Browsed by
Tag: blog

Minor Updates to Site Structure

Minor Updates to Site Structure

Comments 0 Comment

I’ve made some minor changes to the page structure for this blog, in response to a trend I’ve been seeing in site visits. Some visitors have been clicking through to the top-level pages, finding nothing but stubs, and clicking away without looking at actual articles or stories.

I’ve flattened the page hierarchy a bit. There are now four top-level pages, and no additional level between those and individual articles. I’ve also made sure that each top-level page includes a link and a short description for each item below it in the hierarchy.

Now visitors should be able to browse through those descriptions and click through to individual articles. Should make site maintenance slightly easier and make the site more intuitive for visitors.

Minor Changes

Minor Changes

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 That site is badly out of date and I won’t be maintaining it anymore; the only content there that doesn’t also exist here is some outdated material for the “Human Destiny” space-opera setting.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.
Status Report (10 August 2019)

Status Report (10 August 2019)

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:

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.

“Fermi’s Nightmare” Article Now Available on Sharrukin’s Worlds

“Fermi’s Nightmare” Article Now Available on Sharrukin’s Worlds

Comments 0 Comment

One of the few blog entries I’ve ever written that I thought was worth preserving was titled “Fermi’s Nightmare.” This was a brief examination of a corollary to a well-known observation made by Enrico Fermi back in the 1950s. For the last few years, that’s been hosted over at the Sharrukin’s Archive site. As of today, I’ve moved it into a static page on this blog. It should be visible in the Pages sidebar on the right.

At this point, the only thing still sitting at Sharrukin’s Archive that isn’t available anywhere else is some draft material for the Human Destiny setting. Fairly soon, I may either move that content over here, or simply decide to take it offline until I do some redesign of the setting. To be honest, there are things about the current concept that have me seriously blocked – I’ve been struggling for a couple of years to produce more stories for it than the one I’ve published.

Either way, expect the Sharrukin’s Archive site to come down entirely as soon as I’ve figured out what to do with the remaining material.

Status Report (24 April 2019)

Status Report (24 April 2019)

Comments 0 Comment

I’ve been radio-silent for several weeks here. Mostly this is due to the day job, which has soaked up a lot of my time, attention, and energy over the past month or so. What with teaching courses, writing new courses, going on business travel, mentoring my colleagues . . . I’m not having a lot of extra resources to spend on creative work lately. Which isn’t to say that projects aren’t perking along in the back of my mind in odd moments, which seems to be how I often make progress on things anyway. So I’ll certainly be back to this space and pushing things forward once the weather changes.

In other news, I learned something today that severely disappointed me regarding several individuals and a publisher with whom I’ve worked in the past. Not going to name names, but if you know something about my creative history and are aware of recent events in the tabletop gaming industry, you can probably put two and two together. Still not sure what decision I’m going to make about that. How do you respond when you discover you’re associated with, working with, actively supporting someone whose other activities you find reprehensible? How do you respond when, as here, the relationship is at one or two removes? That is, your associates aren’t carrying out the reprehensible actions directly, but they’re continuing to partner with and support, and generally seem to be okay with, someone who is.

I’ve been in this situation before. A few years ago I contributed to a product written and published by an individual whom I discovered later was actively involved in the alt-right movement. I generally avoid issuing political or social opinions in this blog, but you can take it as read that I am not fond of the alt-right. Still, it was too late to back out. My name was already attached to the product in print. Not that this was ever likely to be a huge deal – I was one of dozens involved, and my contribution was minimal – but it still left a bad taste in my mouth. I resolved at the time that I wasn’t going to be put in that kind of situation again, through my own lack of due diligence.

So I’m going to have to think about this. In the meantime, I’m going to temporarily set that publisher’s products aside and make no use of them in this space, until further developments have resolved the conflict or I’ve reached a more permanent decision.

“Architect of Worlds” Page Now Active

“Architect of Worlds” Page Now Active

Comments 5 comments

Recently I’ve noticed a big uptick in traffic to posts under the architect of worlds tag. I suspect someone out in the wilds of the Internet has called people’s attention to the project.

I’m up to my eyebrows in other projects at the moment, but today I took a few moments to create an Architect of Worlds page, accessible under the Sharrukin’s Worlds section in the sidebar. If you’re interested in the project, the advantage of that page for you is that it will include links to current PDFs of the completed draft sections. No more having to weed through old blog posts!

Incidentally, I do hope that people who find the material useful will let me know that, and provide any feedback they can as to how well or poorly the system works for them.

New Content Posted to Sharrukin’s Worlds

New Content Posted to Sharrukin’s Worlds

Comments 0 Comment

I’ve started building out the Sharrukin’s Worlds section of the site, starting with a section on my planetary-romance setting Tanûr. I’ve retrieved my original article “Building a Better Barsoom” from the Sharrukin’s Archive site, and have now posted that here with some minor edits.

At the moment I’m working on the first Tanûr story as a break from working on the novel, so I may produce some more content for that section over the next few days.

I think I’ll make short announcement blog-posts like this one whenever I add substantive bits of content to the Sharrukin’s Worlds section. For now, at least, until and unless I see a better way to help readers find what they’re looking for there.

Status Report (9 February 2019)

Status Report (9 February 2019)

Comments 0 Comment

I’m still plugging away on Twice-Crowned, although I seem to have lost some of my momentum on that project. I may spend a few days working on other items so as to stay fresh, then get back to the novel.

In particular, I’ve taken the first steps to move all of my archived content out of the Sharrukin’s Archive site and into this WordPress framework. For the moment, all I have is a parent page (visible on the sidebar to the right, under the “Sharrukin’s Worlds” link). I plan to hang several child pages from that, each covering a specific project or setting that I have in the process of development. For example:

  • The most recent draft sections for Architect of Worlds
  • Setting notes, maps, and short fiction for the Human Destiny space-opera setting
  • Setting notes, maps, and short fiction for Ancient Greece and the Danassos historical-fantasy setting
  • Setting notes, maps, and short fiction for the Tanûr planetary-romance setting
  • World-building articles I’ve written that aren’t tied to a specific setting
  • Any new projects that rise to the point of active development

This should give interested parties a chance to look at the content I’ve developed without having to dig through months of blog posts. It should also be far easier to maintain than the Sharrukin’s Archive site, which is frankly a royal pain in the nether regions to do anything with. Finally, I suspect this kind of structure might also be a convenient way to collect content on the way to developing books for publication via Amazon or a game-centered platform like RPGNow. Watch this space for further developments.

Status Report (9 January 2019)

Status Report (9 January 2019)

Comments 0 Comment

Just a quick post today. I’ve been home from the office with a bit of intestinal crud for the past couple of days, which has not exactly been conducive to getting any writing done either. Still, I’ve managed to get another two or three kilowords down on Twice-Crowned since the weekend. I’m not at all happy with the text as it stands – I’ve got more loose plot threads lying on the floor than you can shake a stick at – but better to get the story roughed out in full, and then go back and start polishing and trimming. The overall shape of the story is working out fine.

I should call out a source that’s been remarkably useful, and will probably continue to be so: a book titled The Seer in Ancient Greece, by Michael Atiyah Flower, published 2008 by the University of California Press. Although my protagonist is not at all a typical Hellene of her time, it’s very good to have a solid understanding of what other manteis did in the real world, and how they interacted with the society and culture around them. Somewhat specialized, but highly recommended if you have an interest in classical Hellenic religious thought.

Watching this blog for the past few days has been a bit surprising. Today has been the busiest day the blog has seen since I reinstated it back in April, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. For some reason, I’ve suddenly been getting dozens of hits from Facebook, which is odd since I don’t cross-post and don’t even maintain an active account there. Haven’t a clue as to where the hits are coming from, either, and neither Google nor Facebook’s native search engine have been of any help. Not that I’m complaining, to be sure. Still, a small request to any readers who might be coming this way from Facebook: could you leave a comment on this post to indicate where the link is coming from? I’m kind of curious what’s up with that.

Tomorrow, with any luck, I’ll be back on an even keel health-wise and ready to get back to the office. The writing that needs to be done there is piling up too.

2019: Looking Forward

2019: Looking Forward

Comments 0 Comment

So I’ve long since gotten out of the habit of making New Year’s resolutions. For one thing, life is too unpredictable to nail down that way, and for another, it takes more than a line on the calendar to change habits. Still, the first few days of the year is a good time to at least try and make a few plans.

I’ve got a fairly crowded agenda for my day job, where I have several course-development projects lined up for the coming calendar year. I’ll also be “on the platform” to lecture more than I was last year. So there’s one irony: out of all my writing output for the year, most of it won’t be fictional and isn’t likely to be mentioned here.

Meanwhile, I’m taking steps to improve my health in the coming year. I’m an overweight guy in my fifties, and a controlled diabetic as well, and that means I have to pay a certain amount of attention to personal maintenance. At least, I do if I want to live long enough to enjoy a few years of retirement, subject as always to the whims of our lords and masters downtown.

Recently I resumed my membership at a local gym, and while I’m never going to be slim and athletic again, I hope to build up a bit of strength in my legs and maybe lose a few pounds. Possibly more productive is a suggestion my podiatrist made, not long ago. Apparently there exist compact elliptical machines that are ideal for putting under a desk, so you can be working your legs and burning calories even while you sit at a computer. I’ve got one on order for my home office, and if that works out I may order a second one to take to work.

As far as creative writing goes:

  • First priority is going to be producing the first draft for the current novel-length project, a pseudo-Hellenic alternate-history fantasy with the working title of Twice-Crowned. As of this evening, I’ve got close to 11 kilowords down, which should finish one long chapter. The total length of the story will probably be about 120 kilowords in rough draft, and I’m hoping to have that finished by summer. Whether I’ll get the novel actually self-published this calendar year depends on how much revision it needs.
  • Second priority is going to be getting at least one Aminata Ndoye story out the door, and possibly another short piece as well.
  • Third priority is to get back to Architect of Worlds and push that project forward through another big section. I want to revisit some of the material I’ve already written – the model doesn’t seem to be handling “super-Earths” very well yet – but the main objective will be to write the section that describes individual planets in some detail. If I can get that finished and tested, the main “game mechanics” sections of the book will be done.
  • Fourth priority is to finish a couple of fan-fiction projects. In particular, I’ve got a Silmarillion fan-fiction piece that got started and looked promising, but which has been on hiatus for a while so I can work on those other bullet items. There’s also a Dragon Age story that I abandoned in 2018 but that won’t quite let go of my imagination, so I may go back to that at some point. Of course, all of this is subject to Zeigler’s Iron Law of Prioritization: “Any item that falls to fourth on the priority list will never be completed.” I can hope for an exception.
  • Fifth, any continued blogging I may find to do on worldbuilding, writing, or the state of my muse.

Another thing I’m considering is shutting down the Sharrukin’s Archive part of this site, in favor of just placing any “persistent” items in this WordPress framework as permanent pages. Honestly, the Archive as it’s structured is an enormous pain in the ass to maintain, and I’ve never managed to populate it as densely as I originally planned.

Honestly, that seems like enough to keep me busy for the next few months. Watch this space for progress reports.