Summercamp 2025

Kalan      Summercamp 2025
“Creativity is not so much a boundless well, but an all-you-can-eat buffet of elements for your creative endeavor. Eventually you've eaten your fill, and it's time to digest and then make something. But at some point, it will be time to return to the restaurant.”
— Vera Nazarian
  It's June again, which means summercamp prep, which means summercamp is just around the corner!  

Life's been a Trip, Recently

I've got to be very honest, the first half of 2025 has been a mild disaster. My life feels like it's been chucked into a blender being chucked off the edge of a clif - my plans have, for my own sanity, been discarded for the most part. Good things have happened as well as the bad: I've got a corral of supportive friends and a new, healthier relationship, and I'm once again returning to Italy for hopefully a better trip than last time around. But these have been specks of gold in the grey: I've lost a lot of people, work has been insane and I've spent more time in hospitals than I have since I was little (both for myself and family).   So overall, I've been very burnt out, which is majorly effecting my emotions coming into summercamp. Intially, I wasn't even considering trying but I think this actually might get me into gear and going again, even if very slowly and with a lot of bum notes.  

Goals For Summercamp

I just want to write something again. I've been, inbetween all the downtime and burnout, writing but it's been scattered notes, semi-private or been for conlanging. So I'm going to be aproaching a lot of my worldbuilding for summercamp from what makes me, currently, fufilled. Which is:
  • Conlanging. I specificially love, love, LOVE, lexicon-building and semantics and how that relates to the culture of the Asfye.
  • Little tidbits and daily life. I don't find a lot of love in doing large, top-down articles (as much as I must). Big, important articles must get done, but for Summercamp, I'm not going to do that. Once again, this is trying to restart and retrain my creative muscles.
    • by Betty who can't write on a computer very good.

    Meta

    So I partially worked on my meta, which is good enough, even if it's only 15% done. I find it very hard to talk about what inspires me and the scope of the stuff I’m doing since it’s for conlanging and culture building purposes (which is often just inspired nebulously by other people’s work and/or wikipedia diving). However, it's definitely helped me with defining what Kalan is to me: it's a fun hobby project/setting for my main love, conlangs and concultures, written from the outside in .   I decided not to work on outdated articles - all of my articles are outdated - because I do not want to overwhelm myself. However, I did update my guide to Asfye Orthography!  

    Community Support

    My community for summercamp is both within Worldanvil and out. Of course, I'm one of the goblins of the WA discord voice channels (I'm sorry) so I'll be lurking. Also, I'm still a member, even if rather inactive member, of Travelling without Moving so I'll be lurking in there as well.   Furthermore, I'd love to shoutout Roe! I talk to them way too much and they're probably sick of random conlanging tangents, bullying the Danish language and Asfye wedding traditions. They're amazing and I'm showing off a lot of their work because they're a dear friend.   As for my support outside of WA - conlanging communities and my family. I got very blessed to have nerds for family and there's a small to medium chance my dad is somewhere within WA haunting me (hi dad, I love you) so I do ocassionally share my work. They're wonderful.

    Homepages and Introductions

    I updated my homepage to reflect the hobbyist nature of this and to focus in on my current project: the Asfye. I had a stub for an Introduction to the Asfye, this is finally the chance I have to finish it!  

    Looking Back at past work

    I've been working on Kalan as a concept since 2021, and my ideas have changed immensely since that first inception of a fantasy world. The Asfye, in some form, have been in this world since late 2022. They have changed quite a lot on many levels.  

    What do I love from previous versions?

  • I love the artistic aspects I weaved into it. The Asfye I originally had were craftspeople and artisans first. Of course, this has remained a thread throughout my private notes on the Asfye: they are still the dancers and weavers I initially concieved them as. However, in some of my notes, this aspect has been superceeded by writing about religion and gender roles. Also, the idea of the Asfye as potters has dissapeared somewhat, which I want to return to

    • What am I moving on from?

    When I first thought of Kalan, I wanted it to be clean break from my previous projects. This, in the mind of Betty from 4 years ago, included being more high fantasy and magical than before. However, this died a painful death very quickly; it is clean to me that I have limited interest in magic as a living, breathing concept in my world. For me, I feel it distracts from the culture building, and mythologising if it's clearly there in setting.   But I have not abandoned magic all together! I've been experimenting a lot with the idea of magic being dead, or a deist approach to both Kalan's various gods and magic itself - it was present before, but now it's either dead or inaccesible to Kalan. It is mildly inspired by another re-read of A Song of Ice and Fire, because I am a simple woman with simple pleasures, but it is an approach which feels more me.  

    Themes

    Nourishment

    Food is a very hard topic for me to worldbuild. There are some private reasons but I don't often think about food in my day to day life let alone within the fictional one in my head. So, thanks to the vagueness of the prompt, I'm probably going to worldbuild around the topic.
     
  • I've been thinking about Asfye dining culture. The Asfye are a culture which loves food, and loves ritual so I think both go quite gracefully hand-in-hand. Table Manners (I'd like to recommend Nakari Speardane's video on the topic), specific dinners and preperation rituals.

  • On a similar note, Asfye Purity Law heavily relates to food, so if it links nicely, I might write an article surrounding the topic. Or at least start on the major article.

  • The Asfye view writing and religion as a nourishment for the soul and their morality, which spawns a laundry load of ideas overall.

    • Roots

     

    Entry for Summer Camp Prep 2025

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    Article template
    Generic article
    World
    Kalan
    Author
    Crabetty
    Publication Date
    11 Jun, 2025
    Creation Date
    11 Jun, 2025
    Last Update Date
    28 Jun, 2025
    Visibility
    Public
    Views
    16
    Favorites
    2
    Comments
    1
    Work In Progress
    Tags
    sc2025 office

    Comments

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    Grandmaster Make lore, not war
    Jun 27, 2025 19:10 by Imagica

    I'm sorry 2025 has been so hard on you. But writing has a cathartic quality so I hope it will help you as much as it helps me. Enjoy your SC journey and I wish from now on, things to get better.

    I survived Summer Camp! Check out what I wrote in my Summer Camp Hub Article
     
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