All right, so... reflections on this Summercamp. I went into it in a bit of a tough brain place. As people may have noticed 2025 has been sort of a tumultuous year, and certainly I've had some personal nonsense going on that kind of sapped my brain of its creativity. As I've said before, I was also struggling with the updates on this site, and I figured jumping into the deep end for a month of work would sort of test me a little. For one thing if I couldn't get used to the way the site functioned after that, I figured it was a lost cause. And also, I was hoping to regain some momentum since I tend to work well under pressure and a body in motion tends to stay in motion.

So, what was the outcome?!

It was kind of a mixed bag. I did mostly get used to the site updates, but I don't like them any more than I did, I'm just more aware of how I have to work around things.

And it took me longer than I would've liked to gain a little motion - I did three articles fairly early on and then just lost all ability to concentrate and flopped around for two weeks before coming back in the last week and doing five more rapidfire. Last year I was able to do double my goal, this time I barely made the goal itself, but I do consider it successful because it got the dust off my writing fingers.

I'm not sure I'd say I'm in full swing again but I am back to being inspired so I guess mission accomplished!

What I Was Trying to Do

Aside from get my motor running again, my initial goal was to go into the main location in my primary CC "story" or circle, Ruavine, as well as look at fleshing out Gaean a little. I also wanted to debut my other world.

....well I didn't really do any of that, hahaha! Aside from the article on Narjul, the prompts just didn't support it. But I got to do some cool stuff anyway, most notably Katyr Ainham was really fun to write, and Eiryen Nesaleen has been a long time coming.

And while defining what the Imperator is didn't relate directly to Ruavine, it is very relevant, so I was glad to get that done.

Plus it was important since the whole concept seems to be hard to brain?

Anyway not bad.

 

The Reading Challenge!

A City Many People Want to Visit

A short but lovely and evocative article about a city in the forest inhabited (almost) entirely by elves... protected by a test that you can't study to pass. Lovely.

An Animal Celebrity

This article is both well-written and well-designed, and this pereptually irate horse is an absolute superstar in his cape. The writing style is very engaging, and the article itself is substantial which you know I'm into if you've ever seen any of my articles, lmao. Just a great article overall.

 

A Staple Found on Every Dinner Table

I've always had a kind of difficult time imagining how to write about food... which is why I've never written an article about food despite having a whole list of drinks and meals that I could convert. But this was interesting. It gives a kind of history to the stew, goes into the cultural context of it, and even a bit about the evolution of it over time. Also, made me want to eat some stew?

 

A Species that Undergoes Metamorphosis

Oh boy did running into this article send me down rabbit hole. I'll be honest, for a moment there I wasn't sure whether the article was describing a real competition or an inworld one! Anyway, the whole idea is really fun and creative, and this is an especially fun one. Obviously it's a play on Pokemon, which absolutely makes sense with the concept of the world, but it's also unique with its own interesting history. Also very cute.

 

A Myth Surrounding the Birth of an Important Person

More like several legends in this case. This is a fun article looking at various theories about the birth of a famous monk. It's a cool and different way of presenting a myth, and represents the variations upon variations of legends that tend to develop over time.

A Visionary Who Changed the Course of History

I'm a pretty longtime fan of AmelieIS's work - it's always so unique even right down to the presentation. It's always really creative and well-written and just lovely. I'm also wildly jealous of how prolific she is, I... the envy is real.

This is about a mathematician king; it's written entirely from an in-world perspective, which I love.

 

An Animal Celebrity

This made me research seahorses reproduction. I feel like I learned about that at some point and yet by the time I got here, I had completely forgotten... about the unique reproductive biology of the seahorse. Wow!

Anyway, this article delves into the details of Redbolt, a champion racing seahorse. The little quirk in the way Redbolt's seahorse racing career developed - promising start... um, hiccup. And then on from there, a champion rises!

An Organization Seen as the Next Superpower

This article managed to make me interested in the backstory of a fast food restaurant. And then I got to the hovertext and it's hard to describe my reaction to that, other than bookmarking the world to just read everything on it. I've always really liked Chrispy0's work though so this is unsurprising. Glad to see Chrispy0 active here again.

 

A New Condition Unknown in Olden Times

It's probably relevant that I am extremely interested in psychology; this article was extremely compelling to me. The thing that struck me most of all was the, uh, realism? People have a lot of different coping mechanisms, and usually it doesn't involve wholesale rejection of reality obviously but sometimes... it does. Whatever the inworld explanation for the condition, this article captures basically an extreme trauma defense mechanism.

An Animal Celebrity

Count on Tillerz to brighten my day with adorable, whimsical and creative articles about ducks and pufflets. This is one of the cutest things I've ever seen, I can't believe there's an animation, I... I would buy the merch.

 

Lessons Learned

Aside from the thing about seahorses, which I'm not sure whether I learned or re-learned, this year really made me think about... the quality of writing I want to put out here, the creativity I want to revv up, and how I want to present these things. To explain...

I'm honestly kind of jealous of some of these creators, and many other creators as well! I'm not very skilled at... whimsy, for example (plus Crimson Court isn't the most whimsical story/world ever). I'm also terrible at layering implications into things, like the snippet at the end of the Taco Doggo article - I'm not sure I would've been able to resist just putting a big block of text explaining things even if I put it under a secrets lock, ho ho ho.

But I want to get better at that kind of thing, and being more creative in general.

I think my lesson was the same for World Ember last year, but in fairness to me I haven't done much since then, so I'm still working on that.

Writing Goals for the Next 6 Months.

Goals from Now until Feb '26

Get my Samael article together
I have no idea why I haven't done this yet. Arguably the most important person in the setting aside from Gabiel.
Speaking of that, Gabriel article.
I spend an awful lot of time writing about minutiae without getting to the main characters. There are reasons for this, namely that I'm primarily motivated by exploring characters and I'm sort of afraid that I'll lose interest if I do all of the leads. But still, Gabriel and Samael should get theirs at least.
Do an article on Ruavine
This could be a big project but I'm not certain. It could easily just be some descriptions too, depends on how into the weeds I want to go, I guess. Mostly I need to figure out how to make city maps.
And debut the other world
It has a VERY different aesthetic and premise.
Web Design Stuff
I was supposed to be working on learning more and fancier css for the past few months but I didn't so it's back on my list of things to do.