Rue Marr's WorldEmber 2023 Pledge

Good day everyone; I hope you're all having a good November! At the time of writing, it's the 21st, and WorldEmber is fast approaching. I'm a little late getting started with the homework, but it was for a good cause. I've been hard at work creating page upon page of notes for the last several weeks, and soon, I'm hoping it's all going to pay off. So, without further adue, here's my pledge for WorldEmber 2023:

My Goal

That's right: As this image indicates, my goal for this year is to write at least 100,000 words over the course of December. But that's not all: As a stretch goal - just a minor one; you know, to give myself something to push myself towards - I'm also planning to try and win the Most Words Written badge this year (assuming there is one, which isn't officially confirmed just yet.)
Haha. Ha. Funny joke. Yeah, no, it really does sound like that; but I am at least partially serious. Let me explain myself.
I am not someone who has any business winning that kind of a badge. There are a couple reasons for this: For starters, I'm not someone who can just sit down at a page and whip up thousands of words of writing; I actually suck tremendously at that. It takes me ages to come up with the stuff I put into articles for Pretheya, and I've also got the burden of comparing it with all existing lore to make sure that it's both canon-compliant and makes sense in and of itself. Not just that, but since a lot of my writing draws from real world sources of inspiration, I often have to make sure I'm getting my actual sources correct as well.
But that's not the biggest reason. That would be my poor health. I have nerve damage in my hands, which puts me in constant pain whenever I type too much. Usually, this starts to kick in after about an hour of work, and necessitates that I take 30 second breaks every 3 minutes (facilitated by a program called WorkRave that reminds me to do so) to avoid crippling myself. This also straight up just isn't enough, and usually, there will come a point in the day where my hands are in agony no matter how many breaks I take. So not only is my setting poorly suited for a task that's all about writing as much as possible, but I'm also physically unfit for it.
So, with these two things in mind, the obvious question is; why on earth am I trying to do this? The answer's actually kind of complicated.
To talk a bit about myself: I am a three-time school school dropout, a two-time college dropout, and a one-time university dropout. I have also started uncountable projects throughout my life, and dropped something in the region of 95% of them before finishing them. To date, I can't think of a single undertaking that has lasted me longer than a month that I've actually finished.
That's not something I'm very happy about. Actually, it's been one of the biggest things I dislike about myself for as long as I can remember. I have watched many of my close childhood friends go to university, graduate, and now get jobs, and in my eyes; I still have nothing to show for myself.
I want to change that, and I've decided that WorldEmber 2023 is my opportunity to do so. If I can complete my goal of getting 100,000 words written in December, I'll consider that a victory. But what I really want is to win the Most Written badge. It's not the badge I care about; it's the fact that getting it is something that will be - assuming it's even possible, which is in no way guaranteed - incredibly gruelling, difficult, and honestly probably unfun. But that is almost entirely why I want to do it. I want to prove to myself that I can do something that is hard and that is not enjoyable but that is nevertheless important to me, without dropping out or giving up half-way through. In that sense, the fact that I'm incredibly poorly suited for it only makes it more enticing.

The Plan

Now, given what I described earlier about my physical limits, it may seem like this should actually not be possible for me. If everyone participating in the word rankings was doing so on even footing, that would be almost certainly be true; but fortunately for me, there's one advantage I've got that probably no one else competing does. Namely: That I am a complete and utter NEET who won't have any problems at all finding 14+ hours a day to work on my contest entry.
The greatest barrier to entry in competing for a "Most Words Written" challenge isn't how skilled you are; it's how much spare time you've got. In that regard, I may be a moderately slow writer and also disabled, but boy do I have a LOT of spare time. Significantly more, I believe, than most people on this site. Normally this would be a thing to deride me for, but here, it's a massive advantage. I can make up for the fact that I can only write really slowly by just having much more time to do it than other people.
This is the one thing I've got going for me, which I'm hoping will be enough to let me pull through and clutch out a win. But even so, I hold no delusions about it being easy. I expect to spend just about every waking moment of my December either eating, reading, or writing; and probably the vast majority of it in significant amounts of pain.
To be honest, I am not actually expecting to win. My estimation is that I will get to about the two week mark, then run out of energy. Additionally: Having already hurt my hands once from writing too much, I'm not planning on doing it again, so if it gets to the point where I'm at risk of damaging my hands; I will also drop out.
But other than that, I'm planning on giving it my best shot! And in the event that I don't succeed, I hope to have at least cleared the 100,000 words mark, so I'll at least be able to say that I tried my best.
Now, with all that preamble out of the way: I still need to actually do the rest of the homework to get the badge, so let me take care of that now:

Choosing an Area of Focus

My goals for the event directly preclude me from picking any one single area of Pretheya's lore to focus on, or else I won't have enough to draw from to hit my desired word count. Instead, I'm planning to try and submit one article to each of the special categories this year; with the intent of having a little bit of everything in the entries I make.
At a guess, based on my notes, I have a feeling that the topic I'll write the most about will probably be history. I've got plans to finally expand a little on the Blazing Empire; the arguably second most important polity ever to exist in Pretheya's history, behind only the Grannr itself. Another big article I'm hoping to get a start on is the History of the Wyrms: A mega-article written in prose that's going to depict the moment the Ormr awoke on Pretheya, and follow them on their path to the eventual enactment of the Law of Mortality.

Creating a Mini-Meta

Oh dear: This is another thing that's a little challenging to do, again given my word-count goals. Still, I'll give it my best shot. To start off with, the scope will be the, uh, entire continent; so this is already not looking that mini at all. I'm going to use this as an exercise to basically just talk a bit about the stuff mentioned in the blog post on how-to write a mini met.
Themes: Generally, Pretheya is intended to cover some fairly mature themes. Although they've not shown up extensively yet, I still maintain that the core of the setting has to do with issues of sex & sexuality, gender, religious belief, the experiences of persecuted minorities, and perhaps centrally; philosophy and more specifically identity. In case you're new to the setting and just read this and now think Pretheya is the most intimidating and hardcore thing ever: Don't worry, like I just said, this stuff doesn't actually show up much at all in stuff written as of the time of this pledge; it's more relevant to the novels I have planned.
Mood: This is a tough one, and something I spend quite a lot of time thinking about. Generally speaking, Pretheya is meant to emulate the real world mood-wise; which in my experience means that it largely consists of semi-endless tedium, interspersed by high highs and significantly lower lows. It sounds pretty depressing when you put it that way, but then again, that's how a lot of people feel about real life. The key, I think, is that there are a lot of parts of Pretheya that are genuinely really cheerful. I always feel happy when I get the chance to write about the Curious, for example; or the fun stuff the Intersedrans get up to in their festivals. It's kind of like how Berserk isn't totally miserable 100% of the time; even it has those moments of joy, short-lived as they often are.
Goals: Pretheya - as in the WorldAnvil page you're on right now - is essentially a wiki for a novel that I'm planning to release in 2-3 years time. It exists so that I can consolidate lore in a readable format, with the benefit of also having it available to other people who are interested. But really, that's the main reason for this site's existence; all the stuff on here wasn't created specifically to be fun for other people to read, but rather as a resource. Of course, I do hope that people enjoy it: I'm just not actually sure whether or not that's the case, given how niche all this is.
Inspiration: This one, I'm fairly familiar with: The biggest thing by far is the more-than-a-decade I spent playing World of Warcraft. The biggest after that is probably the Dark Souls series along with Fromsoft's other titles, most prominently Bloodborne. Then there's Final Fantasy XIV, Project Moon's Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina, the indie game Gnosia, and more other stuff that I probably can't remember.

Category Structure

Regarding this: I actually got done very extensively overhauling my categories about 4 months ago, and so there's nothing I could do for this prompt to change them; I'm perfectly happy with them the way they are. As such, I'll be skipping this one.

Homepage Review

I actually did this this morning without even realising it was the third week's homework. Talk about a lucky coincidence! Anyway, I went ahead and reworked the intro blurb, adding a new one written more about the meta themes of Pretheya than the in-universe content, and I'm really happy with how it turned out. Additionally, I also created a blurb about content warnings in the setting, and added three new sections: A list of recommended articles for new readers, a (currently empty) list of novels, and a short 'About Me' for myself.

(Unfortunately, the screenshots ended up looking a bit scuffed, because they're all different aspect ratios.)

Last Minute Preparation

I've spent the last week or so prior to and after writing my first draft of this pledge practising typing in ways that doesn't hurt my hands as much. To my surprise, I think I might've actually made something of a breakthrough: I've discovered that typing while standing up is a lot easier on my hands. I have a desk that can switch between standing and sitting, so just typing while standing up isn't new to me, but I'd not actually tried doing protracted writing while stood up much in the past. So far though, I was able to spend just about the entire day writing today, and as of typing this, my hands don't hurt. Here's to hoping this isn't just a fluke, and this turns out to work for WorldEmber too!
I plan to continue experimenting in this regard until it's time to get started on writing, and that'll probably be it for last minute prep; since I feel as if I've got enough notes to go by that I won't run out of stuff to write. So, to everyone who reads this who's also participating: Best of luck to you, and may you also achieve your goals!