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Planning for September 2023

Planning for September 2023

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This will be the first more-or-less-normal planning message since June, given the last three months were massively disrupted by the basement-flooding incident we had late in that month. We’re still working to recover. In particular, my personal and work space is still kind of tucked in around a lot of unpacked boxes and furniture that hasn’t been returned to its usual place. On the other hand, I can get to my bed, my bookshelves, and my workstation, and there’s a good chance I’ll be able to set up at least one of my two game-and-other-project tables this weekend. One step at a time.

Meanwhile, as of late August I had actually finished editing and laying out Architect of Worlds through the end of the main design sequence. That’s a huge milestone, leaving me with only about 50-60 pages yet to polish up and lay out, and the remaining sections aren’t likely to need as much finicky attention. Much easier to do layout when you’re not working around tables and mathematical formulae on every page!

Meanwhile, I’ve been slowly writing new material for Twice-Crowned. My muse has also provoked me into an active side project to write . . . something fan-fiction-like, set in the fictional world of Glorantha that appears in the Runequest roleplaying game. So I’m producing a little bit of new prose fiction as I go, even while I try to remain focused on getting Architect ready for its formal release later this year.

So here’s the plan for September:

  • Top Priority:
    • Architect of Worlds: Write new material to streamline the estimation of variations in local climate (originally Step Thirty-Two in the design sequence).
    • Architect of Worlds: Continue work to design and lay out the finished book. Plan to finish through page 152 (out of approximately 180), or the end of the Special Cases in World-Building section. May continue past that point if time remains in the month.
  • Second Priority:
    • Danassos: Continue work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
    • Danassos: Continue work to rebuild the alternate-historical timeline.
    • Fan Fiction: Continue to write a Runequest-based story of at least novella length.

As far as releases for my patrons are concerned: I expect a free update of the growing Architect release draft. If I produce enough new prose for the Runequest story, I may offer a partial draft of that as a free reward too. There won’t be a charged release this month, and probably won’t be any until fairly late this year, while I concentrate on getting Architect of Worlds ready for release.

Status Report (14 August 2023)

Status Report (14 August 2023)

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Well, the good news is that I’ve just about finished unpacking my library, getting my writing work-center back into fully operational condition. I still have a big pile of boxes and miscellaneous items in the middle of my basement apartment, so I can’t set up my gaming tables yet, and that part of my creative enterprise is still off-line. Maybe in another couple of weeks, if my wife and I can work our way though more of the unpacking and re-homing.

The even better news is that as of this past weekend, I’ve gotten back to work on Architect of Worlds in a major way.

I started by doing a review of the portions of the book I had already laid out, making minor editorial and layout adjustments, adding a few pieces of new text. I also finished the task of correcting all the extended examples in the design sequence – those should be more or less consistent now. As of Sunday evening, I finished that review and moved on to actually laying out new material. If you look at the progress bar in the sidebar on this site, you’ll notice movement there for the first time since late June.

I fully expect to be done laying out the main design sequence by the end of August. The one possible hold-up is that I want to rewrite Step Thirty-Two of the design sequence almost from scratch. The current version of that material is really ugly and hard to apply, and I think I see ways to simplify it and make it a lot more user-friendly. I’ll have to see how long that rewrite takes, but I can’t imagine it will require more than an evening or two.

At the moment, I would estimate a 85% probability that I’ll have a free update for patrons and readers by the end of August, including the entire edited design sequence.

That still leaves a few tasks:

  • Laying out the last two sections of the book
  • Going through the entire draft for a final editing pass, to resolve all the “p. XX” references and correct any last-minute errors
  • Generating or collecting and placing in-line art assets
  • Producing a back cover
  • Building a credits-and-acknowledgements page and a Table of Contents
  • Preparing the book for publication through DriveThruRPG (and possibly through another outlet as well – that conversation is in very early stages, so we’ll see)

I had originally planned to have the book out the door by late this summer, but obviously that’s not going to happen. I still think, barring any further setbacks, that it will be on the market before the end of this calendar year.

Planning for August 2023

Planning for August 2023

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As of today, we’ve reached another really big milestone in recovering from the basement-flooding incident in late June. A moving crew has come to return all the furniture and boxes that were packed out on 3 July, and I also hired them to move everything back in out of the storage pod we have in front of the house. My library and all of my office items are now at least back down here with me, although they’re almost all still in boxes. I’ll be unpacking (and searching for critical items) for days at least, possibly a couple of weeks.

A lot is still up in the air – in particular, I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to get most of these boxes unpacked, and clear space down here for the game tables that are the other half of my creative enterprise. I hope that by mid-month I’ll be more or less back to normal. So I’m not going to establish any hard-and-fast objectives to meet this month.

On the other hand, for the first time in about six weeks, I can at least think about having a firm plan of action for creative work in the coming month.

My plan is to focus on Architect of Worlds this month, recovering the battle rhythm and forward momentum I had going before all this happened. My primary objective will be to make enough new progress on Architect that I can reasonably release a new free update for my patrons by the end of the month. Ideally, I’d like to have at least some idea as to what the new release date for the book might be, but we’ll see how the month goes.

Meanwhile, I do have a couple of small items to write up – some world-building work for the Danassos setting, and another book review for August. I don’t anticipate any real trouble hitting those milestones. I may also keep banging out some new prose for Twice-Crowned, although I don’t expect to make enough progress there to release a new update.

Stay tuned.

Status Report (25 July 2023)

Status Report (25 July 2023)

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Things are moving more slowly than I’d hoped with respect to getting my basement back into livable and usable condition. Here’s where we are as of this morning:

  • Furniture and almost all of my personal goods, including the bulk of my library, moved out.
  • Foundation repair and installation of a new drainage system and air-quality system complete.
  • Water heater replaced (this wasn’t on the critical path, but the old one was a few years past its warranty date, so better safe than sorry).
  • Replacement drywall hung, holes in ceiling left by plumber during emergency repair patched, everything trimmed and spackled and ready for painting.
  • Walls and ceiling have been painted.

The sticking point is the new carpeting. That wasn’t delivered until yesterday (24 July), and we’re supposed to hear from our sales rep today to schedule installation. The earliest we could get the carpeting done would be tomorrow (26 July), and later in the week would be a safer bet.

The problem is, that almost certainly pushes Moving Day – the day I get back all my furniture, and we recover almost the entirety of my library from the storage pod – into next week.

From a logistical standpoint, that’s not a disaster. I’d almost prefer to have a free day or two between Carpet Day and Moving Day, so we can pre-move a few items and get things set up for the big effort. Even better if there’s a weekend in there, so I can focus on getting my house in order without having to juggle my day job too. Still, pushing all these dates to the right (again) means there’s no time left for creative projects to hit good milestones before the end of the month.

I have managed to get some creative work done in July: some world-building work for the Danassos setting and a few thousand words of new prose for the novel Twice-Crowned. None of that has amounted to enough to roll out to my patrons, though.

Meanwhile, I’ve found it almost impossible to make any forward progress on Architect of Worlds under current conditions. It really needs my full workspace and all my research resources on hand. So if Moving Day isn’t going to be until next week, and it will probably take me one or two days to unpack enough to get back to work on Architect . . . well, that means that July will have been a dead month with respect to that project.

So this is, unfortunately, my best estimate for my patrons and readers: there will be no updates for the month of July, no charged updates for any project and no free update for Architect of Worlds.

We are approaching “back to normal,” and I anticipate being able to get back to all my creative projects on a more typical basis in August. I sincerely hope I get no worse disruption to my home and creative work for a long time . . .

Status Report (15 July 2023)

Status Report (15 July 2023)

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We’re making progress on getting the basement (that is, my living space, home office, and creative headquarters) repaired after last month’s flooding incident. The current state of play:

  • Furniture and almost all of my personal goods, including the bulk of my library, moved out.
  • Foundation repair and installation of a new drainage system and air-quality system complete.
  • Water heater replaced (this wasn’t on the critical path, but the old one was a few years past its warranty date, so better safe than sorry).
  • Replacement drywall hung, holes in ceiling left by plumber during emergency repair patched, everything trimmed and spackled and ready for painting.

We have painters scheduled to come in on 19-20 July, and the new carpeting should be delivered about then too. I’m hoping we can get the new carpet installed sometime between 21 July and 24 July. At which point, we’ll be ready to call the movers to bring back all my furniture and help us move all our goods back into the house.

Current best guess is that I’ll be able to call the move finished and release the storage pod we’re renting by about 26 July. At that point, at least, I’ll have my bed back and will have my workstation set up in its usual place once more. Unpacking all my books and games, and otherwise getting everything back to normal, may take some time beyond that.

Unfortunately, I am not making much progress on Architect of Worlds during this period of disruption. I’ve tried to do a few pages, but my current work area is very cramped and some of the physical materials I’ve been using are hard to deal with at the moment. I’ll keep at it, but I suspect the best time for me to forge ahead with that will be after that 26 July milestone.

Fortunately, there’s a solid weekend at the end of the month. I plan to get some minor creative work (notably my book review for July) out of the way over the next week or so, so I can focus on Architect editing and layout for 3-4 days at the end of the month. I see a good chance that, together with what I managed to knock out before the disaster, I should have enough new layout done to permit a free update for my patrons. Expect to see that by the end of July.

Meanwhile, I’ve been carrying out an interesting experiment with respect to my Danassos setting. I thought of a way to model some specific elements of the setting’s back story, and the results have been very interesting. Some revisions are underway to my “historical timelines” document. I doubt I’ll have a new version of that ready for anyone else to see by the end of July, but it’s already suggesting some new stories for that setting, and I suspect there may be some revisions to the Twice-Crowned draft before I’m finished. More about that as it develops.

Planning for July 2023

Planning for July 2023

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Well, as all my readers are doubtless aware, we had a small disaster at my home: some combination of a groundwater intrusion through the foundation, and a burst pipe, ended up flooding our basement. Since that’s my living quarters, telework location, and creative office . . . yeah, this was a big disruption.

So here’s the critical path for the next few weeks:

  • At the moment I’m standing watch while a crew of emergency movers finish clearing out our basement.
  • Tomorrow is the 4 July holiday, and we’ll probably be finishing up a few items and hauling out a fair amount of trash.
  • We have a crew coming in starting on 5 July to do foundation repair and install a new (and considerably upgraded) drainage system. That’s likely to take up to two weeks, so figure about 19 July to get that done.
  • We plan to take the opportunity to replace the water heater. May as well eliminate one possible cause for another water-based disaster in the future. Not likely to take more than a day.
  • Then it’s a matter of patching, priming, and painting drywall and replacing the entire carpet. Not likely to take more than a couple days, if we can coordinate the work efficiently.

Best guess, in the last full week in July I’ll be able to call the movers to bring everything back and help us unload the POD in which my entire personal library is now sitting. Of course, then I’ll be faced with the task of unpacking everything . . .

I do have my computer set up in the living room, so I expect to be able to make some progress on the Architect of Worlds layout, do a book review for July as usual, and maybe push a few other items forward. In particular, I suspect I will be able to release a free update for Architect late this month for my patrons.

Circumstances are not exactly conducive to major progress, though, so (unlike most months) I’m not going to set out any specific milestones for July. Look for a Status Report or two as the month moves along.

Echoes

Echoes

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While I continue rooting through my basement, boxing up the last scraps of small items I don’t want to discard, I’m coming across some interesting items.

Back in the 1995-2005 timeframe, I kept many handwritten notes in small notebooks. At the time a lot of my creative thinking happened at the office, or in other places where I didn’t have access to my computer or the Internet, so handwritten notes were very useful. Apparently I still have all of those notebooks, salted away on low shelves or in boxes that haven’t been opened in many years; very few of these got water-damaged in the recent disaster. So, for example, just today I found:

  • An extensive set of notes titled “Life after Steve Jackson Games,” in which I started planning an independent creative career. Most of that plan doesn’t seem to have survived contact with reality, but a few of its features do seem to have been implemented.
  • Huge piles of notes from when I was helping to develop setting material for GURPS Traveller, including the Interstellar Wars setting. More piles of notes that eventually went into Transhuman Space.
  • My own version of the Aldebaran Sector for Traveller, along with a contract (never completed) to write a GURPS Traveller sourcebook titled Grand Frontiers.
  • Notes and hardcopy of the rules for the Game of Empire system I developed for realm-level play in Traveller. This is the game that I refereed for a bunch of GURPS Traveller fans about 2000, developing a ton of background information (including months’ worth of Journal of the Travellers’ Aid Society news items) for the Solomani Rim.
  • Notes for a new generic RPG system. Apparently I was already thinking in terms of developing my own rules mechanics so as to publish game material without running into licensing issues. Probably never going to be developed now, but still interesting.
  • Notes for a realm-management game set in Bronze Age Greece. I think this did get deployed in a GURPS campaign I was running back in the day, although one of my players reacted so badly to the system in its first session that the campaign disbanded almost immediately afterward.
  • Extensive notes for at least three genre settings. One these eventually gave rise to my first complete original novel (the unpublishable one). Another looks very much like an early version of my Human Destiny space opera setting. A third was a fantasy setting I had forgotten about entirely and might now think about revisiting.
  • Extensive musings on philosophy and theology. I’m almost afraid to re-read these in detail. I’m a cheerful solitary regarding such matters, so it doesn’t concern me that my ideas aren’t in lockstep with any extant school of thought. Still, I suspect the me of 2023 might find the me of circa 2000 kind of hard to take.

Quite the treasure trove. Hard to say whether any of it will ever see the light of day again – it’s not as if I don’t have enough creative work to do already – but it’s still interesting reading. All of it’s going in boxes to be preserved.

Special Status Report for Patrons (29 June 2023)

Special Status Report for Patrons (29 June 2023)

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This one is specifically for my patrons (and regular blog readers who might be interested in my creative projects).

As I mentioned on 23 June, we’re currently fighting a flooded basement which has knocked out my primary living area and home office. I haven’t been entirely cut off from the Internet, obviously, but I’m spending 12-15 hour days just keeping up with my day job and doing pack-and-move work here. Not much time left over for creative work, so (e.g.) Architect of Worlds is pretty much on hold for now.

Architect didn’t get enough new layout done before the disaster struck to justify a new update. There will therefore be no free update for patrons at the end of this month.

I also may or may not generate a planning message for July at the beginning of the new month. Things are too much in flux for me to be able to plan anything with a straight face.

The primary effort right now is to prepare our basement for a crew who will be coming in, starting on 5 July, to do foundation repair and waterproofing work. To that end I’ve packed up just about the entirety of my library and moved it to storage. Over the next few days we’ll be policing up any remaining small items, and moving the larger pieces of furniture aside so the crew has access to get their work done. After the foundation work is finished, we’ll need to paint the new drywall, get all the carpeting replaced, and then move everything back into place. I expect all this to take up the bulk of the month of July. It might even overlap into the first week or so of August.

I’m not entirely cut off. We’re also working to ensure I have a small home-office space elsewhere in the house while the work is being done. If that works out, I may be able to get back to some creative work in a limited way, even while all the repair and rehab are being done. I’ll keep everyone posted as things progress.

Status Report (23 June 2023)

Status Report (23 June 2023)

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Only a short note today, to report that I’m likely going to be getting little or no creative work done for at least a few days, possibly as much as a few weeks.

My living quarters and home office are in the finished basement of our home, and as of yesterday afternoon, that basement is being flooded. So far it’s not too bad – only a few of my possessions have been water-damaged, and the bulk of my library of books and tabletop games is safe for the moment. On the other hand, the bulk of the carpeting is water-logged and we’ve had to shift a lot of furniture around. As I sit at my workstation right now, the carpet under my feet is soggy and wet.

(No, the image above is eye-catching, but it’s not actually that bad. Even if it’s starting to feel that way.)

We have a specialist coming this afternoon to make an assessment and estimate what would be involved in repairs. I suspect we may need to move most of the furniture and items from my space into storage for at least a few days, cutting me off from my primary work machine and resources while repairs get done. In particular, if the flooding worsens, we may need to move everything to save my equipment and prevent significant losses to my library. In the worst-case scenario, it may be several weeks before things are back to normal.

All of which is to say that work on Architect of Worlds and other projects is at a standstill until I get my space back. I can’t even promise any free updates for this month, and I may miss my monthly book review for June. We’ll see how things go. I’ll post again as soon as I know more, and have some idea how long I’ll be offline.