Reading Challenge 2025

Retrospective

We first created our WorldAnvil account years ago for a specific worldbuilding project, but when that project got shelved we sort of forgot about WorldAnvil as a tool. We've recently been revisiting that project, and with a new world also percolating, we decided to give the whole thing another shot. The timing happened to work out such that we got back into WorldAnvil during the last week of the previous phase of Summer Camp, so we only had enough time to submit one entry, but I wish we'd been able to participate for longer and submit for more prompts.

Summer Camp Spotlight

Here are 10 of our favorite submissions from Summer Camp 2025! We stuck to reading submissions for just a few prompts to avoid getting overwhelmed, but even that narrow sample shows how much of the writing this community produces is just inspiring.

Goals

Our, or at least my, worldbuilding goals for the next half of the year are to focus on consistency. Our ADHD makes it hard to stick to one project or story for long, so we often end up with a bunch of ideas and little to show for it. Part of why Asalia's scope is so amorphous is that it gives us the ability to move our focus from one aspect to another while still developing one overall setting. A lot of the submissions we read and liked most were ones that felt grounded in whatever their setting was - not just something invented to fill a prompt but something fully rooted and woven into the world it comes from. That's something we've struggled to achieve in the past because, ultimately, those elements take time to discover and they don't come at all if all your ideas are spread out across different projects that don't interact. In short, I'd like to go for depth over breadth in the next six months, and I'd like to do it with more consistency than the usual two month phase.

Update 8/25/25 - I guess I'm writing a novella? I have the story plotted out in a three-act structure, and I'm 1600 words into the first chapter. So that's something! -Yarrow