2024 New Year's Resolutions

The Last 12 Months

Well, well, well. We made it to 2024. Welcome. The last 12 months has been interesting for me both in terms of personal life and starting my journey with World Anvil. And what I can say with confidence is that this has helped me grow my worldbuilding and story ideas massively.
Seriously, it is insane how far I have come in terms of creating worlds, characters, locations and stories in the last year. Largely cause I have a tool that helps me not only generate ideas but also improve on my thoughts and makes me want to expand things further. So glad I gave World Anvil a go.
Now I am no way near the best anvilite on this platform but who bloody cares, worldbuilding is fun and I'm going to keep going (hopefully to bigger and better things). So, yeah. To sum up the last year, awesome. Not only for getting stuck into something new but also entering contests and seeing people actually like my stuff :D
Speaking of contests...

Summercamp Goals

I joined the Summercamp challenge and gave it a go and to my surprise I ended up coming up with a lot of ideas. Check out my review for that here: The Reading Challenge of 2023.
And I remember making some goals after that challenge which were:

• Update 1 article per week (17 in total)
• Add 1 image per week (17 in total)
• Create 1 character a month (5 in total)

I can safely say I smashed all these goals! Getting most of my articles from a short stub of 50 words to something comprehensive and actually adds lore to my world of Violem. I have also been able to add my own drawings to a lot of monsters I have made. Now you may not be able to see all the characters I made, but I played a campaign and fleshed out about a dozen NPCs which I am slowly adding and placing inside my plot The Lute of Shara.
It just feels good to have set a some long term goals complete and gone up and beyond. It definitely gives me the confidence to carry on even more and go the extra mile for future articles.

WorldEmber

Now World Ember scared me at first, I won't lie. I joined the homework part late and my original ideas wouldn't work. The rules explicitly stated timeline entries don't count and I really wanted to add story extracts to each timeline entry to flesh the lore out a bit. So my way around it initially was to imagine a character, The Librarian, telling and reading stories inside The Great Library of Birohhal.
But as soon as I started going, I couldn't seem to stop. In fact, I began having a flood of ideas for an entirely different continent in the world, Hoarwae. Adding journal entries of a sailor, creatures and even a sea shanty (And I'm terrible at singing). And before you know it, December came to an end and I had over 25k words. That's insane!! For someone who at the start of the year struggled to write 300 words on a single article was able to do that. Insane! Crazy! Bonkers!
And having a focus on presentation, I hope my submissions look good (for a free account) as well as read well. Something I really want to focus on moving forwards is the BBcode and finally buying a membership to really get the right look for my world (which I still have no idea about its themes to be honest, it feels more like a brain dump).

The New Year

Now after looking and reading articles from the community, there is 3 things I noticed stood out. The first is that I love articles with good presentation, which I already want to improve on. The second is there isn't massive text blocks like some of my articles, my favourites layout the page in a way that's easy on the eye, interesting and doesn't waffle. Finally I seemed to gravitate towards the fun and silly ideas (Sandfishes is gold, Bestiary Creatures of Vreathe is a fun spin on book reviews, Fish & Shrimp I want in my own campaigns).
All this worldbuilding is great, but it has also reminded me why I wanted to create worlds to begin with. And that was so I could write stories and play inside this world of fantasy, this is one of my biggest goals for the next 12 months. I think the best thing for me to do is come up with some new long year achievements to set me right and give me a clear path moving into 2024. So, here are my goals for the upcoming year.

1. Buy a World Anvil Membership (I will definitely get my money's worth)
2. Play 1 TTRPG game per month (Set in my world of Violem)
3. Update the presentation of current articles (1 per week)
4. Create 4 stories set in Violem (Plots, One Shots, Campaign, Anthology Series, Short Stories)

Thank you to all who have looked, liked and commented on my work this year. I appreciate all the kindness. Congrats on everyone in the community who entered a contest this year and I hope you have a great year of worldbuilding and storytelling.
To 2024 BABY!!!