Stormbril's Summer Camp 2023 Stats!

Diaaaaaamoooooond!

— Stormbril

First of all, let's take a look at what my original goals were -- how did I do?

My goals were:

Reach diamond -
This one's the most straight forward and simple. Diamond has been achieved!
Training montage back into productivity -
This is a little bit more subjective -- what is "productivity" to me? I spent most of my days (aside from taking proper rest days here and there) working on articles. The vast majority of the articles I wrote this month were polished and at a level I was really happy with; I sort of tried to treat every prompt as it's own challenge article, and I think that's pretty visible with a bunch of them.
Overall, I feel like there's momentum behind me here -- time will tell if it sticks! Lets say this is a tentative success then :)
Fit prose into as many articles as possible -
Ah, another quantifiable goal! What percentage of the words I wrote this year was dedicated to prose? I made 10ish articles that had prose in them (I say -ish because some didn't have the dedicated prose container, BUT they were still focused on or themed towards storytelling in some way), to a total of 15,949 words of prose. That's 22% of all the words I've written (if we're counting BBCode too) as prose! If we take BBCode out, it's actually 28% of all the words written this summer camp as prose! That's pretty good, and I'm pretty happy with that :)

Quick stats

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Articles complete

32

WA Wordcount

72,387

BBCode "words"

15,966

Words of Prose

15,949

Lines of CSS

2,786

Average words

2,262

Interactive articles

10

Articles with prose

10-ish

Highest word count article

Dr. Evingston
7068 words

Lowest word count article

Dear Helen
943 words

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This Summer Camp, overall, I feel was my most successful summer camp I've ever done. I was more ambitious than I'd been before, and I managed to write more in a single month than I ever have. I think I wrote more in this one month than I have in any single year prior, too. There were prose heavy articles, big fancy set-piece articles, and plenty of interactive CSS elements.

— Stormbril

Before I delve into the deeper breakdown of how I felt about my SC2023 overall, I'd like to showcase some of my articles that I'm most proud of!

Great world lore

Articles I felt proud of because of the way they set up, explained, and produced Cathedris lore.

Powerful Organization

A great and evil organization that gets referenced all over the place!

Unclaimed Region

Very important location story-wise, and home of a God-husk >:O

Message to Many

Unique page styling and the event that changed Cathedris forever

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Great prose

Parts of the storyline I want to tell for Cathedris book 1, that I'm happy and proud of.

Manipulating Character

The main antagonist of Cathedris, contains tons of prose!

Secret Letter

Bit of fancy CSS and hopefully a hit to the feels, hehehe

Destructive Event

What might be the most important prose in Cathedris so far!

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Great interactivity

I can't help myself and love CSS too much, and these are my favourites I made this month.

Children's Story

ITS AN ENTIRE INTERACTIVE CHILDRENS BOOK :D

Shadowy Character

This is a whole CYOA built with WA CSS, 29 scenes and 5 endings!

Transport Vehicle

A "Stormbril Interactive" classic, hover over things to see more

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The Breakdown

Let's take a look at a few areas in particular, and see how I felt about them.

Wordcount

The Good

I wrote. A LOT.
And I am beyond proud! I barely had any articles under 1k words, and even a couple that were over 7k! My dream is to write a duology set in Cathedris, and I think this summer camp proves that without a doubt, that's an achievable goal.
The other really fun part is that a lot of those words I wrote, particularly the prose bits, are directly related or even actually planned to be part of my first ever book :D
The response has been amazing, and I am inspired <3

The Bad

I possibly wrote TOO MUCH.
Summer camp is "about getting ideas out", and in some cases, I let the ideas talk more than I let the talking... make... ideas? That doesn't make sense. Whatever. The point is, I would push for long hours on many articles because I just felt like I had so much to say on the topic. Every finished paragraph would result in another, as I go "oh yeah, and I can mention this next too!"
Which in some cases might be too much, and at least resulted in a lot of time spent. And I definitely got caught up in chasing "my most words written ever" as a side-goal, too.

Interactivity

The Good

One of my goals for a long time, ever since setting up Stormbril's CSS add-ons, was to build an interactive book set-piece that could be placed within a WA article. And it turns out this year was the year!
But not only that, nearly a third of my articles this year featured some sort of interactive bit to it. From simple things like clicking classified documents to reveal their secrets, waiting for quotes to change and become spooky, or even a fully-realized choose-your-own-adventure.
I feel really proud and accomplished of these cool articles I've made :)

The Bad

Summer camp isn't about the polish, and I happily ignore that fact >:)
So I'm not sure about how "bad" it is. But I do have to admit, it impacts the amount of work I get done, when I spend 12 hours in a day fiddling with CSS for an article and then the last 3 hours writing it. There were more than a couple nights where I stayed up until 4am working on things -- and while fun, it's definitely not the most healthy.
It's something I should be aware of, and make sure it doesn't get too out of hand or burn me out -- I enjoy it too much and don't want to lose that.

Summer Camp and the Chase for Achievement

The Good

I've gotten better these days about decreasing my hunger for badges, or for achieving things "just for the achievement" of it.
Instead what I like to focus on more is the process and progress, I want to do things that improve me and result in pieces of art that I'm proud to share with the world, or that serve further goals of mine, rather than trying to get things done for arbitrary completion value.
I think I did good at that this year! I chose diamond not because I wanted the highest badge, but because I thought it was achievable, and would result in me having a majority of productive days during the month that'd lead to consistency.

The Bad

There's definitely still some badge hunger and FOMO within me.
WA did a great thing this year with the wildcard prompts, making it easier to choose which to do in order to reach your goal! However, a not-insignificant part of me saw the 40 (42) total prompts, saw all the people writing all of them, and wanted desperately to write them all too, even if it was not worth it for my own specific goals.
Additionally, I started to get pretty tired near the end, and had to start working at convincing myself to be okay with only hitting Gold as well. I'm not sure if it counts as a success or failure that I still managed to go for diamond instead, lol.

Overall, the GOOD far outweighs the BAD in this case. The bad mostly serves as areas where I'm still observing and learning about my own creative process, and it teaches me lessons that I can forward to further success!

— Stormbril

And now I turn the question over to you:

How did you fare this summer camp?

In the comments of this article or in your own version of a "Summer Camp 2023 reflection" post, think about how you approached this event at the beginning of the month, and then reflect on how you feel about it at the end! What were your goals, and did you achieve them? Also, what were your favourite articles of your own that you made? Additionally, why were they your favourite? Sometimes the pressure and constraints of the summer camp format allows the most surprising and great articles to explode out of random areas of our worlds, and that's the magic that makes me love this event so so much :D