I’ve just finished placing another of my old short stories under the “Free Articles and Fiction” tab in the sidebar.
This story is “A Fire in Winter,” a story set in the early stages of an American Revolution that is not going as well as the one in our history. As for what other differences there may be between that world and our own . . . well, better you see for yourself.
“A Fire in Winter” has also been released to my patrons, free of charge.
The last two weeks have been busy.
After almost three months of lockdown at home, I’m finally starting to do a significant amount of telework for my day job, revising and re-designing one of my more popular courses. We’re hoping to get that online for students by the end of July, so there’s a lot of work to be done there.
Meanwhile, I’ve gotten a good start on the second draft of The Curse of Steel. The goal here was to back the beginning of the story up by about two days, giving me a chance to do a lot more character development and exposition before throwing Krava into the middle of the action. I’ve just finished the third chapter of this new material, after which I’m going to be rewriting existing text rather than coming up with new.
I think it’s clear that I was overly optimistic to think that I would be one-third of the way through the draft by now. By the end of June, it’s probably going to be more like 15% or so. Still, I’ll have more than enough material to get past my self-imposed limit of “at least 10,000 words of solid content before I release anything to my patrons.”
All of which is to say, there will be a charged release on my Patreon by the end of June, which will consist of roughly the first 5-6 chapters of the revised draft of The Curse of Steel. All of my patrons, from the $1 level up, will get a copy of the PDF. If you’re interested in signing up as a patron and seeing this draft as it emerges, feel free to click on the Patreon link in the sidebar.
Just a quick status report today. After a few months of world-building work, I’ve finally gotten started with the second draft of The Curse of Steel.
How quickly this goes depends on a lot of things. Although I’m still not going into the office, and probably won’t be doing that on a regular basis for some time yet, I have started doing some day-job work from home. Work on the novel is going to have to compete for time. Still, I hope to be able to finish this draft by the end of August, then prepare the novel for release in the September-October timeframe.
If things go according to plan, patron rewards for June, July, and August will consist of chunks of the revised draft, about a dozen chapters at a time. As always, if anyone’s interested in seeing that material as I release it, click on the Patreon link in the sidebar. All of my patrons, $1 level and up, will get to see sections of the draft. Patrons at the $2 level and up will get a free copy of the finished e-book when that’s done.
I’ve posted “Landfall,” a short story that I wrote a few years back, to the Free Articles and Fiction section.
“Landfall” is a tale about a slower-than-light interstellar expedition, which runs into trouble when it finally encounters a hospitable, Earthlike world after a thousand years of voyaging. What does a society organized around an eternal voyage do, when it becomes possible for the voyage to end?
The story should be linked from the sidebar, but here’s a link as well.
Just a quick post to report on how things are going here.
We’re all in lockdown, with my son the only one who’s still leaving the house for work each day. He works at a small factory that supports the food-delivery industry; as you can imagine, they’re doing an absolutely booming business right now. He’s earning lots of overtime, and he and I joke that he’s the only one in the family that’s really “essential” at the moment. At least my job is secure for when things start getting back to normal, and I’m still getting paid in full for the duration. We have plenty of savings in any case, so as long as money remains good in the first place, we should be able to weather the storm.
The psychological toll seems more acute. I have plenty to do, and my son has his work and his online friends. On the other hand, my wife misses her classes and social contacts, and I think my daughter is going slowly mad, stuck in the house without her usual busy school schedule.
For my part, I’ve been having the usual upper-respiratory issues that always hit me, when the dogwood and maple trees do their thing every spring. I’ve been watching my symptoms like a hawk, and taking my temperature regularly, but so far I haven’t seen any reason to push the panic button. All that means is that I’m in a constant state of low-level apprehension rather than mortal terror, but if that’s the worst I have to live with over the next few months, I count myself blessed. A lot of people are having it far worse.
As for the creative work which is the normal reason for this blog, I’ve been nicely productive ever since I came home. I’ve been working on a more extended system for designing Iron Age villages, an expansion of the “extended character” work I’ve posted about recently. That, in turn, is helping me to visualize the social setting of The Curse of Steel much more completely. If and when I start the second-draft rewrite – which may now be a matter of days – I think I’ll have a much better picture to draw upon.
Meanwhile, I’m also working on the first draft for the EIDOLON “core book,” the basic character-description rule set that I’ll be self-publishing as a basis for releasing world-building material for the game market. I’m also working on the Tremara “culture book” that’s likely to be the first major release for the EIDOLON system. There’s still plenty of work to do on both items, but there’s real progress.
I think April may be the first month that my Patreon campaign gets started again; I’ll have enough new material that patrons might find interesting or useful. If you’re interested in signing up as my patron, please have a visit to my creator page and drop a pledge. Thanks!
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.
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.
As I spin up to self-publish more material in the new year, there are two major tracks on which I’ll be spending time and effort. One is to publish fiction. The other is to publish game-ready world-building material.
Pursuing that second goal, the first step is to design a partial roleplaying-game system that fits my preferences, isn’t under anyone else’s intellectual property, and should be relatively easy to convert to any RPG rules system a reader might prefer. That process is well underway, and the working title for the system is EIDOLON.
From the draft Introduction for the core EIDOLON book:
The word eidolon comes from an ancient Greek word (εἴδωλον) which had several meanings. An eidolon was a phantom or apparition, the likeness of a dead man that appeared to the living. More generally, it could be a figure, image, or shape, a representation of a real thing.
EIDOLON – the set of rules and guidelines in this book – is a system for quickly and consistently describing fictional characters.
Using the systems in this book, you should be able to describe a fictional character in enough detail to use it in your own creative work, or in a live-action or tabletop roleplaying game (RPG). You should be able to easily understand characters described by others using the same rules. You should also be able to convert from EIDOLON to your favorite commercial game systems, and back again as needed.
One thing EIDOLON is not – at least not yet – is a complete RPG. Every tabletop RPG provides a system for describing characters so that they can be used in the game . . . but they also include systems for designing those characters, for resolving situations in which characters must overcome obstacles, and for gaming out various forms of conflict. Although this book does include a very basic challenge-resolution mechanic, none of those other components are here. You will not be able to use EIDOLON for live-action or tabletop roleplaying without doing some additional work!
On the other hand, we plan to publish future source material for roleplaying games, based on the EIDOLON rules. These “setting books” should therefore be easy to convert and use in other, more complete RPG systems.
I’m envisioning this core book as being about 20-25 pages, to be published as a PDF on a “pay what you want” basis. At least for now, I intend to hold the copyright to the core book in my own name. As this effort matures I’ll probably release the system under some form of open-gaming license, so others can easily use it to publish their own work. Once the core book is finished, I’ll be ready to start publishing world-building material under the EIDOLON system.
My patrons will see partial drafts of the core book as I work on it, and even those at the lowest level of patronage will get a free copy of the finished product.
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.
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:
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.