WorldEmber Prep 2025

This year is going to be a weird one. I have revamped Yvari to be a event world earlier this year - I didn't feel like I could organize my world the way that was right, but instead had to bend the world to the whims and structures of the tool. Still, I've been here since 2018 and I love both worldbuilding and the community, I wasn't going to give up on this. After the last update, I'm not so sure anymore, and the more I try to use the new UI the more infuriated I get. I'm here to be creative, not fight the tool at every step of the way. Who knows, maybe this will be my last World Ember? We will see.   As if that wasn't bad enough yet, this year as a whole has been a rough one and I've had more than my fair share of bad things happening. It seems like right now my body is refusing to cooperate. Before, World Ember often was my rock in the storm and worldbuilding often kept me sane and helped me get through the rough parts. Focussing my energy on World Ember often proved to be what helped me get through a dark time.   I want worldbuilding to stay my safe place, and my gut tells me that this year, pressure just ain't it. Oftentimes, you grow with a challenge, and the structure of tasks helps you consider things you normally wouldn't. When I did World Ember prep, I often ended up doing things that felt like meaningless exercises, only there to fulfill some arbitrary idea that may help someone else but wasn't for me. This year, I feel like I have to be extremely gentle and kind with myself and ration my energy - and therefore, i have decided to tackle this World Ember as a World Ember Rebel, similar to how there's Nano Rebels.  

So what does this mean?

  This year, I will not do things that feel like they will not help me. Sometimes, doing such things is a good idea, and when you do them you may realize that this is actually working and helpful. But this year, I don't feel like I want to waste precious energy on such experiments. I do like the Bingo idea very much, though, and some of the tasks absolutely make sense. So instead of picking a row or column, I will be all peckish this year and simply pick all the cherries! In addition, in World Ember proper I will try to reach 10k, but with how fragile I feel both physically and mentally, I will treat every written word as a win, even if I will end up with only a few.  

This World Ember, I pledge to prepare and write sustainably - I will prepare and write as much as I can, while still taking care of myself and my needs, and I will not overexert myself for some arbitrary goal.

    This is the current state of my Bingo card. Some things are X-ed out - for example, I've been in the Discord since 2018, checking that off would feel like cheating, especially since I'm not doing the row/column thing. Since I made Yvari into an event world, the categories come from which event I participated in and there's no world primer or core articles. Since I just did the revamp, there ar eno strubs left, and I decided not to put any schedule pressure on myself.  

First Bingo Task: Find an accountability buddy

This one I can't take credit for, I actually wasn't planning to do this, since I don't even know how much energy I can invest. Still, Leijona reached out to me and we decided togive this a shot, see how we both can profit in our respective ways this World Ember. I'm really looking forward to this!  

Second Bingo Task: Define your scope

Time for an update! It's funny, simply talking to Leijona and knowing there is someone who will ask me about my progress has made me more engaged already. I can't recommend having an accountability buddy enough!   I've also narrowed down four more options for the other three Bingo slots. While I can do things like "Read a book" or "Go for a walk" anytime and they are good things to do, I want to try and see if I can find more worldbuilding-focused Bingo-Tasks. Reading is a habit I'm trying to cultivate together with hte Cookie chapter anyway, so it feels like cheating to include this as World Ember Prep - I will count it, though, if I can't finish enoguh tasks. The amount of inspiration I got from books and also random science articles is too much to count - did you know that apparently octopi have an extra brain for each of their arms? So kind of like one central brain and 8 extras? *eyes my Eziliari, a sea creature-inspired sapient species* I wonder how much personality those additional brain have....   As for the second task, I ended up choosing a defined scope - I've tried this approach before and it worked well for me. However, unlike last time, I will not restrict myself geographically, but thematically: Religion and Conflict are going to be the two topics I want to tackle.   Religion has been something on my mind from day one in Yvari. As much as I like the concept of a cleric (and I'm religious myself IRL) I didn't want to have Gods actively meddling with the world. I love seeing it in other worlds, but it didn't feel right to do it myself. Also, I wanted to explore how people take "real phenomena" (aka physical phenomena that are unusual or not easily explained with the currently available technology level, like eclipses or ball lightning) and see what people who don't understand those make of it. Even in worldbuilding, I can't escape the conflict that I face in my spiritual life: love for natural sciences and still believing in the unexplainable of religion. I have the urge of making Yvari a world where all things are real and explainable yet I still want to preserve a sense of wonder. Not sure if that is a doable thing, so I'll keep moving in this field of tension and see where it takes me and if I like what the world is becoming. For now, let's just say there is SO much thinking going on about the background of religion and magic and how it relates that will probably never see an actual expression in the world, I wonder if I should blog about this at some point.   So what can you expect for World Ember in this department? I'm cooking up several religions at once, trying to find commonalities on a deep level that is not necessarily obvious, and I don't expect the bits and pieces to all be of the same religion. It will probably be a lot of religion-related things in different cultures, but most likely no coherent picture yet, since there is so many question marks still in the background.   Conflict is the second topic and well. It seems obvious in conjunction with religion, given how much religious friction the real world is showing today. But in my mind it is actually only tangentially related when it comes to Yvari. I do not plan to write in big religious conflicts or anything. Instead I want to look for ways to inject conflict in the world. I've always been someone who tries to talk things out and find common ground and a compromise, so as a result, Yvari as it currently stands has very few big conflicts. No warring neighbors, no dynastic infighting.... But conflict is necessary for stories. Of course, people are people, and there is plenty of smaller everyday conflicts everywhere. Teenagers will be teenager in any world ;) and there will always be THAT neighbor. And I'm glad there's no everything's-at-stake, world-threatening conflict. Those can be fun, but once they're over it's hard to top them.   Still, I'm currently thinking about causes of conflicts and how and where in Yvari I could create situations that force conflict. I've tried doing that between Ouvezia and Novali a few year ago already, but it's difficult to write for me and I haven't gotten deep into the topic. November for me will be thinking about what causes conflict, what makes it worse, and also about what consequences do I want in Yvari. I don't have a clear vision yet how that will show up in World Ember, but I hope this will come with time as long as I keep thinking about it.  

Third and Fourth Bingo Tasks: Read a Book / Make a list of articles to write

After deciding on religion as a topic, I decided to spend my monthly book budget on inspiration on the topic. I don't expect to finish any of those, but I started digging in and it already gave me some ideas and new perspectives, so I do count this as successful prep. (Small aside: if you don't mind used books, check out World of Books. I love them and so far had only good experiences with them, and these four books including shipping were around 50€!)   Especially since the last week of November is gonna be my vacation, with two extended train rides. I started out with Eliade's Shamanism and I'll probably take E. O. James' The Ancient Gods with me on the trip if I need a change. Campbell at this point almost feels like required reading as a worldbuilder - I encountered it when diving into writing and storytelling as well as when looking into myth/religion. I'm not sure if I like the idea of a cookie cutter-style but even if I end up not agreeing it feels like a text that has been so influential, it's good to read.   In addition to that, I have started condensing my fuzzy cloud of ideas for religions into chunks that could become articles. I have tons of notes on Ouvezian religion, for example, but I don't feel everything is as it should be yet. So I ended doing what helped me with my first World Ember back in the day: A Google Sheet with article name, a short idea/description and a comment field. I also ended up adding other non-religious articles in there - mostly stuff that never got written from before. I'm kind of doubting my ability to get this religious cloud into something writable - in a way, I worry the ideas may not be ripe yet? I figured it's good to have alternatives to fall back on, and also it may help with the conflict focus.  

The Final Bingo Task

I was trying to find a non-trivial task that would directly contribute to my world, since I wasn't going for the bingo line or row proper. I was actually trying to go for finding adjectives that describe my world (or, maybe easier, my regions). Or maybe moodboards, but in the end I was running out of steam. And since this year I wanted to prioritize rest and my well-being over achieving goals, I ended up re-examining the Bingo board.   Originally I assigned "read a book" to Mircea Eliade's shamanisn, but then I realized that would fit better for the "doing research" bíngo task. And coincidentally, in my sister's book shelf I stumbled across the book that captivated me: Naomi Alderman's "The Power". It's been a while since I devoured a book in a day, and I've thoroughly enjoyed being able to just indulge. This books was right up my alley: changing one thing and following the consequences. My favorite way of worldbuilding. And as a plus, it also has strong religious connotations and is a lot about conflict, the two topics I chose to focus on. So I decided to reassign "read a book" the The Power and move Eliade to "research" (because it is an academic tome after all).   Still I also ended up checking off other bingo boxes that I did anyway - taking strolls through a new city, since I'm on vacation anyway, or rewriting my author description. I've given this quite some thought but ended up not adding much - it is the internet after all, and I'm not talking to just some friends. (Feel free to ask me about more of myself! I just wasn't comfortable to put it out there just like that.) Funny enough, if you count the fact that II've been active int he community for years, this actually gives me a real bingo line!