Summer Camp 2022 Pledge

I pledge to run the Imaginaerium this year too! Daily posts of inspiration and community highlights for the weary writer!

The Imaginaerium was something I started a couple of years ago and ran as daily posts containing articles from cool anvilities, sources of inspiration, artwork, and so on. Something fun to boost people during the Summer Camp and some interesting sources of information to spur the imagination. Last year, it also included interviews from various anvilities (including the Father of the Forge himself). I want to do that again this year.  

OI!   And I want to include more community stuff this year! If you are interested in participating in some way, either by making a post of your own with interesting sources, doing an interview, or something along those lines... Leave a message here or on Discord!

 

I pledge to write and have a great time. That's it. That's the pledge.

I love doing summer camp. I love the challenge of the prompts and the way you can subvert them to fit any strange settings, especially. I want to fall in love with writing and get back on the writing train. That's my pledge as far as writing goes: to write for my enjoyment and to have fun with it.   Oh, and I'm going for the Diamond Badge, but I'm not going to sweat it.  

Guys, I'm back! Probably!

I kind of fell off the face of the world for a while in 2022, only really coming back with1 the Copenhagen picnic. I'm really looking forward to getting back into the community side of things with all the talented and friendly creators who make WorldAnvil such a fantastic place to be. So come hang out with us in the Discords. There might be a stream at some point to replicate the glorious disaster that was the Dark Souls 1 stream, but no promises there!  

And I can't wait to read all the awesome stuff I know people are going to write!

 

Expanse

Leadership

Discovery

Monstrous

Extras!

  With Summer Camp comes the time to decide: what world am I going to write for?   As a general rule, I like to try and connect the prompts to each other as much as possible. It provides a wonderful base to build from whenever you get stuck and lets you continually grow a story and narrative. Some really cool, organic things have come from this approach, and in 2019, I even had all the prompts set in a specific region in Araea. It worked super well, so I recommend trying it!   I think I've narrowed my choices down to two worlds. But there are still like 20 days left as of this writing, so the chances of me changing my mind again are pretty good!  

Araea

This world! It's my first and most established setting, with almost 300k words written for it. Despite that, there's a lot of meat left on this human femur bone...  

Expanse

There are a lot of places I could go with the Expanse. The Surface has many places that fit the bill, from radiation blasted wastelands to wind-carved plains. Under the Surface, there are places like the Abyss, a vast and deadly underground ocean. There are tunnels that reach for miles, expansive caverns that could swallow entire cities, forests of mushrooms, deserts of quartz, and of course the the Far Deep.   Most of Araea is unexplored and shrouded in the dark, with "here be dragons" on the map - and they are hungry.  

Leadership

This is probably the one I have the fewest immediate ideas for, but that kind of makes me excited too. It'll be a cool place to insert personalities who are coping, dealing, influencing, directing, or dying in the other themes. I don't know exactly what I'll do here, but I have some fun things to build off. Back in SC 2019, I ended up creating a couple of fun characters, my favorite being Ramaður-shi, Iron Hag of Dhanû. She became a pivotal personality for where that part of the world may or may not head and set the stage for many stories and conflicts.   Right now, I think it'll depend a lot on the other themes. The leaders will be connected to them, being explorers, villains, monster-slayers, or monsters themselves. It's almost too bad that this theme is in the middle since I don't know what else I can tie them to. I'm not sure I have a solution for that, but we'll see!  

Discovery

With most of Araea still shrouded in hungry darkness, there are so many places I can go with this one. I'll probably tie it to the Expanse and the Leaders related to that, and it'll more likely than not relate to a place rather than scientific or technological discovery - but it might be both. Something in that new places that is finding a use - like the creepy melting crystals in the Atharkam Region. It's a frontier region already, along with The Far End and basically any region of the Far Deep. There are several there I've not yet worked on, too... So this is going to be a lot of fun.   Thinking about it, I think it'll depend a lot on what the expanse (and perhaps Monstrous) prompts are!  

Monstrous

I have two different ideas for how I want to go with the Monstrous theme, and perhaps I'll be able to have both of them co-exist (or not, for more conflicts, but you know what I mean!). One is to have it be something innate to the expanse being explored or the discoveries made - a monster or threat or even just the way the place/thing is. Second, and I'll almost certainly go with this anyway, is to explore the horrible things humans do to each other in the background. If there's a way to scam people or make some industrial process quicker or cheaper, humanity is creative in ways that make any monster in the world pause in terror.   As always, I do like to subvert prompts and expectations and explore these things from unexpected angles, so that's something I'm always going to look at doing. That's how the 'most valuable item' prompt two years ago ended up being a gilded nuke. It'll be great fun.  

Chronotopia

  Chronotopia is my almost empty, time-travel-themed world, where time itself has been slain, and humanity lives in a timeless eternity of contradictions, loops, paradoxes, and... Of course... Time travel! It's a complicated setting, but it's a lot of fun.  

Expanse

Without doubt, the expanse in question for Chronotopia will be the time-streams, the web of when's and where's that reach every point in time that has ever been. It's one of the foundational pillars of the setting and explores how a post-scarcity society might treat its own past and how entire 'eras' become resources, entertainment, and more. Other fun things to explore might be how a single point in space can be several points in time simultaneously, how that interacts, and how people navigate all these confusing ways to exist.  

Leadership

Like with Araea, I'm not sure exactly what I'll do with this. At a hunch, I'd say it'll once again be connected a lot to the explorers of the setting, but it will depend greatly on the prompts. There is a lot of interesting question a theme like this raises in a setting like Chronotopia: how does a post-scarcity, time-traveling society look like? What groups have arisen, how are they organized, and how are they led? When everyone is (theoretically but certainly not in practice) equal, why does one follow and one lead? How does religion or spirituality look in a world where time, death, immortality, and the end of things have been conquered?   And so on. I have nothing written but a lot of notes about it. I'm leaning towards people gravitating towards sort of.. Self-growth philosophies as more of a foundation, though I'm sure a few will just be dedicated to partying for eternity.  

Discovery

In a world where every single "when" is available to explorers, there are a lot of discoveries to make, ranging from profound to petty. In Chronotopia, those discoveries are bound to lead to new ones too. A discovery of what Mars really looked like in the time before it dried will inevitably lead to the discovery of some sort of monster trying to eat the discoverers. Besides that, I'm also going to be thinking about how they have started to make discoveries about time-manipulating technology. Everything from scrying into the past (for entertainment) to creating simulacra of past personalities for all kinds of reasons. The time-warped sky is the limit for this one.  

Monstrous

Much like the Leadership theme, this one raises questions about what conflict might look like in this setting. It might be post-scarcity, and people might be pseudo-immortal, but it's not idyllic, and there's no lack of people who still aren't satisfied. As with most of my settings, the Monstrous here will probably deal a lot with social and economic divisions, how the powerful wield their influence to stay that way and how even near-infinite resources can end up unevenly distributed.   Oh, and there's also time-wraiths too. Beware the Tomb of Eternities.   Here's what'll serve as my mini-meta for Summer Camp!

Araea

Images

Geography, Landscapes, & Buildings

Beasts, Monsters, Spirits, & Flora

 

Music

 

Inspiring World

   

Now, it’s time to plan for success!

  With so little time left, I am filled with excited anticipation and just enough panic to make it interesting. Lets see if this homework stuff can help with that.  

Schedule!

I'm going to divide my writing schedule into two parts, since July is going to be a little complicate. Between the prompts, the cheerleading, and the Imaginaerium, there's no lack of stuff to do!  

Week 1

I'm still off on vacation on the first week of July, and I'm going to use that to maximize how much writing I can.   Since I expect my energy to be at the highest level here, I want to front-load as much reading and commenting as I can muster here.   Writing will happen whenever it happens: My plan is one prompt per day, or more.  

Week 2, 3 & 4

After that first week, I sadly am forced to return to the corporate hellscape of gainful employment. But I still work from home, which reduces the timesink from commuting!   My plan is to start writing at 6 PM, post the Imaginaerium article around 2 PM, and maybe stream some Elden Ring at 9 PM  

Support!

I have lots of support to rely on for the Summer Camp. My primary hanging out place will be the World Anvil discord, my own personal discord (the secretive Lodge), and perhaps my streaming audience as I beat my head bloody against Elden Ring.  

While you're here, why not check out the Pledges of some of these other awesome anvilities?