About

I’m Jonathan Lovelace, a 2009 graduate of Calvin College in computer science. This is the online home of my three major works: the Shine Cycle, my science fiction/fantasy series-in-progress; Strategic Primer, a unique strategy game; and my growing corpus of poetry.

I never introduced myself properly when I began this blog in December 2008, so in July 2011 I reintroduced myself, the Shine Cycle, and Strategic Primer at some length; this page (like the “Welcome” post) is intended to serve as a shorter introduction to me, my work, and this blog.

The Shine Cycle is my magnum opus (with “great” merely meaning “very large” here), a story that primarily spans two continents (though at times stretching to other worlds and even other universes) from the beginning of that world for over two hundred years. I won’t be posting most of its text publicly, but much of the background material and is posted here.

I also write poetry. I’ve posted most of my presentable poems on this blog, one nearly every Friday since November 2009 until I ran out, then more as I wrote them. Because the full archive is so large, from mid-2011 to January 2013 I posted links to small, more manageable groups each week. I have also self-published a collection, of about sixty poems, A Year in Verse, on Kindle and in paperback. But I’m still interested in readers’ opinions as to which poems are my best, and how poems might be improved, as I consider preparing a second collection.

My second magnum opus (again merely meaning “very large work”) is a strategy/simulation game called Strategic Primer, which began as the experiment in my eighth grade science fair project (”what effect does age have on performance in a game of strategy?”) but within the year had grown completely out of hand. During high school I conceived of turning it into a computer game, but as that too snowballed with every idea I’d ever had about how a strategy game should be I dropped it for the time being. I am currently running a preliminary campaign of the “pen-and-paper version” over the Internet—which still needs players!

In addition to these three major projects, which I try to write about weekly, I also write essays about various topics.