WE 2025 - prep work

WorldEmber is about to start, so let's do the prep work. At almost 40 years I refuse to call it homework ... This article will be updated over the next weeks, so if you'd like to follow my progress, just follow my new hub world. But be warned, there might be daily alerts about this article being updated ... So let's dive into the actual prep work now. If you want, you can directly jump to the new content.

Step 1: Pledge your goal!

As usual, I am not committing myself to more than the minimum of 10k words. Based on last year, even that will be difficult enough to achieve. But at least it should be doable.

I considered whether I should focus on just one world or only on certain areas within my worlds, but I came to the conclusion that I should keep everything open. For example, limiting myself now to just the gods of Mirintha or the history of Nova Gaia would simply restrict me too much. If I have a great idea for a species, I want to be able to write about it and not have that little voice in the back of my head, telling me that this doesn't fit my WE focus.

Whether I will participate in any of the special categories I will decide on the go. Depends on how much I like what I write. I am trying to write an article for as many of the templates as I can. So let's see where I will end up with that.

Step 2: The Prep Bingo

I love the idea of a bingo to prepare for this year. At first I had difficulties to decide for a row or column. In the end I chose the second row from the top. This is the one I went to get the "BINGO" for first. I put a beautiful green border around it, so it's more visible which one I mean.

But additionally, I just wanted to check as many of the fields as possible. So, over the last few weeks I updated this article whenever I checked a few of them, and now we are finally done with the whole sheet. (Beside the free space, which I will update Saturday, but more about that at the end ...)

Find an accountability buddy

Having an accountability buddy was something I hoped for, but didn't imaging to really achieve. As luck would have it, I did find somebody, who was also thinking that having one would be nice, but didn't imaging someone would team up with them. And so I reached out to that person and lucky enough she agreed to team up! So for the first time (okay it is only the second time I'm doing WE) I can proudly say that I indeed have an accountability buddy. It is someone who has been around way longer then I have: Imoen Kim

Join the community

I have joined the community the moment I started my subscription about two years ago. As of late I haven't been that active on the Discord server due to ... things, but I'm trying to get back there and be my former self. To the delight or annoyance of some. Maybe I can get some new readers for one of my worlds. Or even some more followers!

Define your scope for WorldEmber

This has already been part of step 1 of the prep work, but I will just write it down again. I'm not limiting myself to any areas of any of my worlds. I do have focus areas, but if I want to write about something else, I will just do that.

• Mirintha: Gods - I still have a few gods to write about, so I will try to write at least one or two of them
• Camp Cozy: Greece - All articles for CC are supposed to be related to Greece
• Nova Gaia: History - Approximately 300 years of Earth's history have to be covered, so let's see how far I will get during December

Review or collect your world inspiration

I already collected my world inspiration before setting up the world and it hasn't really changed.

Do some pre-writing research

For Nova Gaia I did research on a few topics. How far a some starsystems away from Sol? What are typical propulsion systems in Scifi settings? What starsystem could have a planet that could support live? What are the current predictions for global climate change? Which countries could have a negative impact on climate change?

Review your category tree

I did this for Nova Gaia. Currently I am not sure whether I am really happy with it or change it at a later point, but that's just normal, U guess. I find setting up a category tree is always challenging. You think about how to organise your articles and there are so many possibilities. Then you look at how others did it and even more possibilities emerge. And somehow I always ask myself if there isn't a better way to do it all.

Make a list of articles to write

I prepared a list of articles I'd like to write, but I will most certainly not share it. This is for two reasons. First, I don't want to give away any surprises. And second, I don't want to pressure myself too much. If I were to share that list, I'd feel immediately pressured to write all of them, because I said I would do so. And I would tell myself that people were expacting me to write them, because I said so. And therefore I will not share with you the list, you will just have to follow me along on my WE journey.

Tidy up your writing space

Review your world's visual appearance

I'm really happy over all with how Mirintha looks. I have already updated the visual appearance of Camp Cozy. And Nova Gaia is really new. I only started building it a few weeks ago, I'm not even 100% sure when. But not more then four weeks ago. There is still some CSS work to do and stuff like that, but I am getting there. The whole vibe is slowly coming together and I am hopeful to get it to 90% before WE. At least so far, that there are no too obvious style breaks for anyone to see but me.

Finish all your unfinished articles

What are the people in your world like

I haven't even thought about that yet. At least not for Nova Gaia, but that's okay, I will most likely not write a single character for this world or abouot its people in any kind of way. It will be mostly history here. Maybe ...

Mirintha has a lot of different people, there is no single way of saying the people are ... xyz. It's like in real life. There are kind ones, bad ones, nice ones, grumpy ones ... That's what makes it more interesting and realistic. But talking about specific characters, that I might write during WE ... We have the goddess of chance, so she is an unpredictable one. Not good or bad, just ambivalent, rather fickle. There is also the god of war and hunt and I honestly don't know what his character is like, so I probably will not write about him during WE ^^ Another missing god is the one responsible for trade. As you can imagine, he is rather precise and organised. Last but not least the goddess of nature and the elements. She is rather important, but I still haven't thought here through, so likely no article about her as well.

And then there is Camp Cozy. No bad people here. No egoistic, selfish, mean or annoying people here. This is supposed to be pure cozyness, so everyone is nice to a certain extent. Hopefully I can write about all three people I want to write here, but there is still a problem that I have to figure out regarding how to write characters anyway. Because Camp Cozy has a friendsbook and I am not sure if the characters of that world need some more information or if I should just leave it at that ... Maybe you can help me out with that?

Prepare visual elements

New!

I prepared a bunch of visual elements for Nova Gaia. And I was getting closer and closer to the end of November, realizing I hadn't drawn any images for Camp Cozy yet. So I needed to do that asap. At the moment I have two finished images (but that was cheating, I already finished them several weeks ago) and two unfinished images. I also have two more ideas that I would love to but never will draw before Saturday. But that's okay, because those two images will be for articles I will write later anyway. And also one of the unfinished ones could be used, I'm just not happy with it as of now.

The worst part of the whole preparation is, that I realized I might not be able to write a single article for the images I did for Nova Gaia. Because those are primarily the logos of several organizations and I don't really have anything to tell about them yet, as I hadn't time to think about them. Also, I was thinking about sharing some of the images here, but am not sure if I should really spoil the surprise ...

Review or set up your world homepage

I am happy with the status of Mirintha's world homepage. No need to change anything there. I should change a few things for the community board of Camp Cozy's landing page, so wish me luck that I will get there before Saturday. And then there is Nova Gaia, which I started in November, so obviously I had to set up a world homepage from scratch. And not just the landing page, but the whole CSS for the world. First I was making it way to complex, which I figured out while writing the primer article. So I took a step back and currently I am really happy with the whole CSS and also the homepage. Unfortunately, there are still some important things missing, but I just didn't had the time to get them done properly, so please bear with me for a little longer.

Review your world primer article

For this, let us look at the primers of all of my three worlds in order of when those worlds have been created:

FREE SPACE!

I thought about what do for this. And I finally settled on an idea, that I will not be able to reveal before ... propably Saturday. I was trying not to update this article too often, but maybe I will do so one last time on Saturday so you can see what I came up with for this square.