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Planning for November 2026

Planning for November 2026

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October was a fairly productive month. I got started on my university courses for this year, and although those are definitely presenting some challenges I seem to still be on track. Didn’t quite hit my objective for Composer of Cultures, but that’s certainly within reach. I also managed to write a complete Lower Decks novelette from a standing start, so there’s that.

November is going to be insanely busy, though – I’ve got to prepare for Philcon 2026, and I have not one but two projects in observational astronomy that are on a very tight schedule. So there’s not going to be a lot of slack time.

Here’s the general plan for November.

University Studies

I’m going to be doing a lot of observational planning this month – target selection, preparation, getting time on the telescope (while working around the inconvenient location of a few objects in the sky, and the presence of a waxing Moon which tends to wash out deep-sky objects). For two projects – one of which involves generating Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams for three star clusters, the other of which involves capturing an exoplanetary transit by measuring stars’ light curves. All of which happens as part of a team effort and on a tight schedule. This is going to be a challenge. Also a lot of fun, of course, assuming it all goes off on time.

The objectives for November are:

  • SXPS288 – Complete the Astronomy modules 2-6, as well as the Skills module 2.
  • S384 – Complete the Exoplanets modules 2-3, the Project modules 1-2, and the Stars modules 1-3.

Therapy Writing (Fan Fiction)

I finished last month’s story, “Sixpence in Her Shoe,” and wrote the complete story “Asculum” in October. That last was fun – a tense little cross-over with Star Trek: Prodigy.

Unfortunately, as of this week my primary posting destination, Archive of Our Own, is down due to a serious security incident. ETA for the site coming back up is anywhere from 2-4 weeks. Which is causing all manner of angst out in the wild. Personally, I’m just going to put this particular sector on the shelf for the month of November. I may work on the next story so I can post some or all of it as soon as AO3 comes back online, but given how busy I’m likely to be otherwise this isn’t going to be a priority.

No objectives in this sector for November.

Architect of Worlds & Composer of Cultures

I’m continuing to make incremental progress on version 0.6 of the Cultural Evolution Game. There’s still some work left on the Catalog of Capabilities, but another couple of days of effort should see that done. So I’m reasonably confident I can move on to the next sections this month.

The objectives for November are:

  • Finish the Catalog of Capabilities for version 0.6 of the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures
  • Re-implement the “Reading the Entrails” section from previous drafts for version 0.6
  • Contribute to the initial design for other portions of Composer of Cultures
  • Continue to collect other research for a potential second edition of Architect of Worlds, and make very occasional world-building posts to this site based on that new research

Personal Universes

Still working on using a set of games from my shelf to generate a future-history timeline for the revised “Human Destiny” universe. I was able to finish a run of Stellar Horizons in October, and I’m very happy with the results. I doubt I’ll need to go back and tinker with that any longer.

The next phase of this project will involve working with the GMT Games title, Red Dust Rebellion. This is one of their COunter-INsuergency (COIN) games, simulating a futuristic colonial rebellion on a settled-but-not-very-terraformed Mars. I have in mind that several factions of the early interstellar era will have their roots on the revolutionary Mars of the late 22nd Century. Early results are promising – Red Dust Rebellion isn’t nearly as heavy a game as Stellar Horizons, so I suspect I’ll be able to get this piece of the project done in November even with everything else that’s going on.

The objective for November is to continue working with Red Dust Rebellion to build components of a new timeline for the “Human Destiny” future history.

Philcon 2026

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’m slated to attend Philcon 2026 later this month. I’ll be running a session of the upcoming RPG Pioneer, offering a seminar on historical modeling for worldbuilding, and sitting on a few panels. Going to be a fairly busy weekend, and although I’ve specifically arranged things so I’ll need a lot less prep time than in previous years, that doesn’t mean zero prep time. So that has to happen in aming everything else that’s going on.

The objectives for November are:

  • Prepare a “convention notebook” including Pioneer RPG materials and notes for my panels.
  • Prepare a slide deck and outline for the worldbuilding seminar
  • Attend Philcon 2026
Planning for October 2026

Planning for October 2026

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September was a mixed bag when it came to knocking items off my to-do lists. As often happens, some of that can be attributed to the items themselves being too ambitious. Really need to break my long-term objectives down to more realiztic bite-sized pieces. Especially since the university year is starting up and I’m going to be insanely busy between now and year’s end.

Here’s the general plan for the coming month!

University Studies

My two courses have been open for a few weeks now, and I’ve actually done some early prep work for them. Things get formally under way next week and through the end of October. These courses look a bit more challenging than what I’ve seen so far.

As a side note, I can now confirm that the astrophysics course, at least, is likely to give me several items to refine the Architect of Worlds models for that putative second edition. Not redesign those models – it’s gratifying to see that my research is still holding up in general – but there’s been some new work in models of planetary formation that I’ll be able to use to sharpen them up.

The objectives for October are:

  • SXPS288 – Complete the Introduction to Python material, as well as all the work for the “Skills” weeks 1 and 2, and the “Astronomy” weeks 1 and 2.
  • S384 – Complete the Introduction module, as well as all the work associated with the Exoplanets text chapters 1-3, and the first week of work for the observational project.

Therapy Writing (Fan Fiction)

Very productive in September, even though I didn’t quite manage to complete the current “Lower Decks” story – I posted Chapter 5 on the last day of the month, but the story is going to need at least one more chapter before I can bring it to a conclusion.

On the other hand, I managed to perform a light edit on just under a quarter of a million words of old fan-fiction, moving all of it away from FanFiction.Net and onto Archive of Our Own. My FFN account still exists, but it’s now just a stub pointing to the current home for all my work. I also updated my CV on this site so that all my fan-fiction work now has links pointing to the pertinent AO3 pages. That was a big project, taking close to two weeks to complete, which is one reason why other items on my to-do list didn’t reach the finish line.

In October I have more modest goals, especially since a lot of other tasks have moved onto my plate.

The objective for October are:

  • Finish and post “Sixpence in Her Shoe”
  • Write at least one chapter of the ongoing work “From the Ashes”
  • Start the next “Star Trek: Lower Decks” story in the series

Architect of Worlds & Composer of Cultures

I made incremental progress on version 0.6 of the Cultural Evolution Game in September, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. Rather than aim for competing a draft for my entire portion of Composer of Cultures in October, I’m going to lay down a much more attainable partial goal. Bite-sized objectives, remember?

The objectives for October are:

  • Finish the Catalog of Capabilities for version 0.6 of the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures
  • Contribute to the initial design for other portions of Composer of Cultures
  • Continue to collect other research for a potential second edition of Architect of Worlds, and make very occasional world-building posts to this site based on that new research

Personal Universes

I didn’t carry my run of the simulation game Stellar Horizons to a conclusion, because I realized I was having a hard time believing in the premises. In particular, the game assumes that the human species will maintain seven robust national space programs through the rest of the 21st Century . . . and that seems extremely unlikely, given the era of international chaos and climate-change-driven disaster we’re almost certainly moving into.

So I took down Stellar Horizons temporarily, and brought out a different game as a palate cleanser. This was Daybreak, a cooperative game with a “save the world from climate change” theme. From the same design team that produced the very popular board-game Pandemic, if that’s at all familiar.

Daybreak is a very challenging game, and playing it is quite sobering – if the future it models is accurate, we all have some difficult years ahead of us. On the other hand, it’s an inherently optimistic game too. It assumes that given enough global cooperation and new technology, we can get ahead of climate change, and build a better and more humane world.

I spent a few days in September running through several games of Daybreak (it’s also a fairly light-weight and fast-moving game) and eventually took notes from a playthrough to generate elements of the “Human Destiny” future history. I then wrote a new Stellar Horizons scenario to translate the results of that Daybreak run into conditions for future interplanetary exploration. So far the results have been very promising.

The objective for October is to continue working with Stellar Horizons to build a new timeline for the “Human Destiny” future history.

Philcon 2026 Preparation

The last item is kind of hanging fire. I’m committed to attending Philcon 2026 in November, and I expect my programming schedule will be finished any day now, but for the moment I’m still not sure what that’s going to look like. I’m not going to be running any tabletop games this year, which reduces my preparation effort considerably. I think I’ll be delivering a one-hour world-building seminar, so I’ll need to put that together. For the moment I don’t have any specific Philcon-related objectives, but I fully expect I’ll be adding some of those as “time permits” items once my schedule is ready.

Planning for September 2026

Planning for September 2026

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Hmm. Looks like I did it again – by the time I reminded myself about posting a planning message for August, it was already almost the end of the month. Retirement does not seem to have improved my tendency toward procrastination.

A lot has, in fact, been going on! So here’s a summary of events over the summer, and plans for the coming month.

University Studies

Summer vacation is about over, and I’m going to be starting to do some pre-review of the coming year’s course materials. In the 2026-2027 year, I’ll be taking two courses.

One is a straightforward astrophysics course, Astrophysics of stars and exoplanets, which looks as if it’s going to be digging a lot further into the quantitative aspects of modern astronomy. I’m looking forward to learning some new bits and pieces that might make their way into the putative second edition of Architect of Worlds.

The other is an experimental-physics course, Remote experiments in physics and space. You’d think it would be tough to do a lab course when you’re remote-learning across the Atlantic, but the university seems to have figured that out. I’ll be working with other students to plan and carry out some physics experiments and astronomical observations using remote access to the university’s instruments.

The courses formally open in about a week, although actual instruction doesn’t start until October. I plan to spend some time in September reading ahead and generally getting ready. At the end of this year I should be 75% finished with my BSc degree, still on track to start my post-graduate work by about 2029.

No formal objectives here for September. Those will start in October once my courses are actually under way.

Therapy Writing (Fan Fiction)

Since my last planning message, I’ve finished two stories, “The Country of Silence” and “Clear as Mudd.” The next story, “Sixpence in Her Shoe,” is under way and I plan to get that finished in September.

At this point, my return to fan-fiction writing has been going on for about a year and a half, involving 15 stories and over a third of a million words. Still not the biggest chunk of my fan-fiction corpus – my Mass Effect stories (written between 2014-2016) come to around a million words – but it’s been more robust than I expected when I started. Probably going to keep going for at least another few months before the planned series is complete.

A side project: the site where I started posting fan-fiction back in the day has become a sad example of the “dead internet” theory. It’s very poorly maintained, a lot of its functions no longer work well or at all, and it’s apparently awash in scam bots. So I’m in the process of moving all of my work off that site for good. Fortunately, I kept all my earlier work in my own files. Hence I can pull those stories up, possibly give them another coat of polish, and repost them to Archive Of Our Own (AO3) without much trouble. So as time permits, I’m doing that, including a few stories that I wrote and never did post to the old site. I’m also going to be updating my CV page on this site to make sure it points to the new master copies of everything. Once all that’s done, I’ll be deleting all my stories from the old site and deactivating my account there. Unfortunate, but probably necessary.

The objectives for September are:

  • Finish and post “Sixpence in Her Shoe”
  • Finish copying all my old stories over to AO3
  • Update the CV page on this site to reflect the current status of my fan-fiction
  • Deactivate my original fan-fiction site account

Architect of Worlds & Composer of Cultures

August and September were mostly devoted to an overhaul of the draft Cultural Evolution game for Composer of Cultures. The result was enough different from the incomplete version 0.5 draft that I’m labeling it version 0.6.

The game mechanics themselves are complete, and in fact Ken Burnside has done some red-pencil on them. Currently I’m in the process of writing all the supplementary material for the new draft (basically, all the material that would let the user interpret the results of the “game” and build an historical timeline for their fictional alien culture). No firm timeline as to when that will be finished, although I’m hoping to be able to release a complete draft to playtesters sometime this fall.

The objectives for September are:

  • Finish version 0.6 of the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures
  • Contribute to the initial design for other portions of Composer of Cultures
  • Continue to collect other research for a potential second edition of Architect of Worlds, and make occasional world-building posts to this site based on that new research

Personal Universes

I’ve been creatively blocked with my “Human Destiny” space-opera universe for quite a while. To review the bidding: in its original concept, this is a universe in which benevolent aliens arrive (about 18 years from today) and conquer Earth in order to save us from our own folly, after which humans slowly become citizens of the galaxy.

Much of my trouble with that concept has been two-fold. First, it really was hard to write stories about human characters with agency when the Overwhelmingly Benevolent Aliens were in charge of literally everything. Second, I was just having trouble believing in the premise. Okay, it’s not like there’s any shortage of human folly around, but the back story is otherwise already falling apart. As an example, one of the stories I’ve actually written for this setting had a character loosely modeled on Elon Musk as the protagonist, set on Mars in the early 2040s. These days I have zero appetite for taking any inspiration from Elon Musk, nor do I believe we’re going to be putting any humans on Mars that soon.

So the solution I’ve meandered toward is to rethink the setting, so as to preserve a lot more human agency and simultaneously divorce it from those last vestiges of America-centrism. One aspect of this is to assume humans will explore and colonize the rest of the Solar System over the next century or so, although it will be a slow process and it will be driven primarily by powers like China, India, and the European Union rather than (e.g.) Russia or the United States.

To this end, I’ve been tinkering with a tabletop game, Stellar Horizons by Andrew Rader (who is a well-known space scientist). Probably the best “explore the Solar System” game I’ve come across for messing with plausible future histories. It’s been working pretty well! There’s a sequel too, which covers the exploration of the interstellar neighborhood over the next few centuries. I’m hoping the end result will be a medium-to-long-term timeline that will get my Muse moving more effectively.

The objective for September is to finish working with Stellar Horizons and build a first revised timeline for the “Human Destiny” universe.