Help Wanted

Several of my posts have asked for ideas or other help from my readers. This page is intended to serve as an up-to-date list of current needs.

Most generally, I need feedback—comments, criticism, suggestions, questions, or pretty much anything else—on my poetry, the background for my prose, and the rest of my work. (If you’d like to see my work before I post it here, including the prose that I will most likely never post here, I need “first readers”.) But I have identified many more specific items, including several for each of my major projects.

For the blog itself, if you see anything in need of maintenance, please let me know.

The Shine Cycle

There are several places in the outline of the Shine Cycle, my fantasy series-in-preparation, where I need help either coming up with or working out the details of ideas:

• Designing the curriculum for the Academy.
• Thinking of alternate histories and fictional universes to explore in the “Alternate Universes” sub-series.
• Filling in the few utterly blank spots on my outline.
• Projecting Earth’s history into the future for the small part of the series set in our own world.

Beyond the outline, I’d like to know how you would like to be portrayed if I were to write you into the Shine Cycle.

I mentioned above that I need “first readers” (also known as “beta readers”); I have some works that I’m particularly working on (or planning to work on) right now), and so could particularly use critique on:

• I’m currently revising my novelette “A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage”, which I serialized on this blog a year and a half ago.
• And I’m working on writing new material for Sunshine Civil War and An Internal Conflict.

Poetry

I’ve posted enough poetry on this blog to fill a book (and then some!) and am thinking about creating one, so I’d like your help picking my best work to go in it. If the full archive looks too daunting, I’m also posting more manageable selections weekly.

Unwritten Programs

To work effectively, there are a few programs that I need that as far as I can see don’t yet exist. If you know of something that would meet even most or a few of my requirements, or have some ideas as to how I could go about writing such a program myself, please let me know. The programs include:

• A “fictional historiographer” that lets me track the intersecting threads of hundreds of individual histories in a fictional world.
• A mapping program that can manage a massively large fictional world in minute detail and algorithmically generate sensible details that I don’t have set ideas for. (I wrote a later follow-up post reducing my requirements slightly.)
• A multi-paradigm task management program that can handle thousands of tasks without slowing my system to a crawl.
• Not really a need, merely a want: Is it possible to integrate the social features of WordPress and Blogger?

Strategic Primer

In addition, there are several things I need help with relating to Strategic Primer, my strategy game.

• First, the current campaign still needs players&mash;or, if you’d rather not jump into an existing campaign and there’s enough interest, I can start another campaign.
• Second, I need (or at least could use) help designing, managing, writing, and testing the computer version and the suite of assistive programs for the campaign version
• Third, I need help doing the research that has proved necessary for running the campaign and ensuring that the rules and statistics are fair and well-balanced.
• I need some way to deal with the size and detail of the game-world. (See also this second post on the subject.)
• I need help creating and maintaining the database of advances a player can discover in the game
• I need help figuring out how to represent units’ capabilities.
• I could use help designing the API by which clients and servers communicate.
• I’m looking for ideas for the story the players will be able to explore.

 

Can you help?