Follow along with my WorldEmber progress!

I promised you a look over my shoulder this month as I bring a vague and disjointed collection of ideas together into a cohesive piece of world-building. These resources will help you keep track of my progress through this month-long marathon challenge:

• Haly’s Official WE Progress Report — each participant gets a page that automatically collects their author information and all WE-eligible articles across all worlds into a single, shareable package.
• Haly’s WorldEmber on Argentii Index — an on-the-fly journal page and handy sidebar displaying only new Argentii WE-eligible articles.

Today I Remembered the Fun

The love/hate relationship between an artist and their creative work is a cosmic cycle as old as time.

Being creative means that you have your good days and your bad days. Sometimes, you love your work and everything is flowing, it’s easy and free. Then, there are those times when you have to drag your art into the world, flailing like a toddler; it’s messy and hard and you only do it because you must.

Today was one of the easy days. I sat down after a few hours spent playing D&D with the family, opened up my brain, and let the words come rushing out like water through the spillway in a dam. Sure, it helps that I was writing about a topic I love: ghosts. But I’m not here to critique my muse; I’ll take any easy day on any topic.

What Makes Your World Different?

I plan to submit several articles to the upcoming WorldAnvil Worldbuilding Awards. Doing so is an excellent way to invite new readers to become familiar with Argentii, and grow my weird little collective of creative radicals. With this in mind, I keep asking myself, “what is different about Argentii? What makes it stand out from the world we live in?”

A cornerstone of the world that I’ve alluded to, but never gotten into, are the ever-present ghosts. I’ve mentioned them over and over, but never even created a stub for them. They have lived only in my head until today.

Like other paranormal and supernatural creatures, ghosts are open to interpretation. Your idea of a ghost and my idea of a ghost might be completely different things. So in a world where ghosts exist and everyone has encounters with them, laying out what makes these ghosts unique is pretty critical.

After all, if I do my job right, y’all shouldn’t be wondering “are there ghosts here?” I’m going more for, “O-shit, there’s ghosts and people are just OK with it?!”

Heckin Important Chonk

If you’ve been reading either these newsletters, or my WorldEmber articles themselves, then you know that brevity is something I’ve been working on. Most of you already know that I can go on for thousands of words pausing only for the frequent injection of commas for breath. So to put about 700 words into a single article speaks to its weight in the world.

That weight is what makes it foundational. After all, a weighty bottom is a sure way to support almost any construction.

Wrapping the Day

I’ve almost achieved my WorldEmber goal; as I write this, I have 40,397 words toward my 50,000-word goal. With less than 10,000 words to write, and almost six full days as I write this, that shouldn’t be any problem. The question is…can I do it before the new year?!

Stay tuned! And don’t forget to include your creative friends in the fun! Send them this newsletter so that they can subscribe and be a part of all this weird worldbuilding fun!!