Week One: Area of Focus
I have decided to focus on two different areas for this year's WorldEmber: Clean Up and New Stuff
(Note: the details under each of these may evolve over the month as part of further prep steps or additional ideas hit...)
Clean Up: No More Stubs!
This focus area is meant to work on cleaning up at least some of the many topics and subject areas that are stubs or otherwise need significant work for completion. The core of this work will be to take on the Stub articles list and work to reduce it. A second key part of this will be finishing important articles for the Overview category like Known Lands of Prodat.
Articles/Topics for this focus area include:
New Stuff: Adding Coolness
This focus area is meant to create new topics and subject areas that are not in WA yet. The idea is to add/create new coolness, whether it's things that haven't been added to WA yet or expansion on important areas where I've only got rough or even fragmentary notes.
Articles/Topics for this focus area include:
Week Two: Prepare your area of focus
To steal a summary from another WorldEmber Prep page (
Etrea): It's a little bit difficult to write a mini meta for my focus, considering it's mostly working on bunch of stubs and building out new bits all over my world, but I guess I can write a bit more about the categories I'll be working on.
Scope
As noted in Week One, the first part of my goal is to clean up stubs in particular topic areas. The first one is the Overview articles - there are a bunch of these that I have content for, but i have not taken the time to hunt down that content and forge (anvil reference FTW!) it into something coherent. The second one is the stubs for Kingdom of Eridane and its Noble Houses. This is one of those areas that could consume vast amounts of time and space, but with new characters joining the game, Eridane and its Noble Houses have taken on a bunch of new importance. Fact is I've written something like 2 dozen articles in the last 10 days, which probably would have been a non-trivial dent in my WorldEmber word count, but I wanted those articles up for my players, and they really liked them. (See
Lisri Inglor and
House Inglor as well as
Ormani Velaethyn and
House Velaethyn). And the third one is the articles for
Kingdom of Bartol, which are much more stubby and have a long way to go.
Much Bartol content isn't even started, so will fall under the second part of the goal, building out new stuff. The main focus for fleshing out Bartol will be building out the Royal Family and related characters, so there's a good couple dozen articles right there. In addition I have a lot of notes and even some maps for
Santar, so that is another big chunk we can add. Those additions will be more relevant to the Adventures of Zeek game than the main Princelings campaign, but are also a nice addition to the existing geography fpr Bartol. A further area that needs building out is
Prodatean Calendars, since I have a LOT of information related to that which has not been put into WA yet. Finally we have the
Kingdom of Zantea, which has barely even been mentioned in WA, but where there is some excellent potential for expansion.
Theme and Mood
As with most of my WA articles (so far), the theme is to make a "Wikipedia for Prodat", but as I write more I know I have found a small bit of editorializing coming in. I have thought about adding sidebars that are more RP or story focused, even if just quotes from characters. I may play with that a bit, particularly if some of my players show interest in helping out.
Goals
I would really love to get the articles and a decent family tree out for the Royal Family of Bartol. Adding at least some core elements for Zantea would be great too, but that will take digging through notes that are not super organized and will take some time - as well as discussions with a new player since their character will be part of that. And rounding out the Overview articles would be great, as would making a World Meta that is more than a stub (I just added that above...). Fleshing out stubs for Eridane and its Noble Houses is a nice to have, but a lower priority, especially since that generally means a lot of fiddly linking and not generation of longer content.
Inspirations
At this point I think my primary inspiration is my players, both the "old hands" and the new ones joining the Princelings campaign. Talking with them (vocally or over some chat medium, but almost always remotely) gets my energy up and my brain churning with new ideas. I also have been looking at some other WA worlds, as suggested for this challenge, and am finding some very cool stuff... but I will be honest and say many of them make me feel like I have so so very far to go - but that's a form of inspiration too, at least if it doesn't become overwhelm and perfectionistic self-doubt...
Week Three: Welcome your readers!
Review your homepage
OK, I will admit, I am blocking on this one hard core. The idea of having a cool, well thought out home page is great, but while I would love it if lots of people came to read about my world, my audience is the half dozen people who are currently playing in my D&D game set in Prodat... that's it.
Before even getting overwhelmed by a cool layout, I am stymied just trying to replace the very cool image of a cake one of my past players had made for us all to enjoy. Seeing was so huge, I tried to shrink it down, but apparently WA makes whatever the image is fit across the page, and it scales vertically the same amount. So after spending half an hour trying to fix one image, I had basically no impact on the awkward layout of the Prodat homepage. I know, I know, I can edit the photo into something more like a banner... provided I can also make it still look like a cake, etc, and that becomes actual layout and editing, something I don't really like doing.
In the end, what I really want is a new image, but I have no idea what or where to get something I can use or anything.
Week Four: Last minute prep
Once again I find this week's topic doesn't really work for me, but I will see what I can do with at least one of these:
Find a writing schedule
This is one prep thing that makes a lot of sense to me, but after previous stabs at WE and other such things and being very aware of my ADHD and other mental and physical health challenges, I am not optimistic about how effective this might be. But ok, maybe being clear about it will help me at least get a better handle on where I am at as the month progresses.
10000 words in 31 days is 322.58 words/day - let's call it 325. While I really don't have a good sense of how long it takes me to write new stuff, it seems to me like 325 works would mean at least 30 minutes a day, and more likely a full hour each day. Oof, that feels really really hard to do.
Thinking about when I can work on this, I think one approach might be to break the hour into two 30-minute sessions. I could do the first one right after work, and the other before bed. It might also work for me to do the first stretch at the start of the day or at lunch, but I want to be careful about not letting WE writing start bumping work time.
Tidy up writing space
Since I write from a living room chair on a laptop computer sitting on a tray table, I don't really have a dedicated "writing space". BUT the idea of organizing folders, etc. on one's virtual desktop makes some sense. I've already scanned through my Google Docs folders to review some of the areas I'm looking to clean up or add, and I can do more of that. And I
could (in theory) plan out what I'm going to work on... that I will need to ponder a bit, but I think I may add some more notes here during the week as I think that through.
Love that you're using your players for new ideas. Have you tried sending them out surveys to see what they like and what they'd like more of? I've done it a couple of times and gave my players a way to feedback anonymously. It was super useful and gave me more to think about. Anyway, good luck reaching your goal. I hope you have a fun WorldEmber! :D
Interesting idea! I will give that some thought - I think my current crop of players (and there's only 6 of them) are pretty open when we talk about game stuff, and only a couple of them have indicated they want to actually contribute to/help with WA, but it might be interesting to see what sort of feedback I get if I make it anonymous... :). Thanks for the idea!
"Wherever you go, there you are" - Buckaroo Banzai "Do or do not, there is no try" - Yoda "No plan survives contact with reality intact" - Me
I ran it with 5 players, but it was still useful. Good luck! If you do, I hope it goes well! :)