Sharrukin's Palace

I swear, sometimes my muse has the attention span of a squirrel.

My plan for March was to release a new minor update to the Architect of Worlds partial draft, and then write several more chapters of The Sunlit Lands so I could send out a good-sized chunk of that as a charged release for my patrons.

Architect of Worlds did get bumped up to Version 0.4 as of last week – a bunch of tweaks, some of them substantive, many of them driven by the flood of good feedback I’ve received from Brett Evill since the beginning of the year. With that out of the way, I was all set to buckle down and concentrate on The Sunlit Lands. I expected to be finished through Chapter Six or Seven and about 20,000 words by the end of March.

Meanwhile, I posted a couple of weeks ago about an old Traveller project, the Game of Empire rules that I originally developed about twenty years ago. At some time in the near future, I intend to revisit that project and produce a new version of those rules, possibly working toward publishing them as a paid product on DriveThruRPG. I hadn’t intended to work on that just yet, though – Krava’s story was calling me!

Yet early this week, I got the first hint of an idea for a Traveller setting that could act as a test-bed for Game of Empire. It’s a “Milieu Zero” concept of sorts, a single world striving to establish a new interstellar empire after a Long Night. Every day, while I worked on projects for my day job and made progress with Krava’s story, the Traveller idea kept growing in the back of my head, grabbing hold and not letting go.

Today I sat down to try to jot down some notes and get it out of my system, so I could get back to work on Krava . . . and new material just poured out onto the page. Over 3,000 words of it since I got up this morning. Not to mention that I’ve already come up with at least two or three ideas for short fiction, attached to this setting.

Well. I know not to argue when my muse is at work. Even if I wish she were more consistent.

Apparently, by the end of March, I’m going to have something new and worth sharing, it just isn’t going to be enough of The Sunlit Lands to meet my objective. Nor will this block of new Traveller material be useful as a charged release, since I’d like to share it widely and attract some attention to the potential project.

So here’s the (revised) plan for the last few days of March:

• There will be no charged release for my patrons this month. (Again.)
• I should have about 5-6000 words of new Traveller material that will be posted here, shared with my patrons, and possibly shared via social media as well. This will be a free release.
• I still need to finish and publish a book review for the month of March. I’ve already selected and read the book, I just need to bang out the review.

We’ll see if April goes any differently. At least I seem to have gotten out of the creative slough I was mired in for most of February and the first week or so of March. There’s a good chance I’ll be able to produce a worthwhile amount of material next month.