SummerCamp 2025 Homework

Week 1

Nourishment

Oh this is going to be a summer and a half. I'd made Amnar private for a while to update and rework a lot of the oldest articles.

I have a lot going on, including writing a book chapter, book proposal, and catalogue essay in my real life but this will commit me to also working on the thing that's most nourishing to me: Amnar.

I've updated the homepage now and all the categories. I haven't finished any of this, but I have the skeleton of the way I'd like the whole thing to look.

Last year I was able to do the whole challenge, but the "nourishment" theme makes me a little nervous because I've never really focused on food in this world. I always feel weird about it. But anyway, I've hurled myself in at the deep end and here's the pledge:

Week 2

Roots

Look at the cultures and areas you’ll focus on for Summer Camp, and think about how their past shaped them.

I'm on a deadline this week, so I wanted to get this done early. I had my first academic article accepted by Studia Scandinavica two weeks ago, and I need to get my corrections in to the editor. Yes, I have been procrastinating over this pretty hard. The article is the academic version of a piece I wrote for The Conversation six weeks (?) ago. (Yes, I am a Moominologist.)

For last year's Camp, I focused on the Ashcanesh, which Amnar's own origin story of itself. A key fourteen days that form an annual celebration of its founding in the area that became Amin Duum Exclusion Zone. I guess how I handle the theme of roots will depend on the prompts that pop up.

Go to your world’s homepage and imagine you’re a new reader discovering the setting for the first time. What should you change to make the experience more engaging?

I am working on a new homepage, written as if you'd just arrived in one of the Exclusion Zones. It's basic at the moment, and I intend to add in links to articles that are also written for a new arrival who's currently waiting in a customs and processing area to receive permission to enter.

I also need to develop new maps. I've always seen Amnar as a fantasy world, but the way it's styled now, and the way it's evolved in my head, has given it a much more techno-magical feel. That's not reflected in the map styles so eventually I will also update those, and the Chronicle.

Find your earliest worldbuilding project. What mistakes did you make that you want to avoid? What good ideas from those early days can you integrate into your current project? Remember to take a moment to be proud of how far you've come!

I don't have access to my first world-building notes because I started when I was five. I did not know what world-building was, I was just playing. I do have access to the notes I wrote back in the 1990s when the world I'd had in my head got renamed Amnar, and almost all of the work I've done since then, so there's that.

It's difficult to be proud because I keep scuppering myself. I've barely been here since last summer, mostly because life has been brutal teaching and writing and trying to earn enough money to survive over the long vacation months. Coming back to do the Camp in 2025 is about getting back in touch with Amnar again even while I'm putting a lot of work into other, more academic, things.

Week 3

Metamorphosis

What transformations and adaptations have the people in your world gone through? What changes are going on right now… and who is trying to stop them?

The biggest change is the most obvious: in a last-ditch attempt to gain control of The God Machine, the Emperor Mukhadori had his bought scientist tear a hole in reality that unleashed a magical apocalypse upon the world. It's been 5000 years and the world is still reeling from the consequences.

That is about the most elevator pitch I've ever gotten any description of the world. Amnar was established by Isha, who was already rebelling against her own empire's conscriptions into the war, took on the mantel of becoming a god to prevent reality from being entirely destroyed by the unleashed wild heka, transformed into unstable kata, that was about to devastate the world. Long story short, some people helped her, that turned into more people, and Amnar became a thing.

Right now, I'm working on a novel set in 4633, that was originally going to be a series I released week by week. Another change is coming. The emperor may have obliterated his own empire in the process of trying to take over everybody else's, but his family have not forgotten and are looking for payback.

Amnar is made up of a series of Exclusion Zones, where tears in reality periodically spew unstable kata and the horrific monsters created by that form of magical energy out into the world. Magical Chernobyl. But that is also a source of incredible power and development that the rest of the world around the Zones hasn't yet had access to. While the Amnari are looking to find ways to help others, the descendents of the Mukhadori are not so altruistic.

Things are building up to a storm, but I'm not sure how much of that is going to come across in this challenge. I'm really working on transforming the World Anvil site from the way it was (a wiki for readers) to something more immersive. Which leads neatly on to...

Choose a new genre, style, or author, and take a look at their art! Write what you learned from them and what inspired you.

Last month, I re-read qntm (Sam Hughes') collection of connected short stories from the SCP Foundationsite. I love the book (although I'm not so into the ending), and the idea of this approach. This is what inspired me to change my approach to the books and then somehow that led to thinking about how I could improve the World Anvil site.

There are loads of amazing writers on World Anvil who use this approach, which assumes the reader is already on some level a participant in the world in the same way. I realised that given Amnar is quite complex, approaching it from this standpoint would help.

qntm's work specifically made me think differently about creating effective openings to stories and books. The Foundation approach does away with flowery introductions and goes for a totally unexpected voice and style. qntm's chapters and short stories often open with descriptions of magical phenomena as if written for a database or file. This gave me the idea of having a character approaching one of the Zones, and really think about what it would be like if you'd just arrived at a processing station looking for aid or hoping to immigrate. This sits well with my academic interests in the way spaces like the Moomin House are able to morph and adapt to welcome newcomers.

Read a couple of articles from the community, give them a like (and why not a sticker!), and write about what inspired you.

Make Lore Not War's Crux Umbra world has really drawn me in with its very simple, clear CSS. I cannot do CSS like that. I know people say it's easy to code but all of my brain is occupied with other things. If I had the money this summer, I'd pay to get Amnar revamped. Crux Umbra really shows how using paired-down colour ranges with strong choices can give a world a powerful hit on first viewing.

This article on the rules of magic shows just how well you can lay out a page and makes me wonder if I need to think about using multiple columns. The way I'm imagining Amnar's World Anvil is that this would be viewed on a person's Slate, given to them as they wait for processing, so readability and simplicity is a major part of that, slates not being available outside a Zone.

As an aside, I'm currently writing an essay for a library catalogue for one of our specialist libraries JRRI, which covers both magic and medicine. I'm currently looking at the documents chosen for the catalogue and exhibit (being held in Austin, Texas, next year), and it's got me thinking about the metamorphosis and evolution of the earliest forms of surgery, medicine, and magic in Amnar. So I'm going to end up putting that in there as well, somewhere.

Week 4

Tomorrow

Think about current events that will impact the future. Who is working to create a specific kind of future?

I'm late writing this and now I'm regretting signing up for the Diamond tier. I managed it last year, and I was all set up for doing it again this year. Then I got a notification that I've got a job interview on Friday.

The background to that is that I work the UK academic semester, September to June, and I'm only paid during that time. After 18 months of trying to find a better sort of job, I'd kind of given up and was surviving on my savings and my partner, who is a super star and does have a high-paying job and can support us both.

It's more academic teaching, possibly over the summer. So that's my future, maybe? I've also been writing a certain amount of fiction, and would like more time to work on it.

As far as Amnar is concerned, the focus for that specific society is trying to solve the problem of the Gaps, to close them permanently and make it possible to use the control they have over ana and kata to expand what they can do for people beyond their borders.

No idea how that's going to show up but I guess we'll see.

Make sure everything’s ready—from your writing space to your writing schedule—for action before Summer Camp begins!

With the job interview on Friday everything is up in the air but I think this is all going to be written in the evening. How much I focus on sharing, I'm not sure.

Who or what will help you achieve your goal? What will your sharing strategy be during Summer Camp?

As I mentioned above, I'm not sure about sharing because I am so bad about that. I'm going to try to get to the prompts as early as possible and see if there's a way I can use them for fiction inspiration. I may adjust my expectations in terms of what I try to achieve, but I will still do my best. Here we go!