I am not beginning a new life after sixty. That does not feel right to me. It sounds too neat, too dramatic, as if a person reaches a round-number birthday and is somehow issued with a fresh self, a clean desk, and a better filing system.
I can confirm that no such filing system has appeared.
What sixty does feel like is a marker. Not an ending, and not a reinvention, but a point on the road where it is natural to look ahead and wonder what the next decade might deliver.
That is the part that interests me.
A decade is a serious amount of time. Long enough for things to be built. Long enough for plans to stop being vague intentions and become actual work. Long enough, perhaps, for private worlds to become public ones, and for ideas that have lived in notes, maps and drafts to become something other people can enter.
It is also long enough for the real world to become stranger and more astonishing than we sometimes remember.
Only recently, Artemis II carried human beings around the Moon again. Not robots. Not probes. People. For the first time in a long while, the idea of human beings travelling beyond low Earth orbit felt less like archive footage from Apollo and more like a present-tense thing again.
That sort of event matters to me more than I can probably explain cleanly.
I have always wanted to go into space.
That will not happen now, and I am not sentimental about it. Some doors close because life is life, and because physics, cost, age and opportunity do not arrange themselves around childhood hopes.
But my children might see things I could only dream about. My grandchildren might live in a world where human beings working on the Moon, or even Mars, is not something from a paperback cover but an ordinary piece of the news.
That is astonishing.
Whatever else one thinks about the age we live in, it is not small.
Perhaps that is one reason I have always read science fiction so avidly. My shelves and interests are an odd mixture: history, historical fiction, science fiction and cartography — but not much fantasy, despite the fact that I spend so much of my time making up worlds that could easily be shelved under fantasy.
But perhaps it is not so odd after all.
History gives me the weight of what has happened. Science fiction gives me the reach of what might happen. Worldbuilding sits somewhere between the two: looking backward for structure, consequence and human behaviour, while looking outward toward possibility.
Panimálay comes from that mixture.
It is not built from fantasy alone. It is built from history, maps, climate, migration, belief, logistics, animals, language, war, work and the old question that sits behind both history and science fiction:
What would happen if the world worked like this?
That question is at the heart of Russell Street Press as well, at least as I now understand it.
When I first began putting the pieces together publicly, the obvious thing was the fiction. Silent Winter came first. Beyond Winter’s Silence followed. The Foundations of Edrass books are real stories and I want them to stand as stories. I would hate to reduce them to demonstration material, because that would do them an injustice.
Isenwynn, Harvald, Kett, Dren, Ruan, Saera, Dorn and the others matter in their own right. Their choices, fears, duties and mistakes are not footnotes to a method. They are the work.
But the fiction also proves something.
It proves, at least to me, that the method works. If a world is built from climate, geography, movement, subsistence, pressure, memory and belief, then the stories that come out of it have a different kind of weight. They are not floating above the map. They grow from it.
Edrass is not a backdrop. It is a place whose weather, animals, food, law, roads, silences and seasons shape the people inside it.
That is what I want the fiction to show.
The Worldbuilding with AI books, when they arrive, will come at the same problem from the other side. They are about method: how to build worlds with systems under them, how to move from geography to climate, from climate to ecology, from ecology to culture, from culture to history, conflict, belief and story.
The fiction says: here is what that can become.
The worldbuilding books say: here is how you might begin doing it yourself.
And that, I think, is where the next decade becomes interesting.
The long-term aim is not simply to publish more books, although I certainly intend to do that. Nor is it to shout louder on social media, chase trends, or turn Russell Street Press into a small machine for producing noise.
The aim is to build something steadier than that.
I would like Russell Street Press to become a home for this work: the fiction, the worldbuilding books, The Cellar Dweller, the maps, the methods, the essays, the fragments of history and invented history, and eventually a community of people who are interested in building their own worlds with the same seriousness.
That is where Patreon fits in, when the time is right.
Not as a tip jar and not as a place for empty behind-the-scenes chatter, but as a working cellar for worldbuilders. A place for people interested in the deep construction of imagined places: maps, climates, religions, languages, cultures, trade routes, war systems, calendars, settlements, food, law, myth and consequence.
Writers, wargamers, roleplayers, map-makers, artists, history enthusiasts, science-fiction readers, fantasy builders — anyone who enjoys the act of making a world feel as if it has weight under it.
That is the community I would like to build.
Not huge, necessarily. Huge is not always the same as useful. I would rather have a serious, curious, thoughtful group of people building good things than a large crowd passing through because the algorithm pushed something briefly into view.
That may be unfashionable, but I am sixty now, so I reserve the right to be unfashionable with intent.
The next decade, then, is not about becoming someone else.
It is about continuing the same work with a clearer shape.
More Edrass books. More Panimálay. The Worldbuilding with AI series. The Cellar Dweller as a place for thinking aloud in public. Russell Street Press as the formal home. Patreon, eventually, as the workshop where other people can gather around the method and use it for their own worlds.
And beyond all that, the wider world keeps moving.
Perhaps, in the same decade I am trying to build this small press and share Panimálay properly, human beings will be living or working on the Moon. Perhaps Mars will no longer feel quite as unreachable as it once did. Perhaps things I read about in science fiction as a younger man will become ordinary enough for my grandchildren to take for granted.
After all, we all carry communicators now. When I watched *Star Trek* as a child, that was science fiction. Now it is something people keep in their pockets and complain about when the battery runs low.
That thought delights me.
It also reminds me why making things matters.
We live by stories of what has been and what might be. History tells us how people endured, failed, built, fought, believed, organised, migrated, adapted and remembered. Science fiction asks what we might become. Worldbuilding takes some of both and says: let us make a place where consequences can be followed.
That is what I want to spend the next decade doing. Following consequences. Building worlds. Writing the stories that come out of them. Sharing the method with people who want to build their own. Sixty is not a new life. It is a marker stone. The road continues from here.
P.S. If you are interested, the tattoos are healing well.
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