Status Check on Writing since Summer | Prepping for Nano 2015

I've not been in a fictional frame of mind for quite a while. Most of what I've been doing for the last several months (since early June) is academic writing for a couple of papers that are all getting submitted to a journal for a special issue, as part of a series. It's been slow going - partly because we're all making it up as we go along (this is new, groundbreaking type stuff), and partly because I haven't done any academic writing to speak of for over a decade and I'm rusty at being all high-falutin' conceptual about everything. There's about 20 of us involved, and another dozen papers besides mine supposedly getting submitted for this, plus a big joint paper that explains the whole project that has already been submitted.

I'm kind of super burnt out on it actually. I need to finish the second draft though, and then finish making all the ancillary packages to put into repositories so I can reference them in the paper, and then send it out for another round of feedback. I really wish that feedback would consist of "looks great, leave it exactly like that!" more often.

Meanwhile, Nanowrimo 2015 is looming on the horizon. 

The only thing remotely fictional on my mind lately is the beginnings of an idea for an advanced spacefaring civilization - and that part is actually an afterthought. The real idea is basically: what kind of civilization would I want to live in, as influenced by my paying too much attention to national political and social current events? And what would it take to build it?

So now I want to write down an answer to that, and it'll be some form of socialist utopia, but it would have to be at least initially funded by unfettered capitalism. Then I'll make up a race of people who are doing that, and it can become a setting for some novels or a roleplaying game.

The people are currently called the Celestines. The name just appeared out of nowhere while I needed to name an organization for my current game on rpol (Numenera: something :p ). I figured, might as well go with that, and if my players actually head in the direction of investigating the plot hook involving them, I'll have backstory to work from.

Aside from running one game, I'm allegedly playing in two others, but they're both dead. One is Dante's latest VtM, and he has disappeared off the face of the earth again, and I'm sure he'll reappear at some point when it's least convenient for me to play, as usual. The other is a sci-fi horror game that Dana is running, except she seems to have lost interest in play-by-post for the moment. Then there's a weekly live game of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying which is mostly going pretty well, when enough people can actually show up to it. So overall: roleplaying is at a manageable level, and I'm not horribly overcommitted like I used to be, nor do I plan to add any more games.