June went fairly well, it seems. I was able to get a new section of Architect of Worlds written and pushed out to my patrons, I also shared a timeline for my Danassos setting as a free release, and I got another book review written.
The usual list of projects is getting a big overhaul this month. The thing is, that section of Architect that I wrote last month is the last section that wasn’t complete in draft. I’m now in a position to meld all of the pieces of Architect together into a combined draft for the complete book. The result won’t be finished by a long shot, of course. I have a lot of work to do before I can start thinking about layout and getting ready for final publication:
Build the first complete draft for the book out of the separate parts that exist now.
Polish up the world-design sequence.
Polish up the “working with real-world astronomical data” section.
Complete a few minor sections, especially in the “special cases” chapter.
Add “modeling notes” sections, with references to scientific papers and textbooks, to any portion of the design chapters that doesn’t have them yet.
Clean up the extended examples.
Clean up the math throughout the book (rationalize variable names, be consistent about how computations are described, and so on).
Develop images (diagrams, flowcharts, public-domain astrophotography, alien-worlds images) to fill out the content.
I suspect this is going to take at least a couple of months, and it’s going to be one of those cases where the draft looks terrible for a while before I get it under control. I don’t think this is going to generate any releases for my patrons until I’ve waded through most of the above steps. I’m therefore announcing now that there will almost certainly be no new Architect of Worldsreleases to my patrons for at least the month of July, possibly the month of August as well.
Once I get close to having a really clean and complete draft for the entire book, ready to start on layout, I may share that with my patrons as a final charged release before publication. There will almost certainly be enough new material to justify that. We’ll see how things go. I’ve still got my fingers crossed that I might be able to release the first edition of Architect of Worlds by the end of this calendar year!
Meanwhile, regarding my literary projects, I’m switching over to the Danassos project as my top priority for the time being. I’m going to start working, as time permits, on a draft of the novel Twice-Crowned. If I can put down, say, at least 25 kilowords of polished narrative at the beginning of the novel, I may share that with my patrons as a charged release.
My intention is to divide my time between Architect and Twice-Crowned more or less evenly this month, and we’ll see what results I get. Watch this space for updates, as always.
Here’s the planning list, with two items in the “top priority” category:
Top Priority:
Architect of Worlds: Work on preparing a complete draft of the book for eventual layout and publication.
Danassos: Begin work on a new draft of the novel Twice-Crowned.
Second Priority:
Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
Human Destiny: Design additional new rules systems for the Player’s Guide and add these to the interim draft.
Human Destiny: Begin work on a new Aminata Ndoye story, set during her first year at the Interstellar Service academy.
Back Burner:
Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
Krava’s Legend: Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine).
Aside from these items, I suspect I may end up doing a little cartography, certainly for Danassos, possibly for Human Destiny as well. I may have a couple of free sketch maps to share with readers and patrons this month.
Well, May didn’t go quite as planned. I originally planned to write the last open section of Architect of Worlds, but early in the month my muse decided to go and live on Mars instead. I ended up writing about 10000 words describing Mars in the Human Destiny setting, and giving myself a ton of new ideas for the universe and for fiction set therein. So my big project for May turned out to be a new partial interim draft of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate instead.
Okay, Mars is (more or less) out of my system now, so it’s back to Architect of Worlds for the month of June. Here’s the formal planning list for this month:
Top Priority:
Architect of Worlds: Write a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings. Also carry out further additions and revisions to the “special cases in worldbuilding” section. These two tasks are expected to give rise to a charged release, assuming they amount to at least 10,000 words of new material.
Second Priority:
Architect of Worlds: Further additions and revisions to the “working with astronomical data” section. May lead to a free v0.2 update, or may simply be integrated into v1.0 of the complete book.
Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
Human Destiny: Design additional new rules systems for the Player’s Guide and add these to the interim draft.
Human Destiny: Begin work on a new Aminata Ndoye story.
Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
Back Burner:
Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
Krava’s Legend:Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine).
About the only change from the initial plan for last month is that I’m bumping a new Aminata Ndoye story up in priority a little. My main focus is going to be on Architect this month, but I may spend some time working on a story about Aminata’s first year at the Interstellar Service academy in France. Basically an immediate sequel to “Pilgrimage.”
Meanwhile, I’m continuing to tinker in my extensive spare time with QGIS and the NASA topographical data for Mars. I may work on one or two maps of 23rd century Mars for the Atlas, and if that works out it may yield a couple of free rewards for my patrons. We’ll see how the month goes.
Here’s a small sample of material for the Human Destiny setting and game book that’s slowly taking shape. In the Cepheus Engine and related tabletop games, there’s often a system of “technology levels” that helps characterize what kind of gear and weapons one might expect to find on a given world. The concept has its problems, but it’s a quick shorthand that’s useful for game purposes. Since Human Destiny is eventually going to be published as a Cepheus Engine game, it seems useful to put together a set of “tech level” tables for the setting.
Here’s a first very rough draft for that section of the Human Destiny sourcebook.
Technology Levels in the Human Destiny Setting
The Khedai Hegemony maintains a sophisticated scheme for classifying the technological and social progress of emerging civilizations. The following system of “tech levels” is a (vastly simplified) shorthand for the Hegemony’s scheme.
General Technology
As is the standard in any Cepheus Engine game, Technology Level or Tech Level is a measure of the social, scientific, and industrial progress of a given world or society. In Hegemony documents, each TL has an evocative descriptor, and can be associated with an approximate era in human history.
TL
Descriptor
Approximate Date or Typical World
0
Era of Stone Tools
Paleolithic, Mesolithic, or Neolithic society
1
Era of Metal Tools
3000 BCE
2
Era of Exploration
1500 CE
3
Era of Mechanization
1750 CE
4
Era of Electricity
1900 CE
5
Era of Radio
1930 CE
6
Era of Atomic Power
1950 CE
7
Era of Space Exploration
1970 CE
8
Era of Information
1990 CE
9
Era of Crisis
2020 CE
10 (A)
Low Interstellar Society
Minor human colony world or outpost
11 (B)
Low Interstellar Society
Major human colony world or outpost
12 (C)
Average Interstellar Society
Maximum level for the Human Protectorate
13 (D)
Average Interstellar Society
Maximum level for a second-tier client society
14 (E)
High Interstellar Society
Maximum level for a first-tier client society
15 (F)
High Interstellar Society
Maximum level for the Khedai Hegemony as a whole
It may not be immediately obvious, but the Hegemony’s scheme for classifying technological progress includes two singularities, each of which creates a discontinuity in the above table.
The normal pattern for any newly evolving technological civilization is to progress from TL 0, passing through the higher levels in order, finally reaching some maximum level of social and technological progress. At this point the civilization invariably suffers an existential crisis that, at a minimum, forces all its component societies back to some lower TL. This may happen multiple times before the sapient species in question is finally driven into extinction. The highest point of independent development is almost never higher than TL 9. In fact, civilizations that reach TL 9 on their own almost always suffer particularly deadly collapses, likely to cause immediate species extinction – hence the term “Era of Crisis.”
The transition from TL 9 to TL A represents the first discontinuity or singularity in the scheme. Very few civilizations manage to pass the Era of Crisis on their own. Almost all societies that survive the transition and attain interstellar status do so only because an older civilization intervenes, as the Khedai Hegemony did with humanity.
Under the Praxis observed by the Khedai Hegemony, newly discovered sapient societies at TL 0-3 are observed from a distance under a strict non-interference policy. Societies at TL 4-9 are subject to close observation, and possibly annexation if (as in almost all cases) they appear unlikely to survive on their own.
The interstellar levels that follow (TL A through TL F) do not represent a hierarchy of new technologies that appear one after the other in a progressive fashion. Instead, they represent an array of mature technologies, all millions of years old, which are all available throughout the Hegemony. The TL of a world which falls in this range represents the kind of technology that is widely available on that world, because it is locally manufactured and can be supported by existing infrastructure. Items from a higher TL will also be available, but possibly at a higher cost in social credit, or with specific limitations under the Praxis.
Humans know nothing about any technologies above TL F. Humans may speculate, and the khedai doubtless know what technologies might be possible, but under the Praxis such possibilities are cloaked in silence. A few humans suspect that this silence conceals a second discontinuity or singularity, beyond which even the Hegemony dares not go.
Energy Technologies
The Hegemony’s scheme for classifying technologies is most strongly determined by a society’s ability to harness and direct energy to carry out the work of civilization.
TL
Typical Developments
0
Muscle power Domesticated animals Slave labor
1
Hydromechanical power Water wheels
2
Wind power Windmills
3
Steam power Exploitation of fossil fuels (coal) Crude electrical transmission and storage
4
Widespread use of electrical power Exploitation of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas) Oil refining to produce high-quality fuels Hydroelectric power
5
Rural electrification Urban power grids
6
Nuclear fission reactors Regional power grids
7
Increasing use of solar power Continental power grids
8
Mass application of renewable energy
9
Crude “smart grids” Possible abandonment of fossil fuels
10 (A)
Advanced “smart grids” Advanced fission power Superconducting power transmission Hyper-efficient power cells Solar power satellites Complete abandonment of fossil fuels
11 (B)
Nuclear fusion reactors
12 (C)
Advanced fusion power
13 (D)
Antimatter generation and transport
14 (E)
Advanced antimatter power Portable fusion power Catalyzed fusion
15 (F)
Miniaturized fusion power
Communications and Information
This category covers technologies for generating, transmitting, storing, and applying information. It also includes various forms of artificial intelligence and artificial sapience.
TL
Typical Developments
0
Oral communication
1
Written communication Printing press (block printing) Crude cryptography
Radio broadcasting Massive special-purpose computing devices
6
Television broadcasting Massive general-purpose computing devices Information theory
7
Early packet-switched networks Personal computers Industrial automation Advanced cryptography (digital) Public-key cryptography
8
Global Internet Advanced personal computers Advanced ICS/SCADA systems Large-scale public-key infrastructures
9
Miniaturized personal computers Early natural-language interfaces Early automatic translation Sophisticated robots and drones “Cloud” computing Crude quantum computation
Sophisticated personal assistants Advanced expert systems Advanced cybershells Sophisticated personality emulation
12 (C)
Early Virtual Sapience systems Fully Turing-capable systems Undirected machine learning “City minds”
13 (D)
Advanced Virtual Sapience systems
14 (E)
Early Artificial Sapience systems Proof-of-consciousness systems “World minds”
15 (F)
Advanced Artificial Sapience systems Transapience threshold
Environmental
This category covers technologies that can alter or maintain planetary environments. It also covers common developments in environmental awareness – the process by which a civilization learns how its own activities can impact the environment upon which it relies for support.
TL
Typical Developments
0
Agriculture and pastoralism Early trade networks Forest clearing Overhunting Megafaunal extinction
1
Early cities Basic aqueducts and sanitation Advanced trade networks Continental empires
2
Global trade networks Transcontinental empires and colonization
3
Indoor plumbing Advanced sanitation Large-scale use of fossil fuels Large-scale habitat destruction begins
4
Super-cities (>1 million) Large-scale water treatment Sophontogenic climate change begins
5
Super-cities (>10 million)
6
Megalopolitan regions (>50 million) “Green Revolution” in agriculture Awareness of global harms from pollution
7
Megalopolitan regions (>100 million) Sophontogenic mass extinction begins Awareness of sophontogenic climate change
8
Gene-modified crop species Awareness of sophontogenic mass extinction
9
Crude geoengineering Civilizational collapse
10 (A)
Organic urban reserves Advanced geoengineering Climate and ecological remediation De-extinction
11 (B)
Domed cities Artificial species to fill ecological niches Type I (Mars) terraforming
12 (C)
Advanced climate and ecological remediation “Biome minds” monitor wild ecosystems
13 (D)
Type II (Venus, Mercury, Luna) terraforming
14 (E)
“World minds” monitor global ecosystems
15 (F)
Type III (extremal) terraforming
Medical
This category covers medical and biological technologies.
TL
Typical Developments
0
Herbal remedies Crude surgery and prosthetics
1
Diagnostic process Basic understanding of anatomy
2
Advanced understanding of anatomy Crude immunization techniques
3
Germ theory and bacteriology Epidemiology Antiseptic surgery Advanced anesthesia Crude psychiatry
4
Antibiotics X-rays and other internal imaging Public health measures Mass vaccination
5
Blood transfusions Discovery of transplant rejection
6
Eradication of some infectious diseases Discovery of the structure of DNA
7
Theories of molecular evolution Crude genetic engineering Advanced prosthetics
As sometimes happens, my plan for creative work for the current month has taken a big leap out into left field. My original plan for May was to write up the last open section of Architect of Worlds, and release that for my patrons. Instead, I think I’m going to be living on Mars this month.
One of my Human Destiny subprojects is to develop the future history of colonization and terraforming of Mars in that universe. In a sense, Mars is where human beings first figure out how they might fit into the Hegemony’s interstellar society – setting aside the follies of old Earth, disciplining themselves to a centuries-long project in a harsh environment, learning galactic technologies and ways of life. I’ve already written one piece of fiction set on the planet, and Mars is going to be important for the story of my lead character, Aminata Ndoye. Meanwhile, I anticipate dedicating a lengthy section of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate just to describe late-23rd-Century Mars.
The spark for getting back to this subproject was the computer game Per Aspera. This is a logistics-engine game, focused on the colonization and terraforming of Mars. Early in May, the developers of Per Aspera released a new DLC which added a bunch of useful features to the game’s model. I sat down to spend a little time experimenting with the new version, thinking I would just spend an evening or two on it . . . but the result was a superb run which gave me all kinds of setting and story ideas. Forget devoting a section of the Atlas to Mars, I suspect I could write a complete tabletop RPG dedicated to this one planet.
Okay, that’s probably an excessive notion. Still, right now I think I could easily write a first draft of that section of the Atlas. I’m also experimenting with the QGIS software package as a tool for making useful maps of Mars. We have a lot of data about the topographical layout of the planet, so producing plausible maps is not going to be a problem.
So that’s the new plan for May: at the very least, produce a new interim partial draft of the Atlas for my patrons and readers. That will be a charged release if there’s at least ten or twelve thousand words of new material. If time permits, maybe knock out one or two maps of terraformed Mars to go with the new text. If I can get Mars out of my system over the new couple of weeks, then I should be able to turn back to that last section of Architect in June.
April came down to the wire, but on the last day of the month I was able to both post a book review and push out the first section of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
For the month of May, I think the Top Priority item is going to be Architect of Worlds again. There’s one more section of the book I need to write from scratch, and the “special cases” section needs more love. I suspect between those two items I’ll have plenty of new material, so a combination of them is likely going to be a charged release for the month of May.
The remarkable thing is that if I can hit that mark this month, that will mean that Architect of Worlds will be more or less complete, at least in an initial rough draft. That’s quite a milestone! I think if all goes well, June may see a release of a full rough draft of Architect, all in one document, a true v1.0 for the entire project. That will be a free release for my patrons, since they’ve already seen all the individual pieces.
The book won’t be anywhere close to finished at that point – I anticipate a lot of polishing, production of diagrams and graphics, and layout before I can even consider trying to publish it – but that’s still a big step forward. I begin to think there’s a chance Architect may arrive on virtual store shelves before the end of calendar year 2022.
All that being said, here’s the formal planning list for May:
Top Priority:
Architect of Worlds: Write a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings. Also carry out further additions and revisions to the “special cases in worldbuilding” section. These two tasks are expected to give rise to a charged release, assuming they amount to at least 10,000 words of new material.
Second Priority:
Architect of Worlds: Further additions and revisions to the “working with astronomical data” section. May lead to a free v0.2 update, or may simply be integrated into v1.0 of the complete book.
Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
Human Destiny: Design additional new rules systems for the Player’s Guide and add these to the interim draft.
Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
Back Burner:
Human Destiny: Begin work on a new Aminata Ndoye story.
Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
Krava’s Legend:Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine).
I’ve had some ups and downs so far this month, but at about the midpoint I do seem to be on track to reach some good milestones.
I spent the first week or so of April doing an overhaul of parts of the Architect of Worlds design sequence. I started out just trying to add an alternative mechanism for producing gas giant planets, but that ended up carrying so many implications that I eventually had to overhaul most of Steps Nine through Eleven. I’m still not happy with the smoothness of the revised text, although the model seems to be working well enough.
Once that was done, I went back to an extended test run for Architect, generating planetary systems for a reasonable cut of the stellar population near Sol. I’m working with the data set associated with the paper The 10 parsec sample in the Gaia era – this is probably the best census of the solar neighborhood available at the moment. As of this evening, I’ve gotten about to the five-parsec radius.
I started out systematically generating planetary systems for every star on the list. Mostly this was to verify something I suspected about red-dwarf and brown-dwarf systems – that they are very unlikely to generate planets where humans can comfortably settle. So far I think I’ve confirmed that suspicion. I don’t think it’s impossible to find an Earthlike world in a red-dwarf system, but those stars have so many factors stacked against them that such cases are probably quite rare. Scientific and mining outposts, maybe, but not prosperous colonies. So after I generated 19 red-dwarf and brown-dwarf systems, I dropped those and concentrated on the brighter stars, spectral type K and up.
I now have 13 planetary systems for those brighter stars, and I’m encouraged to see that Architect is doing a decent job of generating Earthlike worlds (generously defined) for them. If we want air with sufficient free oxygen in it to breathe without too much artificial aid, that doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Counting Earth, I have six habitable worlds within five parsecs of Sol:
Sol III (Earth)
Alpha Centauri A-III (a super-Earth with a helium-nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere)
61 Cygni B-III (tide-locked)
Epsilon Indi A-II (tide-locked)
Groombridge 1618 III (tide-locked)
70 Ophiuchi A-III (a true Earth-analog, no helium, not tide-locked)
Not bad. Looks like Architect is going to give us a fair number of tide-locked Earthlikes, and the occasional super-Earth with weird but breathable atmosphere. The variety even in this short list is nice to see.
Eventually I plan to work all the way out to the ten-parsec radius, but this will do for now as a stress test for Architect. For the bottom half of April I’m going to switch to writing up some of these worlds and planetary systems, as a first installment in the rough draft of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
So for my patrons and readers, here’s the likely release schedule for this month.
I do have a new interim draft (v0.9) of the main section of Architect of Worlds, but I think I’m going to hold off on pushing that out to everyone until I’ve had a chance to go through and polish up the text a bit. I think I also want to get to the long-delayed project of cleaning up all the mathematical formulae so that I’m using more standardized variable names and formats. You may see a v0.9 draft next month sometime.
On the other hand, I’m pretty confident I can have a first interim draft of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate ready by the end of April, with at least 10,000 to 12,000 words of material in it. That v0.1 draft will be a charged release for my patrons. I may charge for further additions to that draft, as I have with new sections of Architect or other book-length projects, but only if and when there’s enough genuinely new material to justify it.
For a while, I was afraid that March would be yet another month without any big block of new material to share, but then I had a remarkably productive week and was able to produce a first interim draft for the “special cases” section of Architect of Worlds. So March ended on a good note, and now I need to think about April.
I think I’m going to restructure my priority list, starting this month. Instead of listing several projects as all being “Top Priority,” I’m going to restrict myself to one project that’s going to get the lion’s share of my time in the coming month. That’s the project that seems to me most likely to produce a block of new material suitable for sharing with patrons and other readers. Everything else is going to get pushed down to “Second Priority” (projects that may get some time, but probably won’t lead to a big block of new material) or “Back Burner” (projects that I’m keeping on the docket but don’t expect to work on at all during the coming month).
For the month of April, I think the Top Priority item is going to be to work on a rough draft of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate, a new tabletop-oriented book that describes the late-23rd-Century universe of the Human Destiny setting. Working on that project for the first time is also going to help me make progress on several items on this month’s Second Priority list:
Give the current (v0.8) draft of the Architect of Worlds design sequence a thorough workout, looking for possible ambiguities and bugs to be corrected, possibly leading to a v0.9 release.
Similarly, test and improve on the “working with astronomical data” (v0.1) and “special cases in worldbuilding” (v0.1) sections of Architect, possibly leading to v0.2 releases for those.
Also, work out how my particular take on the Cepheus Engine system is going to represent this kind of setting, which is kind of different from the usual representation (3D space, more detailed world writeups, and so on). If I come up with some results here, those may go into the interim draft of the Player’s Guide, leading toward a v0.5 release for that.
So, without further ado, here’s the formal planning list for April:
Top Priority:
Human Destiny: Start compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate, meanwhile giving the Architect of Worlds material a good workout. Produce a v0.1 interim draft (at least 10,000 words) by the end of the month as a charged release.
Second Priority:
Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings.
Architect of Worlds: Further additions and revisions to the “special cases in worldbuilding” section, possibly leading to a free v0.2 update.
Architect of Worlds: Further additions and revisions to the “working with astronomical data” section, possibly leading to a free v0.2 update.
Human Destiny: Design additional new rules systems for the Player’s Guide and add these to the interim draft.
Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
Back Burner:
Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
Krava’s Legend:Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine).
Well, February was at least somewhat successful – I managed a major rewrite of sections of the Architect of Worlds design sequence, and released a new interim draft of that for a wide audience. I think in March I’m going to try to keep up my momentum there, and work on some new sections of the book. It would be nice if I could have the whole rough draft finished before summer, so I could work on final polish and layout and actually get the book out at last.
There’s one new development in how I’m planning to structure these projects. I’m going to break the Human Destiny setting bible into two distinct books for eventual publication under the Cepheus Engine game rules. The core setting bible itself will get the working title of the Human Destiny Player’s Guide, and then there’s going to be a separate Atlas of the Human Protectorate that provides location data and adventure seeds. My patrons will get free updates to the Player’s Guide, since I’ve already charged them for that once, but the Atlas will likely be a charged release once there’s enough material there to justify one.
Meanwhile, I really need to get unblocked on Krava’s Legend again if I can. it’s been well over a year since The Curse of Steel was published, and it needs to start getting sequels if the series is ever going to attract an audience.
Here’s the list for March:
Top Priority (“this is how I’ll judge whether the month has been successful”)
Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings.
Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section of special cases and additional worldbuilding material that doesn’t fit into the design sequence.
Human Destiny: Start compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate, meanwhile giving the Architect of Worlds material a good workout.
Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
Second Priority (“work on this as time permits”):
Human Destiny: Design additional new rules systems for the Player’s Guide and add these to the interim draft.
Krava’s Legend:Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
Back Burner (“work on this only if everything else gets blocked”):
Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine)
I think the top priority for a charged release will be to get the initial draft of the “special cases and additional worldbuilding topics” material finished. The other items are more likely to give rise to free updates for my patrons.
The best-laid plans of mice and men, and all that.
My plan for February was to get a major update of the world-design sequence for Architect of Worlds out the door, and then pivot to finishing the Human Destiny novelette “Remnants” before the end of the month. Okay, one out of two isn’t bad.
It turns out that writing a murder mystery is hard. I’ve rewritten “Remnants” three times in the past couple of weeks, and I keep finding plot holes that mean the story still won’t work. I don’t think there’s any way the story will be finished to my satisfaction before the end of February. I’m honestly not sure how long it will take me to get it straightened out, even if I stay focused on it to the exclusion of other projects.
It appears to be time to throw in the towel and move to something else, while the back of my brain works on “Remnants” on its own schedule. That means there will be no charged release for February for my patrons. I’m going to concentrate on getting started on a new project for next month, and in the meantime pushing a book review out with what’s left of this month. I’ll post a planning message early in March as usual.
Well, my day job is a little less demanding as January turns into February – my two big projects for calendar year 2021 are almost finished and I don’t have any big new projects for 2022. At least not yet. So I’m expecting to make good progress on a couple of creative projects this month. Here’s the main list:
Top Priority (“this is how I’ll judge whether the month has been successful”)
Architect of Worlds: Rewrite sections of the Introduction and Design Sequence segment, based on new research, hopefully simplifying several steps of the sequence having to do with the placement of planets. I may also take this opportunity to update all the worked examples and make all the mathematical notation more consistent.
Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
Human Destiny: Finish writing an article for the Cepheus Journal about the game-book project.
Second Priority (“work on this as time permits”):
Krava’s Legend: Write a few new chapters of The Sunlit Lands.
Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings.
Human Destiny: Produce a high-level map of terraformed Mars.
Human Destiny: Research and produce a timeline for the terraforming of Mars.
Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
Back Burner (“work on this only if everything else gets blocked”):
Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section of special cases and additional worldbuilding material that doesn’t fit into the design sequence.
Krava’s Legend: Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine)
The work on Architect of Worlds is probably the top priority this month. The end result there will probably be a version 0.8 draft of the Introduction and World Design Sequence. That new document will be a free update for my patrons.
I’m also considering releasing the new partial for free on this blog site, in an attempt to generate some new interest for the project. There have been a lot of changes and improvements since the version that’s currently available to the public. My patrons will continue to get any further updates to that document as free rewards, until there’s another major overhaul or the book as a whole is about ready for layout and release.
Meanwhile, I should be able to complete the novelette “Remnants” this month, and if that ends up being long enough, I’ll likely make it the charged release for February.
