WorldEmber Pledge 2025

Focus

This year, I have chosen to focus on "geopolitics and geography", or, in other words, countries and the lands they occupy. Or in other other words... the kind of stuff you'd see on a map!

A hefty percentage of my stubs are empty articles with placeholder names for countries. They are something I've been avoiding writing about for years, now, and I'm tired of it. It's about time I got comfortable writing about them, because I want them to be in my world, and nobody else is going to put them in there for me!

Writing about countries doesn't just mean writing about the organizations themselves. I also want to write about culture, landmarks, folktales, and maybe even languages. I have been craving more depth in this area of SanZera for so long. I'm eager to finally get started!

Preparation

In an attempt to not completely burn myself out, I will be preparing for WorldEmber by selecting five homework prompts from the WorldEmber bingo:

Finish All Unfinished Articles

I'm assuming this is referring to articles that aren't stubs, because I intend to finish my stubs during the actual event.

Currently I have a few articles that are mostly finished but have been sitting in drafts: Stelettias, Luminous Ink, Saredian Isles, and Confederacy of the Shadow. If any those links go live, you'll know I've gotten around to finishing them!

Read a Book

I desperately want to read more books. When I was in grade school, I devoured them. Now that my brain has easy and free dopamine in the form of doom scrolling, it's very difficult to convince it to read.

I have been rereading Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings so I can get back into the series. I'm about halfway through the book, so I should be able to finish it by the end of the month!

Pages Read: 512/1001

Do Some Pre-Writing Research

I've replaced the Free Space in my row with a different prompt from the board. If I want to write good countries, I'm going to need to do some research. This will likely come in the form of long-form YouTube essays while I play Minecraft, or maybe, if I'm lucky, some actual reading!

If anyone reading this has a suggestion or a resource to help me write better countries and organizations, please feel free to leave your recommendation(s) in the comments.

Prepare Visual Elements

My dream is for most or all of SanZera's images to be drawn by yours truly. Creating some generic symbols or filler images that can be used for multiple articles should help me with this. By the end of November, I hope to complete at least three images that can serve this purpose. I will add them below as they are created.

Make a List of Stubs to Expand

There are a lot of stubs to sift through, and more will certainly pop up along the way, but here are some that currently pique my interest the most:

• Azhavin and Theocracy of Azhavin
• Eastern Auzera
• Eastern Islands
• Khetzala and Khetzala organization (and many other articles related to Khetzala)
• Northern Auzera
• The Divide

Final Thoughts

I'm excited. I haven't been excited about writing in a long time.

I look forward to sharing this experience with you all, but I hope you'll understand if I am not as active in the community as I maybe once was. I really want to focus on my own creative health, and that might require me to tune out the hype for a little while.

All the same, I'm so grateful you're here, and I'm cheering every one of you on! We can do this. Let's light up the forge!