Summer Camp's Summer Survey: 2019's Electric Boogaloo Edition
Another fantastic Summer Camp draws to an end, with blood and tears shed, coffee consumed and muses exhausted. But don't relax too much! The next challenge it lurking just around the corner! Like we did for WorldEmber, I thought it'd be interesting to take a moment and take stock of everything we learned through the struggles of Summer Camp. This year's prompt were really interesting and they allowed me to really go deep into a region of Araea that I haven't really done previously. Without further faffing about... Answer in the comments below!
What was the Easiest prompt to write an article for?
What was the most difficult prompt?
What was the surprising favorite prompt that you didn't expect?
Was there any prompt you were excited to write as soon as you saw it?
How'd you approach the prompt order?
What goals did you set for yourself? Did you accomplish them?
What did you learn from this year's summer camp?
And.. What will you do differently next year? :D
For me:
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The easiest prompt: The Fortress-Garden of Dhanû - I had a very clear concept in mind and it was the first article I wrote, so it flower very easily.
Most Difficult: The Children's story. Beware the Anklebiters!. Just wasn't in the frame of mind for it! Even if last year's story ( Nahau and the Day in the Sun ) went pretty smoothly.
Surprising Favorite: Industrial Settlement. Izhaso, the Forge of Bones. Kinda started with "Who says forge has to mean metal", because I like twisting prompts and I like how it ended up. Second place goes to Dhanû Idioms and Sayings, which turned out a lot better than I thought it would.
Prompt-Hyped: Definitely the Influential Woman, as I had already hinted about her existence and what kind of lady she was in an early article through quotes. Ramaður-shi, Iron Hag of Dhanû is a tough lady, not to be messed with.
Prompt Order: I decided to do the prompts in order, to eliminate all the questions about "what to write next". Worked out OK!
Extra Goals: My goal was to reach 300 followers for Araea, because why not? Mission accomplished! My second goal was to gather more insight about my writing process, which failed miserably - I was too busy writing! My next goal will be to try and engage / get more engagement with those followers, maybe turn this writing thing into a career.
Lessons Learned: I learned that Summer Camp gets harder the deeper into it you get. The last 10 prompts were much more difficult than the first 20. Similarly, people's energy drop off and comments, etc get less frequent as people burn out. I also learned that I can expect at least 2-4 days in camp where I just won't get any writing done at all.
Next Year!: It is difficult to plan when you don't know what the prompts will be, but I am going to try to keep an more even tempo next year. Get the articles done before burnout sets in, but without keeping up a pace that invites it early.
As with last year, I'm going to try to list people's favorite articles here! Both for extra exposure and fun.
The easiest prompt: The first one I did was the important plant. It was too easy. I started Hvatvetna from scratch for this competition, and as I got things going, I ended up replacing the quick bit about Yronvid Trees with Lich Peppers. (Which then got referenced a bunch in some of my other articles. :) )
Most Difficult: The children's story. I'm not a big fan of scaring kids into compliance, so I had to make the alternative life threatening. Ice elf parents use the story of The Hot Man to keep their kids from wandering off and dying.
Surprising Favorite: The disease that comes with old age. Alzheimer's terrifies me, and I flipped it to "your memories come back and overpower you." Which is also terrifying, but different. And I managed to tie it into the world and the culture. I think The Price ended up being my best Summer Camp piece. (It got even better after Etalia pointed out that the word 'gift' means poison in Germanic languages.)
Most Excited: I decided to put my industrial outpost on another planet. Then I wanted to make that planet weird! So the few paragraphs of description on the planet Spekivard are actually based on several long conversations with an astronomer about how stars and planets form, orbital mechanics based on Kepler's laws of motion, and a paper model that let me visualize what the seasons would be on a planet with a "horizontal" axis of rotation.
Prompt Order: Whatever caught my fancy! I opened up all 30 prompts as tabs in a new browser window, and pasted the name of the prompt in as a placeholder article title. As ideas came to me, I could make notes in the pages. Sometimes those notes turned into enough words call that one done and I could ship it! In the evenings, I could flip through the remaining tabs and try to find ideas that would connect. The last 5 gave me a couple days lag, then came together in a rush and I shipped them all on the same night.
Extra Goals: My goal was to do 10 of these. I just learned about WA at the end of June, and so the competition actually distracted me from some other things that I was going to do in July. :) I'm very pleased to have gotten all 31 - gamification works. I'm looking forward to doing it again next year.
Lessons Learned: 1) I was totally blocked when I started, because I wanted to be writing the reference book for a game set in my world, but I didn't have everything in my head yet. So I started by writing in-world documents instead. The people in the world don't know everything, and so if there were inconsistencies, it wouldn't matter. Allowing my writing to be from an unreliable narrator made it much easier to just write. 2) SummerCamp can be all-consuming - it basically took all my spare time this month. 3) SummerCamp is also good practice in shipping the work when it is good enough. As I built connections between the ideas from the prompts, at a certain point I had to drop perfect consistency and just get words out the door.
Next Year: Next year I'm hoping to have more depth. Maps, more NPC's, more cultures, etc. Prompts about travel and relationships between cultures would fit my world well. Some more of the "what do people do every day" kind of things would also be fun, just to flesh out how the people live their lives.