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Status Report (11 December 2020)

Status Report (11 December 2020)

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This is turning out to be a pretty busy month. Here’s the tentative plan for the rest of December:

  • By 14 December, finish a partial draft of the Human Destiny sourcebook for Cortex Prime, and post that so it can be reviewed as part of the Cortex Creators workshop. (Here’s a link to the current draft in Google Docs. Feel free to have a look.)
  • By the end of December, have a much-closer-to-finished partial draft of the sourcebook available for my patrons. That version will probably not be a finished first draft, but it should come to 15-20 kilowords, and it should be playable. This will be my charged release for this month on Patreon.
  • Also by the end of December, finish another piece of short fiction for free release here and to my patrons. I have a couple of candidate stories in mind.
  • Probably post one or two more steps in the Architect of Worlds design sequence.
  • Plan one or two pieces of short fiction for an upcoming anthology. More about this later, once I’m more sure that it’s going to come to fruition.
  • Start working to polish up a Human Destiny novella for publication via Amazon.
  • Work on The Sunlit Lands with what plentiful free time remains.

There’s just not enough of me to go around at the moment, given all the projects I have underway. Although that’s not a bad problem to have.

Short Story Now Available: “Fragment”

Short Story Now Available: “Fragment”

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I’ve posted a new short story, “Fragment,” to the Free Articles and Fiction section of this blog.

“Fragment” is an odd little story, dressed up as a short scholarly article in the discipline of Assyriology, possibly appearing in a peer-reviewed journal from some other line of history.

“Fragment” will also be released to my patrons, free of charge.

Plans for December

Plans for December

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been making slow progress on the first draft of The Sunlit Lands. I was a bit blocked for most of November, with a sequence of scenes just not coming clear, but I think I’ve pushed past that obstacle.

My original plan was to have 15-20 kilowords of the draft finished by the end of November, and release that for my patrons, but that doesn’t appear likely to happen.

Therefore, there will be no charged release on Patreon again this month. I may have a free short story to share on this blog and with my patrons by the end of November; we’ll see how the Thanksgiving holiday goes.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve been considering the Cortex Prime game system as a potential vehicle for publishing game material related to my literary projects. That’s looking more likely by the day. In particular, I’ve learned that Fandom (the publisher) plans to set up a new version of the Cortex Creator Studio which supported earlier versions of the game. Once that’s in place, it should permit me to write and release game material under fairly congenial licensing terms.

Meanwhile, starting on 4 December Fandom will be holding a “Cortex Creator Confab,” a workshop of sorts, which will allow potential creators to get some exposure and feedback on early drafts of their work. That looks like a superb opportunity for me to get started.

Upon consideration, I’ve decided that the first setting I’m going to try to write up isn’t Krava’s world, it’s going to be the Human Destiny space-opera setting. The end result will hopefully be a complete, Cortex-driven RPG that allows players to take on the role of humans living as subjects of a benevolent (but demanding) alien interstellar empire. I’m envisioning rules that will permit the game to take place on Earth, among the colonized worlds of the Sol system, or out on the interstellar stage.

So, this is what the plan for the remainder of November and the whole month of December looks like:

  • Continue working on the first draft of The Sunlit Lands, with the goal of having a significant chunk of the draft ready for patrons sometime in December.
  • A crash project to write up a big chunk of the Human Destiny setting in the form of a draft RPG based on Cortex Prime, to be submitted for the December workshop. This material should make a good release for my patrons too, and I may post excerpts from it here in the blog as well.
  • I’ve started reading the next self-published book that’s likely to get a review here. Look for that sometime in December.
  • Finally, I have a couple of partial short stories that I may complete and publish as free releases over the next couple of months.

More than enough to keep me busy through the holidays, I should think.

Some Important Links

Some Important Links

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Since I have a fair number of new readers these days, I thought it might be worthwhile to reinstate a few cross-links in the sidebar and point those out. (Thanks to Jürgen Hubert for indirectly encouraging me to overcome inertia and get this set up.)

There’s now an Important Links widget at the top of the sidebar. The links here will point you to other places on the Internet where I maintain a presence:

  • Patreon page. Patrons get links back to posts on this site, and (at least for now) one article or piece of short fiction each month, all for free. In some months, I make one charged release of at least 10,000 words of new content (excerpts from a novel in progress, draft world-building material, and so on). Charged releases are based on whatever I’m working on at the time – there’s no overarching theme. Patrons also get free copies of some or all of the work I self-publish, depending on their level of patronage.
  • DeviantArt page. This is where I’m likely to post any character art, cartography, or other visual art I produce in support of other projects. Some of that will also appear here, but that’s not guaranteed.
  • Amazon author page for John Alleyn. Exactly what it says on the tin. Here’s where you’ll find my more recent, self-published original fiction.
  • Amazon author page for Jon F. Zeigler. You’ll mostly find links to my non-fiction work here, especially old GURPS books that are still on sale via Amazon. Also, at least one short-story collection to which I contributed under my legal byline.
  • Fan Fiction archive. This points to my profile page on FanFiction.Net, which has its drawbacks but is the only place you can find all of the fan-fiction I wrote during that period of my creative career (roughly 2012 through 2018). Mostly Mass Effect stories, along with a bit of fantasy fiction in several settings.

All of these links should be working properly, but if any of them look strange to you, drop me a note and I’ll see if I can fix them.

Short Story Now Available: “Safe Haven”

Short Story Now Available: “Safe Haven”

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I’ve posted a new version of “Safe Haven,” one of my oldest short stories, to the Free Articles and Fiction section.

“Safe Haven” is a tale set soon after the Trojan War, in a world that isn’t quite the same as the one familiar to us from the poems of Homer. Aside from the links on the Free Articles and Fiction page and in the sidebar, here’s a direct link as well.

“Safe Haven” will also be released to my patrons, free of charge.

A Bit of Insight

A Bit of Insight

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I think I may have finally gotten myself unblocked with respect to one of my long-term creative projects. The project in question is the Human Destiny setting.

The premise is that sometime in the middle of the 21st century, an interstellar civilization arrives in the Sol system and (without much effort) conquers humanity. It’s a strangely benign sort of conquest, though. The aliens don’t have any interest in us as slaves, nor are they motivated by a desire to take the solar system’s natural resources for their own benefit. Their goals seem mostly to involve . . . nannying us. Their laws are fairly strict, backed up by almost-universal surveillance, but enforcement seems to be non-violent, completely incorruptible, and even-handed. Meanwhile, all of us are provided a standard of living better than ever before, without anyone being required to work for any of it.

Naturally, a lot of humans resent all this mightily, but there seems to be nothing that can be done about it. The longer-term question is why all this has happened. What motivates the aliens?

I’ve written and published a couple of stories in this setting: “Pilgrimage” and “Guanahani.” I have two or three more stories in my development pile too. I’m fairly sure there’s a robust series, maybe even a few novels, in there. Yet, even after years of cogitation, I’ve never been able to get the idea to launch.

The main problem is that the setting does away with a lot of human agency just by its premise. Great, the aliens have come along and solved a lot of our problems, including many of the ones driven by human conflict and misbehavior. There are certainly stories left to be told, but a lot of the writer’s tools for plot and character development are set aside already.

It’s probably telling that almost all the stories I’ve written in this setting so far involve breakdowns of the alien surveillance apparatus. It’s kind of like Star Trek‘s transporters – they’re so useful for short-circuiting plots that a writer often has to justify taking them off-line before a story can happen.

There’s also the aliens’ motivation. They’re here because they want us to survive and evolve into the kind of species that actually can play a role on the galactic stage. That means human psychology needs to change. We need to learn to live with each other and tolerate the Other, we need to get better at understanding and preserving the big systems that keep us alive, we need to start thinking on much larger scales in both space and time.

So how do I write stories about that, in which the aliens demonstrate their motivations through conflict and plot rather than by simply telling the reader what’s up?

I was idly thinking about this the other day – a lot of my creative work happens in the back of my mind while I’m doing something else entirely. Then my mind made a connection with what I was doing with my hands and my forebrain at the time.

I was idly playing a game on my iPad, you see.

Terraforming Mars has been out for several years as a tabletop game, and now has a pretty good adaptation as a mobile app as well. It’s one of those wonderfully thematic board games that does such a superb job of making a complex subject playable and interesting to the layman.

Terraforming Mars assumes an era of exploration and colonization throughout the solar system, starting either late in this century or sometime in the next. The centerpiece of that era is a generations-long project to, as it says on the tin, terraform Mars – transform that planet into an at least marginally habitable world, where human beings can live freely with little or no life-support equipment.

Well. Suddenly I could see a lot of possible context for the Human Destiny setting, Suppose the aliens, aside from simply providing a decent quality of life for most humans, also opened the door for this kind of expansion into the solar system? If humans could settle on Mars, cooperate with each other in a project that might not pay off for many human lifetimes, wouldn’t that be an opportunity for some of us to demonstrate the citizen-of-the-galaxy mindset the aliens are looking for?

Right away, my brain started working on ways to get my character Aminata Ndoye – the protagonist of “Pilgrimage” and a few of the not-yet-published stories – involved in Martian terraforming and solar-system expansion. That in turn gave me a whole raft of new ideas about the Human Destiny setting as a whole.

All of which is to say that I might be turning back to that project, finally. My creative plate is rather full at the moment, between working on my Krava stories, and Architect of Worlds, and wanting to flesh out the EIDOLON game system a bit more. Still, as 2020 winds down I think I might be able to revisit the Human Destiny setting, rework the core documentation for that, and start making some of that information available. Readers of this blog, and my patrons over on Patreon, can expect to see some results from that over the next couple of months.

Status Report (17 October 2020)

Status Report (17 October 2020)

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A quick note to assure everyone that I’m still alive. I’ve been working on a lot of things this week, with the result that none of them have been pushed through to completion. Hopefully this weekend will help change that.

  • About finished with the next bit of Architect of Worlds, which will start establishing a designed world’s atmosphere and climate.
  • Still working on reviews of the second and third books in Gordon Doherty’s Empires of Bronze series, which will bring me to my goal for this first month of reviewing other people’s self-published books.
  • Picking out another piece of short fiction, to post here and send as a free reward for my patrons.
  • Also working on promotion for The Curse of Steel, and pushing forward with the first draft of The Sunlit Lands, both of which are important but aren’t likely to be visible here. Watch that progress bar, though!

Look for some results from that list over the next few days, I think.

Status Report (1 October 2020)

Status Report (1 October 2020)

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I’m still working on the next step in the Architect of Worlds design sequence.

This one is proving a bit thornier than usual, because I’m trying to model a very complex system. This step is doing a lot of the heavy lifting to describe the geology of a world. I need something that can handle Earth’s complex plate-tectonics geology, and the stagnant-plate geologies of Venus and Mars, and the mega-vulcanism of Io, and putative super-Earths, and can also handle long stretches of geologic time, and and and. Tall order . . . although I think I’m converging on something that will work well enough. A few more days of work on that, most likely, and then the next block of draft text will appear here.

Meanwhile, as of today the editor I hired to review the draft of The Curse of Steel has finished his work, and his assessment was both useful and very positive. The big takeaway here is that he’s confirmed my belief that the current draft does not need any more major surgery. I estimate about two more weeks of work, to finish the glossary, go through the draft one last time to pick a few more nits out of the prose, assemble the e-book files, and publish.

The Curse of Steel will almost certainly be available on Kindle Direct by the middle of October. At the point of release, anyone who’s signed up as my patron at the $2 level or above will receive a free copy of the e-book, and anyone who’s signed up at the $5 level or above will be mentioned in the Acknowledgements section of the book.

After which, I plan to spend about three days in unashamed celebration, and then it will be time to get to work on the next book in the series: The Sunlit Lands.

Architect of Worlds – Step Fifteen: Determine Orbital Period

Architect of Worlds – Step Fifteen: Determine Orbital Period

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So, for the first time in over two years, here is some new draft material from the Architect of Worlds project. First, some of the introductory text from the new section of the draft, then the first step in the next piece of the world design sequence.

The plan, for now, is to post these draft sections here, and post links to these blog entries from my Patreon page. None of this material will be presented as a charged update for my patrons yet. In fact, there may be no charged release in September, since this project is probably going to be the bulk of my creative work for the next few weeks. At most, I may post a new piece of short fiction as a free update sometime this month.

Designing Planetary Surface Conditions

Now that a planetary system has been laid out – the number of planets, their arrangement, their overall type, their number and arrangement of moons, all the items covered in Steps Nine through Fourteen – it’s possible to design the surface conditions for at least some of those many worlds.

In this section, we will determine the surface conditions for small “terrestroid” worlds. In the terms we’ve been using so far, this can be a Leftover Oligarch, a Terrestrial Planet, a Failed Core, or one of the major satellites of any of these. A world is a place where characters in a story might live, or at least a place where they can land, get out of their spacecraft, and explore.

Some of the surface conditions that we can determine in this section include:

  • Orbital period and rotational period, and the lengths of the local day, month, and year.
  • Presence and strength of the local magnetic field.
  • Presence, density, surface pressure, and composition of an atmosphere.
  • Distribution of solid and liquid surface, and the composition of any oceans.
  • Average surface temperature, with estimated daily and seasonal variations.
  • Presence and complexity of native life.

In this section, we will no longer discuss how to “cook the books” to prepare for the appearance of an Earthlike world. If you’ve been following those recommendations in the earlier sections, at least one world in your designed star system should have a chance to resemble Earth. However, we will continue to work through the extended example for Arcadia, focusing on the fourth and fifth planets in that star system.

Step Fifteen: Determine Orbital Period

The orbital period of any object is strictly determined by the total mass of the system and the radius of the object’s orbit. This is one of the earliest results in modern astronomy, dating back to Kepler’s third law of planetary motion (1619).

Procedure

For both major satellites and planets, the orbital period can be determined by evaluating a simple equation.

First Case: Satellites of Planets

To determine the orbital period of a planet’s satellite, evaluate the following:

T\ =(2.77\ \times{10}^{-6})\ \times\sqrt{\frac{D^3}{M_P+M_S}}

Here, T is the orbital period in hours, D is the radius of the satellite’s orbit in kilometers, and MP and MS are the masses of the planet and the satellite, in Earth-masses. If the satellite is a moonlet, assume its mass is negligible compared to its planet and use a value of zero for MS.

Second Case: Planets

To determine the orbital period of a planet, evaluate the following:

T\ =8770\ \times\sqrt{\frac{D^3}{M}}

Here, T is the orbital period in hours, D is the radius of the planet’s orbit in AU, and M is the mass of the primary star in solar masses. Planets usually have negligible mass compared to their primary stars, at least at the degree of precision offered by this equation, and so don’t need to be included in the calculation.

Examples

The primary star in the Arcadia system has a mass of 0.82 solar masses, and the fourth and fifth planet orbit at 0.57 AU and 0.88 AU, respectively. The two planets’ orbital periods are about 4170 hours and 7990 hours. Converting to Earth-years by dividing by 8770, the two planets have orbital periods of 0.475 years and 0.911 years.

Alice has decided to generate more details for the one satellite of Arcadia V. This is a moonlet and so can be assumed to have negligible mass, while the planet itself has a mass of 0.65 Earth-masses. The moonlet’s orbital radius is about five times that of the planet, and Alice sets a value for this radius of 28400 kilometers. The moonlet’s orbital period is about 16.4 hours.

The Curse of Steel: Second Draft Finished!

The Curse of Steel: Second Draft Finished!

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With the cover art ready to go, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks focusing on day-job work (writing and editing course material that’s going to go online) and working on the second-draft edits for The Curse of Steel.

That latter task has paid off. As of this afternoon, the novel is complete in the second draft.

What this means for the project is that I’m about to do one last editing pass, and then prepare the manuscript for release as a self-published novel. If all goes well, the novel will be released sometime in September. The one wild card is that I’m considering submitting the current draft for a manuscript assessment from a reputable freelance editor, to help me organize and direct that last editing pass. If I decide to go with that plan, that might delay the release a bit, depending on how long the assessment takes and how deep an edit it suggests I make.

In the meantime, though, the last chunk of the second-draft manuscript will be released to my patrons within a few days as the charged reward for August. All of my patrons, from the $1 level up, will get a copy of the last eight chapters of the draft (about 24,800 words). When the novel itself is released, all of my patrons from the $2 level up will get a free copy.

I’ll probably also release another piece of short fiction later this month, for my patrons and in the free-fiction section of this blog. More about that as we get closer to the end of the month.