WorldEmber 2025

The end is nigh—the end of the year, that is—and that means it’s time for WorldEmber.

The goal of each WorldEmber is to write at least 10,000 words of original worldbuilding over the course of 31 days. And this page you’re reading right now—this one right here—is where I’ll be planning for the event and sharing what I make.

Preparation

In a change of pace for 2025, the fine folks at World Anvil have replaced their traditional weekly homework assignments with a fun li’l bingo board. Instead of one path to preparation perfection, there are now many. And that’s pretty cool, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve used similar gamification devices in my classrooms for years, and I think they are a powerful way of engaging folks who might otherwise be “checked out.”

Now, all that said, when faced with a set of rules—any set of rules—I feel compelled to bend them. You tell me I need to pick five across or five down from a bingo board, and I want to do six diagonally instead. So that’s what I’m going to do.

Re-Read Your Core Articles

I wrote a whole nice paragraph here about something or other that somehow didn’t get saved and now I’m too pissed off to write it again. The short version: I'm simplifying the timeline surrounding The Blood of Seven Queens to allow myself to access shit that was originally conceived as happening in the far future. There was never a good reason for it happening in the far future, I may never get to write that far future, and most of it works just as well in the present day anyway.

The end result is the re-reading of many many core articles, including this one about Eden itself (originally from Summer Camp 2020, I think) that I just rewrote:

Make a List of Articles You Want to Write

This is a work in progress, but it’s where my mind went immediately after this year’s homework launched—even before I saw it was a spot on the bingo board. I do this every year anyway, and it’s the fastest way to get myself excited for the event.

• Monarchs of The Highlands
• Monarchs of The Realm
• How the five moons work on a flat world
• Edenian Calendar
• Volcano that spits up virgins rather than swallowing them (based on Janet Forbes joke on 8/2/25 stream)
• Tortilla of Ships, based on joke comment from Summer Camp 2025
• Winged monkeys lore

Free Space

For the free space, I’m going to post a note to the public feed to let people know that I’ve moved most of my active worldbuilding energy to a new world. Only one person is following it as of right now, and I’d like to change that before WorldEmber begins.

In case you didn’t see the note, here is the world to follow if you’re so inclined:

Find An Accountability Buddy

My good pal Chris Lontok, aka Kitoypoy, asked me to be his buddy for this year’s WorldEmber and I don’t think I could have said “Yes” any faster than I did. We’ve hyped each other up over the past several years, during this event and others held by World Anvil, so this one felt only natural.

Review Your Category Tree

A little while back, I announced “Clarkwoods Disassembled,” an initiative to split my one big Clarkwoods Literary Universe into distinct worlds based on genre, tone, and active worldbuilding area. This is to be a side project I embark upon as time permits, but in order to check off the “Review Your Category Tree” bingo box for WorldEmber prep, I felt like I needed to get the new, distinct worlds created right away.

I’ve done that, and you're free to follow them at Eden, Stains of Time, Blood Red if you’d like (though Eden is the only one under active development at the moment).

I’ve also created basic category trees for each world, and that was way more fun than it should have been. Why? Because by breaking out my Earth-based Stains of Time world from the much more fantastical land of Eden, I could now have a category tree that omitted things that aren’t really relevant to that human-centric, mostly mundane universe (species, for example). It also let me rethink how I might better organize Eden, now that its category tree didn’t have to hold space for the Stains of Time stuff.

Progress

This is where my finished articles for WorldEmber 2025 will go, once they’re done.