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Resolutions '24

I've been struggling to make good use of World Anvil. I love the platform and I'm passionate about my worldbuilding, but I still find myself worrying about whether my content is "good enough" to be posted here, which is silly I know because the whole reason I subscribed to World Anvil was to give myself a single place to organize my worldbuilding that's been spread across random notebooks and sketchpads for decades now.    Looking through some of the other worlds and articles people have created, even those that are recognized as being some of the best on the platform, I see people who are putting out there worldbuilding in varied states of completion. People who are unafraid of later changing what they share today. I've seen notices on world homepages warning followers that articles may be getting archived, heavily edited, or the like because the creator has decided changes are needed to make the story/game/world better.    They tell me to kill my darlings, and I've tried to take that to heart, but I think I need to acknowledge that in the way I work I've come to simply have no darlings. Like being the fan of a series where the author loves killing beloved characters in horrific ways, I've stopped putting my work out there to prevent myself from getting too attached should I need to change it later, but this has left the world I have in World Anvil out of sync with worldbuilding that still lives in those notebooks and sketchpads. That's defeating the entire purpose of being here.   So, as simple as it sounds, my goal going into 2024 is to just start sharing what I've been creating. It doesn't need to be perfect to be shared, and it won't be because that's both impossible and counter to the reason for the exercise. It's not like what I have shared is perfect either.    To that same end, it's time to get myself organized. I've kinda let my world turn into a cluttered mess because the only time I really make myself sit down and post things is for competitions like Summer Camp when I can turn the work into more digestible responses to a prompt rather than thoughtfully crafting the world like I used to do. Getting my world more organized will help me see where thigns I've written overlap and need to be addressed. Hell one of the biggest values of using World Anvil is interlinking everything and literally nothing I have up is linked properly.   Now, I'm genuinely disdainful toward new years resolutions. I think they simply set us up to fail because the artibrary position of celestial bodies doesn't give us the motivation to follow through on what we claim any more than it gives us phenomenal cosmic powers or the means to enact global change from the comfort of our social media accounts. So I'm not going to make a resolution, despite the name of this challenge, but rather just state these goals. Maybe I'll reach them, maybe I won't. It's like starting a bingo card or a scavenger hunt; I've got things I need to look for and I'm going to do what I can to get there, but I'm also going to not put counterproductive pressure on myself to get it all perfect right now. This will be a process. It's going to take time, it's going to be painful, and I'm going to have periods where life prevents me from working toward those goals, but I'm not going to let it be a thing I succeeded or failed at. Instead, it's a change in lifestyle that's going to build to something new in my life. Who knows, maybe I'll start journaling on here when I don't feel the motivation to write proper articles. (Honestly, I wish this challenge worked off journal entries instead of articles, because that's what this feels like to me.)    Whatever shape it ends up taking at the end of the year, I'm not going to ask myself if I succeeded or failed my resolutions from today. Instead I'm going to try to see the journey from this moment to where I am come next World Ember and measure not some arbitrary binary, but rather my own growth as a writer and a person.   I don't know if anyone will be coming with me on this journey, but if you're reading this I hope for both of us a year that helps us be more who we want to be, who we need ourselves to be.   So here I go. -D

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