we’re getting there.

Ken Burnside is still working on the final round of textual edits, but it sounds as if he’ll be done with that sometime around the GAMA Trade Show this week. He and I have discussed the number and nature of his editorial requests, and aside from the tweaks I’ve already made it sounds as if I’ll be able to rip through the whole list in just a few hours. So the current guess is that he’ll have the final release draft in hand by about 9-10 March, after which he’ll be able to do his first print run and start shipping hardcopies. The e-book version should be available about then too, including rewards for my patrons. Further delays aren’t impossible – Ken is a one-man shop too, and he has a lot more on his plate than I do – but we’re certainly getting closer to release day.

Meanwhile, I was able to release a substantially revised version of the Human Destiny setting bible to my patrons as a reward, the first charged release I’ve made since April or May of last year. That’s still going to be my primary creative project over the next few months. I feel as if I’ve underestimated the amount of setting-bible work I need to do before I start writing new fiction in that universe, but I’m at least getting closer to the point where I’ll be confident.

Here’s the formal plan for March:

• Front Burner:
  • Architect of Worlds: Finish editorial work on the release draft and turn that over to Ken Burnside for publication in the mid-March timeframe.
  • Human Destiny: Continue rewriting and adding to the setting bible (BRP sourcebook).
  • Human Destiny: Write a new Aminata Ndoye story, set when she’s about seventeen years old and attending an academy for officer candidates for the interstellar service.
• Back Burner:
  • Great Lands: Begin work to revise the geography and back history of the setting.
  • Fourth Millennium: Resume work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
  • Fourth Millennium: Resume work to rebuild the alternate-historical timeline.

I’m betting on a charged release for my patrons this month, most likely some combination of new Human Destiny setting-bible material and a new Aminata Ndoye story. That all depends on whether my other commitments leave me enough time, as usual.

Getting back toward a more normal planning-and-execution style this month, now that Architect of Worlds is just about out the door. Couple of status items before the planning message, though.

Architect of Worlds

Ken Burnside and I are working on a final editorial pass through the book, finding and stepping on the last few textual bugs. Last I heard, Ken thought he would be done with his piece of that sometime next week, after which I suspect it won’t take more than one or two evenings for me to make the necessary tweaks to the text and layout. At which point I generate two PDFs (full-color and greyscale) and send those over to Ken, and my editorial involvement with the project is done.

Ken is working to ensure that hardcopies will be back from the printer before the GAMA Trade Show in early March. He may be able to ship the first batch of hardcopy editions to the folks who are pre-ordering the book before then, otherwise it will probably be mid-March before that happens. E-book copies will likely be available to the general market about the same time. I should be able to distribute e-books to my patrons and play-testers before that, but I don’t have a firm date yet. Patience a little while longer, please.

Human Destiny

With Architect of Worlds finished, I think my first new creative project is going to involve turning back to the Human Destiny setting.

My long-term plans for that setting have changed a bit. I have a couple of stories from that universe already published (“Pilgrimage” and “In the House of War”), but those have never sold very well for lack of advertising and word-of-mouth.

I think I may actually pull those stories back, do some setting redesign to match my more current thinking, and then start releasing fiction through a different avenue: the Royal Road website.

Royal Road tends to focus on so-called “progression” fiction – long-running serialized stories in which the protagonist gains in personal power and influence in the course of the narrative. It occurs to me that the story of my central character – Aminata Ndoye, the first human to become an officer in an alien interstellar service – would work pretty well as a (subtle) progression story. After all, she works her way upward in social status and rank throughout her career.

The nice thing about Royal Road is that it enables you to start building up an audience for your work, eventually working toward a paid-publication roll-out that’s likely to be more successful. We’ll see.

So the plan there is to rework the “setting bible” a bit, firm up the plan for a long-term narrative for Aminata’s story, rewrite the existing pieces to fit the new narrative, and start writing new fiction as well. Once I have a good chunk of Aminata’s early story down, I can start releasing that to Royal Road and attracting an audience for it. Patrons will, of course, get to see that new material as I get it laid out.

The new version of Human Destiny is also likely to tie into a tabletop RPG project, most likely using Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying (BRP) system. In particular, the setting bible is likely to be framed as a BRP book that might get self-published in the long run.

Other Projects

There are also a couple of other settings I’m thinking about spending some time with, notably the Great Lands setting (high fantasy, related to my first published novel, The Curse of Steel) and the Fourth Millennium setting (historical fantasy, related to my unfinished novel, Twice-Crowned). These are likely to be back-burner items through February while I work on finishing Architect of Worlds and getting some material laid down for Human Destiny.

So here’s the formal plan for February:

• Front Burner:
  • Architect of Worlds: Finish editorial work on the release draft and turn that over to Ken Burnside for publication in the February-March timeframe.
  • Human Destiny: Outline and begin rewriting the setting bible, possibly in the form of a draft BRP sourcebook.
  • Human Destiny: Write a new Aminata Ndoye story, set when she’s about seventeen years old and attending an academy for officer candidates for the interstellar service.
• Back Burner:
  • Great Lands: Begin work to revise the geography and back history of the setting.
  • Fourth Millennium: Resume work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
  • Fourth Millennium: Resume work to rebuild the alternate-historical timeline.

I would estimate a 75% chance of a charged release for my patrons this month, most likely some combination of Human Destiny setting-bible material and a new Aminata Ndoye story. As usual, that’s more likely as I produce more than about 10,000 words of substantively new material, and becomes a near certainty as I approach 20,000 words. We’ll see how the month goes.