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Peluge’s Preposterous Adventures

See what Ice Wolf's blue furry investigator is up to today. Peluge's Preposterous Adventures

Cultivator Universe News

Stuff is actually getting done.

I finished the copy edits for Eyes of Infistar, I have Sails of Everwind, ready to go off to my copyeditor, and I have been working on my website (so far, all behind the scenes where nobody can see it). I even gave my daughter some advice on panelling her graphic novel… (mostly in the form of photographed examples from ElfQuest, but sometimes a few good examples is exactly the advice someone needs.  Right?)

I also attended my first ever zoom music circle this week.  Compared to an in-person music circle it was a bit lacking.  Compared to no music circles at all, it was a whole lot of fun, and I’m totally up for doing it again.

Totally guilty of work avoidance…

At least, I avoided the part of work that feels like work. My copyeditor sent back Eyes of Infistar when I was on vacation last week, and this morning I did not start going through her suggested changes.

Instead I diddled around online for a couple hours while trying to convince myself to do the edits, and finally said “I think it’s not happening, why don’t I just write?”

So, a full day’s quota of words were written.

But I do need to get to those copy edits eventually. 🙁

That Was Quick

Eyes of Infistar is at my copyeditor. (She reported that she was enjoying it and that it was nice to be working on something that is “actually good” which gives me a glow of accomplishment, but also makes me think that there might be some drawbacks to being a freelance editor-for-hire.
Sails of Everwind has been edited according to editorial demand and is ready to be reread and hopefully approved to go off to the copy editors next.
Lioness is being read by readers…

I just ran out of editing projects to work on. Looks like I get to start writing the next book already. Only a few weeks after finishing the last one. Awesome!

Fencing With Waves, it is your turn!

Creating a Galactic History

I guess I’m in a talkative mood, so I’m going to explain the steps I have been using to make a history for my Cultivator Universe.

1) I started by drawing myself a galaxy, and then I gridded it off into squares. (Fortunately for me, spiral galaxies are relatively flat, so it wasn’t too huge of a stretch to use a 2D map for this exercise.)

2) I then mostly randomly created 200 dots representing the worlds on which my civilizations started. (I randomize by rolling dice. I married an avid board-gamer and there are always dice around.)

3) I randomly assigned a Civilization Level to each of those dots. These levels told me which of those planets started developing technology the soonest, and therefore who had a “head start” when it came to spreading out among the stars.

4) I made an arbitrary guestimate of how fast the “reach” civilization would expand once its ships had achieved near light-speed capabilities, and based on how much “coverage” I hoped to achieve, decided how long ago my oldest civilizations started expanding.

5) I created a technological advancement chart that would give me a rough estimate of how long it would take each Civilization Level to achieve various technological benchmarks.

6) I split my total timespan into segments, and created map overlays that showed the “reach” of each civilization at the end of each segment in the form of transparent colored circles.

7) And then, checking each overlay one at a time, I have been figuring out which civilization encountered which other civilization in what order, and writing a quick one sentence explanation of what happened when they did.

Underwater Printing Presses and How My Brain Works

So I was taking my usual evening walk with my husband, and he knew I had been working on a history for my Cultivator Universe, and he was curious about my “squid aliens” and how far along my technical advancement track I was going to let them go (I had already told him that my “squid alien” civilizations didn’t achieve spaceflight before they were discovered by other people who had).

I admitted that I hadn’t even figured out how squid aliens could achieve written language yet, and then dove right into figuring out how they might do so, with my husband valiantly holding up his end as sounding board and alternate outlook. We wandered through a possible system for representing their language physically, discussed clay tablets, and about the time I started wondering what materials would be available to act as the frame for a moveable-type system, he told me his brain had gone into overload… “I was just asking a question!”

And I said, “I’m sorry, I can’t help it — my brain just works like that.”

“Yeah,” he answered. “I know.”

For me it was a bit of relief, though. It means I am pretty much back to normal, after over a month of “feeling awful and not able to get anything done,” followed by another month of rebuilding of my mental and physical endurance. Bleh.

I’m doing much better now, and should be in good enough shape to get back on my “regular” schedule. (Sans singing, alas, because I’ve been perpetually stuffed up since New Years.)

And in the eye-candy department…

As I said I have been working on a history, and that means I needed a map… only it’s the history of something that calls itself a Galactic Empire. So, map, yeah…

This is the “terrain” map I ended up drawing.

Pretty, yes?

First Week on the New Schedule

So I’ve tried it for a week.
In order to make the switch from work to music, I set my husband’s alarm-clock to turn on the radio. This worked fine for stopping me from editing, but on Friday when I was coding, I just ignored it. ::rueful::

Still I not only got a better balance of stuff accomplished, I also got more total accomplished. Stopping working before I hit brain-dead apparently has fringe benefits.

(I used to know that. Once upon a time my wordcount goals were actually there to tell me “Time to stop,” not to push me to write more. But I guess I sort of forgot that in all the excitement of doing the publication thing?)

Anyway, here’s what I got done last week…

  • Writing: I fixed many errors in Eyes of Infistar, installed a copy on our tablet for my husband to read, got back several chapters worth of notes, made more fixes, and put a new copy on the tablet.

    I also ebook-ified a book written by my daughter, put it on the tablet, and did a read-through.

  • Art: Compiled 19 pages of ink scans for Scent of Spring.
  • Music: Practiced 5 times (inc. 3 “vocal workout” sessions). Worked on scoring Scent of Spring. (Yes, the song has the same title as the graphic novel… There’s a reason for that.)
  • Coding: Started work on an image carousel for inserting on the bottom of certain webpages. In the process, discovered that the ‘$’ jquery shortcut doesn’t work consistently when used on a page that is integrating wordpress content. The discovery process involved a certain amount of hair-pulling. ::rueful::
  • Tatting: Worked on a design that still isn’t right. (I do a lot of that.)

Plus, I did 11 holes of disc golf, played the Eldritch Horror Boardgame with my family 3 times (we just got a new expansion, so we were eager to try out all the new stuff), helped one daughter build a website and helped another make bead lizards* to give away to friends. All in all, a good week.

*My design from over 15 years ago. They were actually the body of a dragon, but the wings were futzy and delicate and the older kids and I ended up making a bunch of dragons without the wings, back when. Examples were still inhabiting my bedroom, and she wanted to make a couple. Her first one is pictured below.

More itty-bitty images

So last week I finished working on the sewing project I was doing for my friend Yoon Ha Lee, and this week I was supposed to be working on Lioness, a story set in the same world as Cantata and Pavane, but on the other side of the continent, (and with a more adventurous plot — also, a heroine who weaves and makes lace: and it is very challenging to weave and make lace while simultaneously being the protagonist of an adventure story, let me tell you!) I started it five years ago, but it got sidelined by Across a Jade Sea.

Anyway, I haven’t managed to get Lioness going again yet. What happened instead, was that I made twelve new sprites for that video game that’s based on my world. (Okay, so it’s a user-made-content expansion to an open-source computer game. Close enough.) My programmer is ecstatic. He’s been being very patient over this business with me publishing books and therefore needing covers for them, and how that was absorbing all my artistic oomph. But, we had almost finished replacing all the placeholder art, and now it looks like we’ll finally get there! (If I counted correctly, only 9 sprites left to go.)

So, here are some (very tiny) “Westlanders” (mentioned very, very briefly in Cantata and Pavane):

Another thing I did this week was make an ebook version of my pulp sf “romp” Eyes of Infistar, for my publisher to look over and decide if that’s going to be our next release. It’s got strange planets, a mysterious alien artifact, primitive temples, space pirates, plus an empath, an intelligent blue ape, and a political/economic entity that calls itself a galactic empire. And lots of action scenes. I even have a sequel written, although not edited. (Editing the sequel was another project that got pushed aside when Across a Jade Sea attacked me.)

But I have said very decidedly that I am NOT doing any more covers right now, so if he wants to release it this year, he’ll need to find a different cover artist.

Wordcount

When I finished working on Sails of Everwind today, I hit the wordcount function, and it told me I had 111666 words.

I hope there isn’t anything significant about that.

It was only ever an estimate, after all.

Sails of Everwind just passed the 100K words mark, and so is at an estimated 100+%, which breaks my progress bar.

I guess now would be a good time to remove the 8K or so words right at the beginning that I have decided I don’t want… that’ll give me a little more working room before I break my progress bar all over again.
(I’m close to the end, but not that close to the end. I’m guessing the first draft will run… 115K? Something like that.)

Author's Note on the Cultivator Universe

I had created two fantasy worlds, and wanted to do a science fictional one. But I kept having problems. I could build a science fictional universe around a story (see Black Flag for an example of a universe built around a specific story) but to just build one that stood on it's own was for some reason giving me trouble. I finally realized that it was because I was tripping over the fact that science fiction universes are often seen as a continuation of ours: a possible future. My imagination was choking over my conviction that I was incapable of guessing what the future would be.

So instead of creating a possible future, I created an impossible one.

As soon as I had detached the universe I was building from the real world and real life, by centering it on a concept that was scientificly impossible, I was free to be as scientificly rigorous as I wanted to be in everything else. At the same time I remained free to ignore scientific realities when I thought they were getting in the way of a good yarn. The best aspects of both worlds were mine to play with.

Keywords: Cultivator, Science Fiction,

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