Summer Camp 2021 Recap

Reflection on prep, Recap of Events, and Remarking on the future

One diamond, hold the burnout, please!

— Me, maybe

Summer camp is completed! (Ignore the fact that it's been completed for over a week now, I was taking a week off xD)
Before I get into how it went for me and my thoughts on it, how did it go for you? Did you do things in a healthy way and achieve your goal? No burnout occured, right? Now is the time to keep that momentum going :D

Recap

So I want to take a look at what worked for me, what didn't work, and what I achieved this month! How was it different from the last two summer camps that I did? And what should I take into next years?

The Prep

This year I didn't really prep at all for summer camp -- at least not in the way I had before. In prior years, I had completed things like meta documents, world primers, introductory articles and things like that. I'm not sure if it's because I already have some of those set up for Cathedris, or I just wasn't feeling it this year, but nothing like that really happened.
What I did do is write a "core" article, God-husks, leading up to summer camp. And then I also got into a bunch of CSS work in setting up "Stormbril's CSS add-ons!" that would prove useful for some of my summer camp articles.
Thinking about it now, I definitely did prep for summer camp -- just instead of world primers and art prep, I did connecting articles and CSS prep.

Summer Camp

I went in knowing I'd be having a busy month -- some entire weeks were taken up by camping with family, where I'd have no internet access to write. I also went in knowing that the last 2 SCs I did burnt me out entirely. So this year I went in with a goal of writing smaller articles! Overall, it appears to have been a successful goal -- though I still did write a teeny tiny bit more than I had hoped. My goal was to write somewhere around 500-700 words per article, and I ended up with an average word count of 730 across my 31 articles.

Staaaaaaaaaats

To keep Dhel happy, this article of course needed to include some much loved stats :D Additionally, it will include some insight into the stats as well!

Articles Written

31

Average Wordcount

729.32

Highest Wordcount

The Locked Scroll of the First Floor

Lowest Wordcount

Ash Halls

What's interesting about the word counts is that I started small in the beginning of the month -- my first 10 articles were all under 1k words, and were consistently fairly small. The middle of the month is where I started writing the longer articles, like the Locked Scroll and the Basalt Divers. Then I attempted to taper off the word count for the final 10, but sorta failed, as most articles were around 700-1000 words for the final 10. Maybe it was just the momentum keeping me going writing more? Working off of prior ideas? Who knows!

What I wrote

This year the prompts were fantastic for inter-linkage! Normally I like to try and do some during the month, but this time it was super easy to have almost every prompt linked to another one. I've listed out all 31 prompts I wrote here in groups of connected responses, for ease of viewing and reading!

Powerful Catalurgy Prompts

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Oh boy did I ever enjoy writing powerful Catalurgists! What I enjoyed most with them is having them become almost myth -- they've become people who use titles as their names, rather than the names they had prior. I'm definitely going to be making a series of these. Hopefully at least one for every type of Catalurgy! I've got ideas for "The Architect" already :D

Ichor Industry Prompts

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He'an Related Prompts

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Fear not! Fan favourite He'an will be getting more and more articles as well, of course :D
First things first, they absolutely deserve a portrait re-draw. He'ans original portrait was one of the very first I ever drew when starting Cathedris, and desperately needs an update. Also maybe some emojis to add to my Discord server o.o

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Hansun/Teneran Deep Prompts

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The Comprilith Prompts

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Soom-Shida Prompts

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Effects of Catalurgy Prompts

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Legion Prompts

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Snake Prompts

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Unrelated Prompts

Not every prompt was able to be tied to another in the list of 31 -- these two stood out from the rest as stand-alone responses! However, they're still quite connected to the rest of my world, and that makes me happy :)

What I read

Not as much as I would have liked :( If there was one thing I sort of faltered on, it was reading stuff this year. I follow around 100 worlds, and in these big events, it is HARD to keep up! I had a couple good reading sprints throughout the month where I powered through a bunch of my notifications, but I still had something like 150 unread articles at the end of July that I wanted to read.
All the same, there was some fantastic work that I read :D Because my memory is a potato, and I've cleared my notifications, I can't remember that many concrete examples :( But a few examples you should definitely check out if you somehow missed it: Qurilion's amazing work with Shedim, Dylon's exeptional prose and storytelling with The Void Between, CatRobi's gorgeous articles, writing, and art, and Emy's high quality (soon to be expanded, hype) worldbuilding. There's so much more that I wasn't able to fully read, or has slipped my mind D: I'm so proud of the entire Lodge, everyone did just amazing work. The entire WA discord should be proud of what they wrote too! If your name isn't on this shoutout list, don't fret, you did incredible as well :D
Special shoutouts to AvalonArcana and AmélieIS -- both of them were reading and commenting powerhouses, at the same time writing incredibly successful Summer Camps of their own :D Due to the aformentioned time crunch of this month, I haven't gotten around to reading their work yet (and also omg there's a lot of it -- looking at you, Amélie!), but you better believe it's on my list of things to check out.

Reflection

Overall, I think I am really really happy with how I handled Summer Camp this year! I achieved my goal of writing smaller, bite-sized articles (mostly) to help fill in the cracks and spaces left by the mega-articles that Cathedris is sorta known for. It helps me relieve a bit of the pressure I feel to always create something bigger and better than my previous work (which was getting pretty stressful D:)
Looking at the distribution of likes on the articles across the month is interesting as well. There's of course the standard distribution of likes -- the highest amount of them are on the early articles, and as the month goes on, the likes get less as people get tired from interaction. Makes sense to me! There are a couple stand-outs though -- The Locked Scroll of the First Floor, as well as Split the Stride and The Dream-maker all have more likes than the articles I also wrote around the same time.
The Locked scroll has fancy CSS, so that one makes sense -- Split the Stride is very short, and tied to Emy's amazing short story, so I get that one too! And then the Dream-maker is my amorous individual, and I guess that's just something that gets the community goin ;D

Onwards

I honestly don't know if I'm going to do the same thing next year! The small articles worked nicely for me, but I don't want them to totally outweigh my larger more fancy ones. It will depend on how much editing and expansion I do on these articles throughout the coming year!
I might go back to doing 10 polished articles and just aim for bronze -- but last year that really burnt me out, and I think that sort of worldbuilding is better suited for WorldEmber anyways.
As for the coming months -- expect more CSS add-ons, a big fancy article on The Comprilith, and expansions to this year's Summer Camp articles. I have a few God-husks with their portraits done and awaiting articles as well, but I find I need to be in the right mood to get those done -- maybe for WorldEmber? :O
Thanks for taking the time to read along with me, and I hope you're doing well <3

What did you learn from this year's Summer Camp? Any stats of your own to share? What about your favourite article you wrote? Any favourite articles of mine that you read? :D Let me know!

And as TJ says...

WorldEmber is coming