krava's legend – Page 10 – Sharrukin's Palace

EIDOLON: Examples of the Extended Character (I)

March 20, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

My employer has sent me home for what may be the next couple of months, since I’m in a “high-risk” category for COVID-19 (over 50 and with a chronic health condition that might complicate if I come down with the disease). So here’s a great opportunity to work on EIDOLON and some of the world-building for The Curse of Steel. I may be posting a lot more frequently for a while . . .

For today, here are some notes I’ve put together over the past few days. Here I’m starting to puzzle out how the EIDOLON “extended character” will work in practice. I’m working with the home society for The Curse of Steel here – the Tremara or “Mighty Folk,” a tribal Iron Age culture somewhat reminiscent of pre-Roman Celts. These notes aren’t polished rules material, but if you refer to last week’s post you may get some insight into what I’m working on here.

In Tremara society, the smallest monetary unit is the copper penny (cp). A copper penny is roughly the value of a pound of barley.

As a practical matter, most Tremara tribes don’t coin copper pennies. Most transactions at that level are handled through barter or exchange of favors. The most common coin in circulation is the silver penny (sp), which is worth 12 cp. Very wealthy Tremara sometimes use gold coins for big transactions; these are either obtained in foreign trade or minted by the richest tribes. The gold piece (gp) is worth 20 sp or 240 cp.

Tremara agriculture is based largely upon barley. A bushel of barley weighs about 48 pounds, and so is worth about 4 sp.

Assume an average person requires 600 pounds of barley per year. This constitutes a subsistence diet, without much variety or luxury, but enough to support a healthy life. This comes to 600 cp per year or 50 cp per month. Assume another 10 cp per month for other expenses (clothing, tools, maintenance of housing, and so on). Hence the bare minimum for subsistence living will be 60 cp (5 sp) per month, or 720 cp (60 sp) per year.

Proposed rule for Social Standing in EIDOLON:

In any EIDOLON setting, the benchmark figure for Social Standing is a cost-of-living equal to the bare minimum for subsistence living in that setting. Social Standing for any individual equals log-2 of (his personal cost-of-living expenses, divided by the benchmark figure), rounded to the nearest integer.

Social Standing can be modified by conditions of legal or social privilege, although these modifiers will not normally amount to more than plus or minus 1.

Tremara Agriculture

Tremara characters can own several Assets related to agriculture:

Crop Land (measured in acres) – cleared flat land of good quality that can be used to raise barley. Only half of the Crop Land is planted each year, the other half being left fallow.
Pasture (measured in acres) – cleared land that doesn’t have to be flat or of the best quality, which is set aside for grazing. Can also include land left forested for pigs to forage.
Horses
Cattle
Small Animals – some combination of sheep, goats, and pigs.

These Assets are operated by three classes of Workers:

Farmers – a character serving as a Farmer must have the Professional Skill Farmer at +2 or better.
Herdsmen – a character serving as a Herdsman must have the Professional Skill Herdsman at +2 or better. Each Herdsman is assumed to work with a pair of dogs trained for animal handling.
Farm Laborers – a character serving as a Farm Laborer needs no specific Professional Skill, but must have Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, and Intelligence at +0 or better. A Farm Laborer provides unskilled labor, which is often seasonal in nature (grain harvest, shearing, milking, herding pigs, and so on). Farm Laborers may be slaves.

Agricultural Assets must be supported as follows, or else they can produce no profits:

One Farmer for every 24 acres of Crop Land (round up)
One Farm Laborer for every 12 acres of Crop Land (round up)
One Cattle for every 6 acres of Crop Land (round up)
One Herdsman for every 80 Horses or Cattle, or for every 120 Small Animals (combine fractions and then round up)

Farm animals must be supported by Pasture: 0.5 acres of Pasture for every Small Animal, and 4 acres of Pasture for every Horse or Cattle. Any animals not supported by Pasture are lost.

Each year, Agricultural Assets will produce profits:

Per acre of Crop Land: 210 cp (350 pounds of barley, of which 140 pounds must be set aside for next year’s planting)
Per Horse: 150 cp (loan or sale of animals, possibly stud fees)
Per Cattle: 100 cp (milk, leather, meat)
Per Small Animal: 20 cp (milk, wool, leather, meat)

Each year, the farm workers must be paid:

Per Farmer: 2,700 cp
Per Herdsman: 1,800 cp
Per Farm Laborer: 900 cp

Example: A Prosperous Farmer

An independent Tremara land-holder maintains his own small farming settlement:

48 acres of Crop Land
60 acres of Pasture
12 Cattle
24 Small Animals

The land-holder himself is a Farmer. His wife and eldest son serve as Farm Laborers, without needing to be paid (they are supported by his profits). He has also hired a second Farmer and a Herdsman as farm-hands, and he owns two slaves who serve as additional Farm Laborers. All his labor requirements are met. He has enough Cattle to support his Crop Land.

The land-holder’s farm produces 11,760 cp per year (10,080 cp in profit from the barley harvest, 1,200 cp from the Cattle, and 480 cp from the Small Animals). He must pay his labor 6,300 cp per year (2,700 cp for the Farmer, 1,800 cp for the Herdsman, and 1,800 cp for the two Farm Laborers). He makes a clear profit of 5,460 cp per year. Divided among himself and his four dependents (including his elderly mother and a daughter too young to work), this comes to 1,092 cp per year per person. His Social Standing rounds up to +1.

Example: A Chariot-Lord

A Tremara chariot-lord owns three small farming villages, scattered across several miles of countryside. These amount to the following Assets:

1,000 acres of Crop Land
1,400 acres of Pasture
40 Horses
260 Cattle
400 Small Animals

None of the chariot-lord’s personal Company (his household) are working as Farmers, Herdsmen, or Farm Laborers. He needs 42 Farmers, 84 Farm Laborers, and 8 Herdsmen to maintain his lands. He has more than enough Cattle to support his Crop Land.

The chariot-lord’s lands produce 250,000 cp per year (210,000 cp in the barley harvest, 6,000 cp from his Horses, 26,000 cp from his Cattle, and 8,000 cp from his Small Animals). He must pay 203,400 cp per year for labor (113,400 cp for his Farmers, 75,600 cp for his Farm Laborers, and 14,400 cp for his Herdsmen). His annual profits are 46,600 cp. Divided among himself and three dependents (wife and two children), this comes to 11,650 cp per year per person. This chariot-lord’s Social Standing rounds off to +4.

Some final comments:

So far, I’ve been working mostly on the left-hand side of the diagram in last week’s post: the income and profits generated by a character’s Assets and Workers. I haven’t done too much yet on the right-hand side: the hirelings and support staff that can make a wealthy character’s life better. I’ll need to develop both sides before I can lay out what a wealthy Tremara chariot-lord’s household really looks like! More on that as my enforced vacation continues.

EIDOLON: The Extended Character, Revisited

March 12, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

As I mentioned in my last entry, I’ve been working on a way to not just model individual characters in the EIDOLON ruleset, but to model their social connections. The idea is to have a simple set of rules that I can use to describe the intricate web of relationships that any character will have, as a member of a complex society.

I think I may be getting close to what I want. Consider the following diagram:

A model for the extended character in EIDOLON

You’ll notice a certain confusion of vocabulary here; I’m not sure yet what words would be best to describe the various components of this model. Here’s the idea, though.

At the top, we have the extended character itself. Perhaps this is a single individual, perhaps it includes that person and some of her partners and dependents. Or perhaps it’s a group of unrelated characters who have agreed to throw in their fortunes together: an adventuring party, the officers of a mercenary band, the crew of a privately held starship, und so weiter. In any case, all the Members (or Household, or Company, or whatever term makes sense in the setting) will share their finances equally, sharing the same social standing score once the model is complete.

On the left, we have various forms of Income. Some of this may be External Income – simple pay for the professional occupations of the Members, say. On the other hand, the Members may also own certain Assets, pieces of wealth-producing property. Most likely these Assets will require some kind of labor to actually produce their own Income. A medieval lord will need peasants to farm his land, an ancient tycoon needs slaves to operate his mines, a starship captain needs crewmen to run his ship. These workers, employees, or vassals will be paid for their labor, but by working on the Assets they produce Income for the owners, in the form of profit.

Income is on the left, outgo on the right. The Members will probably spend some of their resources on simple consumption – food, clothing, housing, luxury goods, entertainment, all at whatever level they can afford. They may also have people hired to provide them with personal service: a wealthy woman’s impeccable butler, a warlord’s kept courtesan, a personal clerk or physician, whatever might be available and appropriate in the setting. These hirelings or henchmen are also paid, but they produce no Income or Profit, they simply work to improve the quality of life for the Members.

The Members have to make sure the books balance – they can’t spend more on luxuries and personal service than they bring in! Any given setting book written under EIDOLON would lay out various structures like this, with rules for various Assets and how they would have to be worked, and lists of available workers and henchmen.

Here’s one simple result of this system: the Social Standing score of all the Members depends solely on the amount spent on Consumption and Staff. I’m taking an almost Veblenist approach here, claiming that status in almost any society is strongly correlated to the level of conspicuous consumption. Not a bad assumption, I think, for most RPG worlds and fictional universes.

There’s one more neat feature of this model: it’s possible to nest it. The character(s) who make up one set of Members may be getting paid for their services by someone higher up. Likewise, each of the workers or henchmen that one character pays may be keeping her own Household at a lower level.

For example, I’ve started to work out the details here using features of Tremara society, the setting of The Curse of Steel. A given Tremara chariot-warrior will own many hundreds of acres of cleared land, with peasants to manage his herds of cattle and horses and raise an annual crop of barley. If we wanted to zoom in on those peasants, then each peasant household could be described at finer detail using this same model. Meanwhile, the spearmen, bards, and other specialists who live in the lord’s hall and provide service for him could also have families, dependents, or property of their own.

This is a model I think I can use extensively in worldbuilding work, in a variety of settings; it should make an interesting innovation for the EIDOLON ruleset. Progress!

EIDOLON: The Extended Character

February 25, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 2 comments

I’ve gotten kind of stuck, and it’s affecting three separate projects at once. I suppose it’s another example of the world-building rabbit hole that I tend to fall into. Although in this case, if I may mix a metaphor, I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Before I dig deep into the second-draft rewrite of The Curse of Steel, I want to revise my earlier, rather sketchy, world-building work about Krava’s home society. That should help me ground the story better in the details of her situation: a noble warrior’s only child, who suddenly inherits his lands and possessions at the same moment that she becomes a leading figure in her tribe. There are a lot of moments in the story where Krava deals with money, with groups of warriors, with chains of command and fealty . . . and it would be good to have a better image of how her tribal society (the Tremara, or “Mighty Folk”) organize such things.

The more I think about that, the more time I’ve spent turning some of my previous bits of world-building and game design over in my head, most notably the analysis I did of ancient Greek society in GURPS terms. Earlier this month, I spent a week or so on a similar analysis of Tremara economics and social structure – how many peasant families are needed to support one chariot-driving warrior, and so on.

That did help me get a more realistic picture of population sizes and social stratification in Tremara culture, so that helped. But then, my mind tripped and fell down the rabbit hole. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about something for the EIDOLON project. (As a reminder, EIDOLON is the not-quite-a-full-RPG I’m designing, a universal character description system that should be easily convertible to any other published RPG rule-set, so I can publish world-building material in a game-agnostic manner.)

The idea is that an individual character isn’t just a collection of aptitudes and skills. She’s going to have a place in society, a role, a specific status in the social hierarchy. Most RPGs tend to gloss over this factor. Characters tend to be socially unpinned, wandering adventurers without ties to the community around them, even in settings that ostensibly involve dense social structures.

GURPS at least attempts to account for social standing, with a set of character traits like Wealth, Social Status, Rank, Social Regard, Social Stigma, and so on. It still tends to treat characters in isolation, each one’s place in society always independent of every other’s. For example, a GURPS character has a Cost of Living that’s tied to his Social Status, but that’s highly abstracted. A socially prominent character probably has many other characters working to support his rank and status, but GURPS just elides all that into a monthly expenditure.

So it occurred to me: why not have rules in EIDOLON to support the description of characters (or groups of characters) who have extensive social capital? Instead of just having a bare-bones “wealth” trait, or a simple ranking of social status, why not lay out exactly what that means?

So, for example, take a prominent noble warrior in Krava’s world, such as her father Derga at the beginning of The Curse of Steel. Considered as an adventurer, Derga has a lot of gear and equipment that go with him when he travels: fine clothes, some armor, weapons, a chariot and a team of ponies to draw it, all of the finest quality. Considered as a lord, however, Derga has a lot of things that wouldn’t go on a typical RPG’s character sheet: agricultural land, herds of cattle and horses, a fine mead-hall to live in. He also has the people that are loyal to him and are needed to support his assets and lifestyle: subordinate chariot warriors, spearmen, craftsmen to maintain all his goods, someone to manage his household while he’s away, all the peasant families who work his land, and so on. Meanwhile, Krava herself is Derga’s dependent – she gains benefit from all of his holdings and wealth, even if she doesn’t control them yet.

So I’m working on a set of rules and techniques that EIDOLON can use to describe a situation like that. Since EIDOLON is intended to be a “universal” system, of course, I’m hoping the framework will be extensible to cover a variety of situations: adventuring or mercenary companies, commercial starship crew, modern small businesses, and so on. Any situation in which characters have enough social status and wealth to have assets, property, and hirelings to help maintain it all.

I think I’m getting close to a first-draft design for all this. Once that’s done, I can do a lot of the detailed world-building for Krava’s setting, which in turn will give me material for the first EIDOLON “setting book,” and will also let me get started on the second draft for The Curse of Steel.

It’s annoying when my different projects get tangled up, as if I had discovered unexpected dependencies in an elaborate Gantt chart. Should be productive in the long run, though.

A Bit of Conlang Translation

February 3, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

One of the things I’ve been working on is a minor reworking of the Tremara language that appears in The Curse of Steel. Mostly I’m just choosing a few word-roots differently for aesthetic reasons, and tweaking the word-formation rules so that I’m not applying the Pūnct’uatìon Sh’akër quite so liberally.

I’m also working through some translations from English, since that’s a good way to develop more vocabulary and try out the syntax and grammar. Here’s an example, which was much more complex than I expected it to be, although I’m pleased with the result. As a small challenge for you, see if you can identify the original text.

Kadir ganari tíveta, anara tar dranet. Náraië tar steret, velo tar athemeta plemet, iu kesë tíveta aseneti. Bravam lókosar ganari genana dun, tan sendi ganari verdun, iu kesi sendenti argeni verdónemo. Geni pereta vergan va, tan geni revsova areg. Kun náraië tar asenet, tan kun poten, tan kun naren, athemë plemeti va. Asenet.

It’s working, I think. A little more of this, and then I need to generate a few dozen new personal names. The character names in the draft are a little repetitive.

Projects for 2020: The Curse of Steel

January 20, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Storyboarding the back story for *The Curse of Steel*

Meanwhile, the most important project I have underway is the novel I finished in the rough draft last year: The Curse of Steel.

Here’s a short synopsis that I put together for Books & Buzz back in November:

The Curse of Steel is the story of a young woman from an Iron Age “barbarian” culture, not quite identical to any culture from our own history, but most like the Celtic or Germanic tribal kingdoms of the pre-Roman period.
At the beginning of the story, Krava is an ordinary warrior of her tribe, serving as her father’s charioteer and bodyguard while he travels to visit friends. Suddenly her father is killed in an unexpected battle, leaving her alone and far from home. Soon afterward, she comes into possession of an ancient and powerful weapon, and she also learns that she is descended from the gods of her people.
Krava quickly grows into the role of a classical hero: a skilled and resourceful warrior who proves her worth in violent action, motivated by a craving for fame and esteem, and often arrogant or foolhardy. Think of Achilles, or Cuchulainn from Irish mythology. Krava’s own culture admires such behavior, and for a while she enjoys her new status, but in the end the results are a disaster for herself and everyone around her. At the end of this first story, she has matured a little; she departs on a quest to repair the harm she has done, and find a more sustainable way of life for herself and her people.

The rough draft – what I sometimes call the “plot draft,” in which I mark out the broad outlines of character, setting, and plot – is finished. The story is readable now, but it’s not very tight. Over the next few months, I intend to do an almost complete rewrite in the second draft, to fine-tune the story and bring the themes and dramatic beats into clear focus.

If all goes according to plan, The Curse of Steel will be self-published sometime this summer, after which I’ll get started on the second novel in the series. The working title for that one is The Sunlit Lands.

My patrons will see sections of the revised draft as I work on it, and those at the second or third level of patronage will get a free e-book copy of the finished novel once it’s published.

2019 in Review

December 31, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Well, this has been a year. Twelve months of doing my best to pass by the madness that seems to be sweeping the world, keep my family prospering, excel at my day job, and keep making progress on my creative projects. With some success, as it turned out.

Let’s be honest, this is the year a lot of things seemed to come together, as I built workflows I could use to set up and finish creative projects. I designed my first full constructed language, one which is actually usable for literary work. I drew up several maps. I hacked my brain in such a way that I could do world-building work in service to an actual story for a change.

I managed to write (at least in the first draft) my first mature, full-length, original, publishable novel: The Curse of Steel. That’s a pretty big deal.

So while 2019 wasn’t altogether sunshine and roses, I do feel as if I’m in a reasonably good place in my creative life. Still more work to be done, to be sure, but I’m more confident that I once was.

This blog seems to have reflected that. I’m still not sure who is reading this thing regularly – most of you don’t have a lot to say – but traffic keeps growing, slowly by steadily. The top ten (new) posts for this year were:

As usual, about 40% of the hits on the blog just start at the home page and go from there. There’s also a lot of perennial interest in some of my old Architect of Worlds posts from 2018, as well as that extended exercise in world-building I carried out based on the Bios: Genesis and Bios: Megafauna games. That’s always in the back of my mind as I consider what to work on next.

As always, let’s hope that the coming year is prosperous and productive for all of us . . . and that the world manages to hang onto sanity in the coming months.

Status Report (28 December 2019)

December 28, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

I’ve been busy with several projects over the past couple of weeks.

The foremost item, of course, is spinning up the second-draft rewrite of the Curse of Steel.

This has been a bit harder than I thought it would be at first. The more I examine and re-read the first draft, the more I realize that it needs extensive surgery. Turns out that I’ve written a rather complex story, with references to back-story, a bunch of subplots, an antagonist who isn’t the primary villain, a primary villain whose actions are largely invisible to the viewpoint character, setup for the later novels, and so on. There are lots of loose bits of plot-thread that I need to either tie off or properly anchor into the narrative. I’m having some trouble teasing all of this out and keeping track of it.

So I’ve been taking a lot of notes, and reviewing the details of three-act structure, and trying very hard to ignore Hero’s Journey hand-waving, and generally flailing about. I’m sure things will settle down before long, but at the moment the process is kind of painful.

One thing I’ve started to experiment with is using a bit of software to help lay out the story structure and start bringing order to the chaos. I’ve invested in a product called Causality, which is mostly designed for story-boarding screenplays but can also be configured to assist with novel-writing. It’s an interesting approach – one builds a narrative from the individual dramatic beats up, grouping those into scenes and chapters, tracking what characters are involved, and so on. Here’s a sample of what I’ve done so far with The Curse of Steel:

Storyboarding for what’s currently Chapter One.

I’m just getting started with the software, learning its functions, but it does promise to help me make sense of the novel I’ve already written, enough that I can tighten it up and make it publishable.

Meanwhile, on another track, I’ve started pulling my world-building notes together, with the goal of making those available via my Patreon and eventually self-publishing them in PDF form.

One piece of that project involves designing a general character- and setting-description format, so I can publish game-ready material for sale without stepping on anyone else’s intellectual property. That’s actually moving along fairly well. I’ve laid out how to describe a character’s untrained aptitudes and trained skills. and I’ve started on sections laying out how to describe things like social status, membership and rank in an organization, personality traits, and so on. All of this is looking like it will end up as a 20-25 page document. The working title for this not-quite-a-complete-roleplaying-game thing is Eidolon.

Once Eidolon is in working order, that should open the door for me to start publishing world-building material for people to use. Actually opening up my Patreon campaign for contributions will hinge on how close Eidolon is to a complete rough draft, and how close I am to being ready to bang out chapters of the revised novel. Probably not in January 2020, but maybe by February.

New Creative Directions

December 5, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 1 comment

It’s not the end of the year yet – that being when I usually take stock and make plans for upcoming creative work – but a few things have happened recently that may turn out to be productive.

The Obvious Task: The Curse of Steel is finished in the first draft. I’ll be spending the next few months on a second-draft rewrite of the novel, with a planned milestone of having it ready for publication in the spring. After that, I’ll be getting started on the second novel in the series, The Sunlit Lands.

Preparing for Patreon: Now, as one element of preparing for publication, I’ve been thinking about re-opening my Patreon campaign, which has been shut down for several years. Hopefully, that can help me gather an audience for the novel(s), as well as raise a little money to help pay for professional cover art or editorial services. With the novel series underway, I certainly won’t have any problem producing material that patrons can enjoy for the foreseeable future.

World-Building Material for Patrons: However, while working on the novel series, I’ve been coming up with a lot of world-building material: maps, constructed language, cultural descriptions, character writeups, and so on. Most of that material hasn’t been posted here. I imagine some of my readers would be interested in it, either on its own or as support for tabletop gaming.

The stumbling block here is that when I frame my own world-building notes in terms of a tabletop game, the game system I normally use is GURPS. Steve Jackson Games is fairly strict about licensing the GURPS system for third-party publishers – there’s no Open Gaming License for it, for example. It’s possible to work with them to get a license, and several publishers have done so, but for someone like me who would just be publishing material for a small audience via Patreon, that’s not worthwhile.

Fortunately, a solution came to me a few days ago: publish game-ready material using a “generic” character description format of my own design, one which could easily be converted to GURPS – or to any number of other game systems, for that matter. That way I can publish the material for patrons and still avoid any danger of infringing on SJG’s online policy.

Just as a trial balloon, I’ve started pulling together the design I have in mind, and it’s surprisingly simple. I suspect I could publish a reference document, under a Creative Commons license, that’s no more than a dozen pages long. So that looks like it’s going to be part of the strategy.

Some New Simulations for Evaluation: Entirely unconnected to the above, I received a shipment from Sierra Madre Games earlier this week – two games that I ordered many months ago and that have finally been released.

Bios: Origins (Second Edition) is the final game in Phil Eklund’s Bios trilogy, which began with Bios: Genesis and Bios: Megafauna. This game picks up where Megafauna left off – at the point where the primitive human species (or some other pre-sapient species on an alien world) first attains a spark of consciousness. It’s a Civ-like game, which traces the history of a world from the Paleolithic all the way to the dawn of the Space Age.

As with Phil’s other games, this has oodles of thematic interest, and I suspect it could be used rather handily as a world-building tool. You may recall that I did a series of “world-building by simulation” articles a while back, using Genesis and Megafauna to design an alien world and its dominant sentient species. Now I think I’m going to tinker a bit with Origins and see if I can turn it to similar purposes. There may be a fair number of blog posts about that over the next few months.

Meanwhile, Pax Transhumanity is a game by Phil Eklund’s son, Matt Eklund. It’s a thematic simulation of future history – the period over the next century or so, during which technology is likely to completely transform human society (again, still, as always). It fits in well with the Transhuman Space setting I helped design for Steve Jackson Games back in the day.

I’ve been waiting for Pax Transhumanity for a long time, hoping to use it to re-inspire me for another of my creative projects: the “Human Destiny” setting, in which humanity becomes part of a polyspecific interstellar community over the next couple of centuries.

The Human Destiny stories started off reasonably well – I actually published one of them via Amazon a while ago – but I ran into a brick wall with them. Largely because, in the current concept for the setting, human beings have very little agency! They’re the passive subjects of an alien empire, which came to manage Earth and human destiny because we proved unable to succeed on our own.

Okay, I will admit that I’m fairly pessimistic about human prospects. My evaluation of my species is that we’re just smart enough to get ourselves into a world of difficulty, but not smart enough to save ourselves from the consequences. That doesn’t make for very hopeful or interesting storytelling, though.

So for a long time, I’ve been trying to find ways to convince myself anew that humanity actually has a hopeful future, preferably without divine intervention or helpful aliens to save us from our own folly. I want to develop a fictional world in which we muddle through and eventually manage to solve the problems we cause for ourselves. Going back and re-reading Transhuman Space has helped a little, since that’s exactly the assumption we made for that setting. Tinkering with Pax Transhumanity might help too.

All of which means that I might be re-working the Human Destiny setting over the next few months. More material for this blog, the Patreon, and eventual publication, hopefully.

Architect of Worlds: I still need to get back to work on the Architect of Worlds project, of course – that’s been stalled for a lot longer than I originally planned. Even so, every once in awhile someone comes across it and gets good use out of it, even in its incomplete state. One of these days I’ll have to set everything else aside and just get the next big section written . . .

Hmm. This is reading a lot like a “prospects for the new year” post, isn’t it? Even if the above list is all I work on, that’s more than enough to keep me busy for months. I suppose that’s okay. When the muse calls, you answer, no matter what the calendar says!

“The Curse of Steel” Complete in First Draft!

December 2, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

As of about ten minutes ago, The Curse of Steel is finished in first draft, coming in at just over 90,000 words.

For me, this is a pretty remarkable milestone. I’ve written and published a couple million words over the years, but this is the first time I’ve managed to write a full-length genre novel that is:

Mature enough for a general audience (as opposed to the first novel I wrote, when I was twelve);
Publishable (as opposed to the second novel I wrote, which used a whole pile of problematic tropes); and
Not fan-fiction (as opposed to the third through seventh novels I wrote, which got lots of readers but will never earn me a dime).

Now the hard work starts. The first draft is the “plot draft,” where I work out the story for the first time. It’s certainly readable as is – I flatter myself that my prose style is fairly clean – but it’s not as tight as it needs to be. Now I need to go back and do an almost complete rewrite, turning the bare-bones narrative into something that will grab and hold readers’ attention.

Still. I think I will take a few hours and celebrate.

A Welcome Bit of Publicity

November 30, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Timothy Pike, the editor of Books & Buzz Magazine and the associated Chapterbuzz website, offered me the chance to be the subject of a cover article in an upcoming issue. Since I had done well in the October writing challenge on Chapterbuzz, and The Curse of Steel was making strong progress, he thought I might be a good subject for an interview article. He sent me a bunch of questions, about a week ago I sent him back a few thousand words of responses, and now here we are.

I was pleasantly surprised at the article – Mr. Pike did a pretty good job of pulling my comments together and building a pep-talk for other would-be authors out of them. I’m certainly not going to argue with a bit of free publicity!

Here’s a link to the article itself: How author John Alleyn gets lost in his own worlds. It’s free to read at Books & Buzz.

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