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Progress on the “Human Destiny” Setting

Progress on the “Human Destiny” Setting

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It looks as if the project on which I am least blocked this month is the Human Destiny setting, my more-or-less-hard-SF universe, in which humans are living as a (very minor and subordinate) part of a vast and sophisticated interstellar civilization.

I started out this month just planning to add a few thousand words to the Human Destiny setting bible and Cortex Prime sourcebook, while I spent most of my time working on other items. Still, the more I went digging into my reserve files, the more Human Destiny material I realized I already had. This weekend, I’ve been collecting content from about a dozen separate documents, all generated over the past six years or so. All it needs is some organization and polishing.

The last partial draft of the setting bible that I released to my patrons (version 0.2, in January) was about 18,000 words. As of today I’m up to about 25,000 words, and I suspect I’ll end up with quite a bit more by the end of the month. The result will remain nowhere near finished, but that’s still a fair chunk of new material.

Meanwhile, I’ve resurrected a Human Destiny novella that I originally wrote back in 2015, and I’m polishing that up for release. Depending on how the edit goes, that should be something like 20,000 to 22,000 words of new fiction that my patrons haven’t seen before. The title of that story is In the House of War, and it’s the tale of my heroine Aminata Ndoye’s first deep-space assignment.

Looks as if this is going to be the release plan for August: version 0.3 of the Human Destiny setting bible as a free update for my patrons, and In the House of War as a charged release. Probably close to 30,000 words of new material in all. I’m thinking I may then prepare the novella for self-publication, using some of the new processes I’ve been researching, so my patrons at the $2 level and above will get that for free once it’s released. Most likely next month.

I really need to get some more work done on other projects, but this is what seems to be moving at the moment, so I’m going to run with it.

Planning for August 2021

Planning for August 2021

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Okay, July was something of a wash.

I didn’t completely fail to meet my objectives. I did get a book review published, I got the first few chapters of Second Dawn posted to Kindle Vella before that platform went live, and I did get started writing more chapters for that. I got a little bit of work done on other projects as well. Still, the month was conspicuously short on major milestones. I was distracted by a couple of minor bouts of illness, and my day job soaked up more of my attention and energy than usual. At least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Even so, the goal for August is to pick up the pace a bit, and have more material for my patrons and readers, both free updates and enough new work for a charged release. I’m also thinking about a shift in emphasis among my second-tier projects – I’m feeling a bit more inspiration for the Human Destiny setting at the moment, so I think I may do some new work on that.

Here’s the priority list for August.

  • Top Priority (“this is how I’ll judge whether the month has been successful”):
    • Architect of Worlds: Return to improvement and polishing of the Introduction and Design Sequence document, leading to a new minor-version release.
    • Human Destiny: Write a few thousand more words of the Cortex Prime sourcebook and setting bible.
    • Krava’s Legend: Write a few new chapters of The Sunlit Lands.
    • Scorpius Reach: Write, edit, and publish a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
  • Second Priority (“work on this as time permits”):
    • 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: Write a new short story for eventual collection and publication.
    • Krava’s Legend: More research toward improvements to my release-and-marketing workflow.
  • Back Burner (“work on this only if everything else gets blocked”):
    • 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.

For my patrons, this month’s free releases will probably include a new minor-version release of the Human Destiny sourcebook, and possible a minor-version release of the Architect of Worlds design sequence. This month’s charged release, if there is one, will most likely be composed of new charters from Second Dawn and The Sunlit Lands. As always, I’ll want to complete one or two book reviews for self-published or indie fiction this month.

Watch this space for status reports, and if any of the above interests you, please consider signing up as a patron using the link in the sidebar.

Status Report (28 July 2021)

Status Report (28 July 2021)

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Well, June was really productive, but July is turning out . . . otherwise. Between a couple of bouts of minor illness, and a need to focus hard on some projects for my day job, I just haven’t had the spoons to crank out new creative content at the rate I hoped for. Today’s the fourth day from the end of the month, and it’s looking like I’m not going to hit any of my major objectives for July.

The month hasn’t been a total wash. I got a book review posted early, I successfully got Second Dawn posted to Kindle Vella before that service went live, I’ve gotten a couple of new chapters written for Second Dawn, and I’ve done some small-scale work on Architect of Worlds. Unfortunately, none of it is adding up to something that would justify a major release for my patrons.

So I’m stating now that there will be no charged release for my patrons for July. I might manage a free update for one or two documents before the end of the month, but even that’s not certain. Here’s hoping August will see a bit more progress.

Second Dawn is Live!

Second Dawn is Live!

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Kindle Vella apparently went live earlier today, even earlier than I expected. Which means the first episodes of Second Dawn, my space-opera serialized novel, are available for reading through the Kindle app.

The book’s blurb: “Katerina was an innocent archaeologist, happily at work on a colony world, when pirates attacked her work site. Only the timely intervention of a merchant ship’s crew enabled her to escape. Now she’s fallen into a world of diplomats, mercenaries, and spies, working to solve interstellar mysteries with the fate of empires at stake. Will she be a pawn in the game, or will she become one of the players?”

Here’s a link to the live book: https://www.amazon.com/Second-Dawn/dp/B0995FPP1Y

Which, of course, means it’s even more important for me to get more chapters written ASAP. In the meantime, reads and reviews are welcome.

A Change in Plans

A Change in Plans

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I went to set up the first few chapters of Second Dawn in the Kindle Vella platform last night – successfully, as you can see from the image above. However, in the process I also discovered that Amazon is very close to taking Vella live. I’m seeing hints that it may be up and running for the general audience as early as this week, almost certainly by the end of July.

Well. When I started writing Second Dawn, it was under the assumption that it would be a couple of months before I needed to work on the next section. Apparently that isn’t the case. When Vella does go live, I want to not only have those first six chapters in place, I want to have a few more chapters ready for weekly release.

All of which means that I’m changing the plan for July a bit. My main fiction-writing effort, in what’s left of this month, is going to involve building a backlog of chapters for Second Dawn. Ideally, I’ll have six more chapters ready to go within a couple of weeks.

How that interacts with my other plans for the month, I’m not sure yet. I’m probably not going to be working on Krava’s Legend quite as much as I’d planned on. I do still want to get some work done on Architect of Worlds so I can at least send out a free update of that material for my patrons. I’ll probably also produce a free update of the Scorpius Reach setting bible along the way. We’ll see how the next few days go.

Planning for July 2021

Planning for July 2021

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Well, I said I was going to spend the month of June focusing on writing new fiction. Apparently I wasn’t kidding. I produced about 22,500 words of new early-draft fiction in June, for an average of about 750 words per day all month. Pretty good work rate for me.

The new material included the first six chapters of Second Dawn, which is mostly likely going to be the first serialized novel in a series, all published on the Kindle Vella platform. Second Dawn is placed in my new Scorpius Reach space-opera setting, and I’m quite happy with how it’s turning out so far.

I also wrote “Derga’s Tale,” a roughly 10,000-word novelette set in the Iron Age setting of Krava’s Legend. “Derga’s Tale” is the story of how Krava’s parents met. It’s the first short piece in what’s eventually going to be a collection of 5-6 stories, all prequels to The Curse of Steel. Once I’ve written all of those stories, I plan to edit them into a book-length collection, which I’ll then use to practice the new publication and marketing methods I’ve been researching. In particular, the collection will serve as a “reader magnet” that I can use for promotion of the series.

Finally, I also released a minor-version update to the Scorpius Reach setting bible, and published one book review. Not a bad month in all, even if the month didn’t quite go as I’d planned it. Planning is essential, even if you don’t always stick to the plan.

Incidentally, June was also surprisingly successful on the social-media front. I appear to have lost a patron at the beginning of the month, but since then I’ve seen three or four new patrons come in. Welcome to all the newcomers! Surprising number of new Facebook contacts as well, given that I’m not taking any specific action to promote this site. I’m not going to question good fortune.

Now that I’ve gotten some fiction written, I think this month will be spent focusing on pushing Architect of Worlds a few steps forward. Here’s the priority list for July 2021.

  • Top Priority (“this is how I’ll judge whether the month has been successful”):
    • Architect of Worlds: Return to improvement and polishing of the Introduction and Design Sequence document, leading to a new minor-version release.
    • 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.
    • Krava’s Legend: Write a few more chapters of The Sunlit Lands.
    • Scorpius Reach: Finish final editing of the first six chapters of Second Dawn, and post the novel to Kindle Vella so it’s available to readers when the platform goes live.
  • Second Priority (“work on this as time permits”):
    • 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.
    • Krava’s Legend: More research toward improvements to my release-and-marketing workflow.
    • Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller.
  • Back Burner (“work on this only if everything else gets blocked”):
    • Human Destiny: Write a new short story for eventual collection and publication.
    • Human Destiny: Write a few thousand more words of the Cortex Prime sourcebook and setting bible.

For my patrons, this month’s free releases will probably include a new minor-version release of the Architect of Worlds design sequence. This month’s charged release, if there is one, will probably be a block of new material for Architect of Worlds, and possibly another short story from Krava’s Legend or a few new chapters of The Sunlit Lands.

As always, I’ll want to complete one or two book reviews for self-published or indie fiction this month. I’m in the middle of a very good candidate right now, so two reviews this month seems possible.

Watch this space for status reports, and if any of the above interests you, please consider signing up as a patron using the link in the sidebar.

Status Report (20 June 2021)

Status Report (20 June 2021)

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A quick note for my patrons and other readers, at the two-thirds point for this month. Things are going reasonably well, and I’m making good progress on this month’s projects.

As I mentioned at the beginning of June, this was likely to be a month for writing fiction rather than working on non-fiction or world-building projects. At this point that certainly seems to have been the case.

Later today, I believe I’ll reach my objective for getting started on the first “Scorpius Reach” novel – six complete chapters, setting up the main story with some action, a bunch of character introductions, and some world-building.

Rather than spend the rest of June working on The Sunlit Lands, I think I’m going to write the first of several short stories set in the same Iron Age fantasy world. The idea is to write incidents pulled from the back story of my main characters. When I’ve got five or six of those, I’ll pull them together into a “reader magnet” collection that I can use to help promote the series. I’ll also make use of that collection to practice some of the improvements I’m making to my publication process. The idea is that it should be easier for me to share the collection, and future work, more widely.

The first story, I think, will be “Derga’s Tale” – the story of how Krava’s parents met and became lovers. Krava’s father-to-be, Derga, is an ordinary mortal man in love with Tivetha, the daughter of a god. What’s more, Tivetha has sworn a Red-Sonja-like oath, never to become involved with any man who can’t defeat her in a fair contest. Derga knows that several men have tried to meet her condition and failed, and he also knows that he has no chance to defeat her in any fair contest of strength or armed skill. So how does he proceed?

So by the end of June I should have about 16,000 words of new fiction. My patrons will get that as their charged release for June. I’ll also release a free minor-version update to the Scorpius Reach setting bible, and I may release a free minor-version update to the Architect of Worlds Introduction and Design Sequence document. That last item is looking kind of iffy right now – it may be next month before I have enough new work done to justify that release, but we’ll see.

Planning for June 2021

Planning for June 2021

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The last few months have been very productive, and I think this pattern of posting a status report and priority list at the beginning of each month is helping. Not to mention that it’s likely to be useful information for my patrons, and anyone else who’s following my work.

May was a good month overall. I released an update to my Scorpius Reach setting bible, adding a fair amount of material to the initial draft. This gathered some good attention from the Traveller communities on Facebook and Reddit. I also released a minor-version update to the Architect of Worlds Introduction and Design Sequence document. Finally, I wrote and released the first draft of a completely new section of Architect of Worlds: the Working with Astronomical Data document.

I did not get any new fiction written, and I think I need to refocus on that in the coming month. Earlier this year I had a potential project to write and sell several stories, and for a while I was holding time and energy aside for that. Unfortunately, that seems to have fallen through, so I’m turning back to writing in my own original universes again for a while.

One very useful milestone happened this month. I’ve been developing my Scorpius Reach setting, not just as a test-bed for the Game of Empire rules, but also possibly as the backdrop for some serialized fiction to bring to market. Although the stories themselves are going to be entirely original to me, and I don’t plan to market them as anything but original fiction, there was still a potential IP problem there. I’ve been using the Traveller game rules to help develop the setting, and the “bible” for it is framed in terms of a Traveller universe. So I decided to approach Marc Miller, the owner and primary publisher of Traveller, and discuss how best to avoid stepping on his intellectual property. Once I described what I was planning to do, he immediately and graciously granted me permission to proceed without any concerns. So that’s a big potential obstacle out of the way. I plan to start writing the first Scorpius Reach serialized novel in June.

So here’s the priority list for June 2021. I’m reworking the format a little, to organize by a hierarchy of urgency first, rather than by overall project:

  • Top Priority, or the “this is how I’ll judge whether the month has been successful” level:
    • Architect of Worlds: Return to improvement and polishing of the Introduction and Design Sequence document, leading to a new minor-version release.
    • Krava’s Legend: Write a few more chapters of The Sunlit Lands.
    • Scorpius Reach: Write the first few chapters of a serialized novel to be published via Kindle Vella.
  • Second Priority, or the “work on this as time permits” level:
    • 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.
    • Krava’s Legend: Write the first short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
    • Krava’s Legend: More research toward improvements to my release-and-marketing workflow.
    • Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules.
  • Back Burner, or the “work on this only if everything else gets blocked” level:
    • Human Destiny: Write a new short story for eventual collection and publication.
    • Human Destiny: Write a few thousand more words of the Cortex Prime sourcebook and setting bible.

For my patrons, this month’s free releases will almost certainly include a new minor-version release of the Architect of Worlds design sequence. This month’s charged release, if there is one, will probably be a block of new fiction from the Krava’s Legend and Scorpius Reach settings. I do hope to produce some new Architect of Worlds material this month, but there probably won’t be enough of that to bundle up as a release for my patrons, so maybe look for that in July.

As always, I’ll want to complete one or two book reviews for self-published fiction this month.

Watch this space for status reports, and if any of the above interests you, please consider signing up as a patron using the link in the sidebar.

A small administrative note: I spent some time this morning cleaning up the post tags on this site, merging a few tags and making sure they had consistent format. In particular, I merged all the tags that made any reference to my high-fantasy novel series into the krava’s legend tag. I also merged the tags that referred to the various Bios-series games by Phil Eklund into the bios tag. Might make the site a little easier to navigate.

An “Architect of Worlds” Teaser

An “Architect of Worlds” Teaser

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I’ve been working on a new section of the book, with the overall title of “Working with Astronomical Data.” Here’s a list of topic headers for the material I’ve produced over the past week or two, about 7000 words in all:

  • Star Names and Star Catalogs
    • The International Astronomical Union (IAU)
    • The VizieR Catalog Reference Service
    • Traditional Astronomy
      • The Ptolemaic Constellations
      • Proper Names for the Stars
    • Bayer Designation
    • Flamsteed Designation
    • The Durchmusterung Catalogs
    • The Henry Draper Catalog
    • The Gliese Catalogs
    • The Hipparcos Catalogs
    • The Gaia Data Releases
    • Other Data Sources
      • SIMBAD
      • NASA Exoplanet Archive
      • Wikipedia
  • Developing Inputs for Interstellar Maps and the Design Sequence
    • Star Positions
      • Equatorial Coordinates
      • Deriving Cartesian Coordinates from Equatorial Coordinates
      • Galactic Coordinates
      • Deriving Cartesian Coordinates from Galactic Coordinates

Lots more to work on in this section. I’m not at all sure whether I’ll have the whole section finished by the end of this month, but if there’s enough there (say, 15000 words or more) then I’ll make the interim draft a charged release for my patrons, after which they’ll get free updates while I keep working on and adding to the material.

Once this section is finished, there will be only two more chunks of the book that need to be written: the “how to generate random maps of interstellar space” and “special cases that don’t fit neatly into the main design sequence.” I’m beginning to think I’ll have a complete pre-layout draft for Architect of Worlds by the end of summer 2021 . . . which means the first edition of the book may be ready for release late this year or early in 2022.

Status Report (16 May 2021)

Status Report (16 May 2021)

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Since the beginning of this month, I’ve returned to my day-job office on a mixed schedule that allows for a couple of days of telework per week. It’s been an adjustment, but so far the results have been pretty good – I’m continuing to be productive on my creative projects. So here’s the state of things as of mid-month.

Biggest push right now is to write a completely new section of Architect of Worlds. This is a section titled “Working with Astronomical Data,” and it’s intended to document most of the tricks I’ve learned over the years for taking real-world data and turning it into plausible star system designs and maps of interstellar space.

So far I’ve got about 4500 words down on how stars are named, what the best data sources are for information on stars, and where on the Web one might go to lay hands on useful star catalogs. That piece is about finished. Then I’m going to start working on material describing how to read star catalogs and other data sources, and translate those data into inputs for the main Architect of Worlds design sequence. I’m hoping to have this whole section finished in rough draft by the end of May, at which time it will probably be this month’s charged release for my patrons.

This is a big deal! This section is one of the three blocks of material that still needs to be written before I can seriously start thinking about laying out Architect of Worlds and getting it ready for release. (The other two blocks are “how to design maps of interstellar space” and “special cases that aren’t explicitly covered in the main design sequence.”) I still have no clear idea as to when the book will be ready for its first-edition release, but I’m increasingly confident that will be either late this calendar year, or early in 2022.

Meanwhile, I’m continuing to investigate improvements to my process for publishing new fiction. Right now I’m focusing on finding a reliable source for book cover designs – the cover I designed for The Curse of Steel was okay, but it didn’t pop, and I suspect it’s one reason why sales have been a bit disappointing.

I’m also continuing to work on development of some serialized fiction to be published through the new Kindle Vella outlet, based on the Scorpius Reach setting. I had a big step forward on that a few days ago – more about that once things come closer to fruition – and I suspect I may be in a good position to have a story in place once the platform is released to readers.

Finally, of course, I’m continuing to work on The Sunlit Lands as time permits. That might be a back-burner project for what’s left of May, since I released a few chapters to my patrons last month and I’m focusing hard on Architect for the moment.