Summer Camp 2023 Pledge

"Hey, he's back!"

"Oh no. Now we're going to get dragged into more random nonsense, aren't we?"

"Quiet down! Make sure he doesn't notice you!"

The world: Creus, as usual
The goal: All 40 articles, each article with 1500 words minimum, 60,000 words minimum
The motivation: I haven't written much since the last summer camp. The reason was due to a major collision in my professional world - suffice to say that the job I had in the meantime sapped all of my motivation to engage in writing. It was a mean, nasty bit of work, populated mostly with vain and shallow children. This summer camp will be me recapturing that spark of creativity and drive to create, to engage folks with my ideas. In ordinary times I do the same thing with my job, but the stifling of this urge over the nonce just made it that much stronger.

On Power

Power is central to Creus, as the technological advancement of Creus has created Power (as an electricity analogue) for the masses. Power in its less literal form is embodied through the central government/empire of Etoile, the semi-rigid hierarchy of professional guilds, the new status of the nouveau riche industrialists, and the general centralization of society as it evolves quickly past its agrarian roots. The new power axis of magic and magicians threatens all of these prior power relationships, and represents a sea change in how many of the 'powerful' feel about their place in the world. I mentioned in Discord that the modern philosophical treatments of power are Hobbes, Foucault, Arendt, and Marx, and I'm hoping to add at least some originality on top of these classical philosophers as I worldbuild.
The novel I've been intending to write is meant to explore this power dynamic in great detail; much of my world building this summer camp will be in build-up to getting that novel written, hopefully this November.

On the Frontier

I already did a frontier themed camp a few years back (the Stagonids, an island chain on the periphery of the Principality of Etoile), but that was a well developed, open-for-tourists type of frontier. This year, I'm going to mine the undercurrent of the Age of Exploration that I've embedded in the world - the oceans have not been successfully crossed, and nobody really knows if there's anything over the horizon, though the denizens of Etoile are fairly sure the world can be circumnavigated.
In relation to the prompt about Power, many world-dominating empires justified their rule through their aggressive policies on territorial expansion, control, and relentless claiming of land and resources by the powerful entities within that empire. I don't think I have it in me to replay the history of the conquistadors in the Americas, but I think I'll have some islands far across the ocean that are in some way important to the recent revelation of magic. Part of any travel to there would involve traversing the frontiers of the Principality, the comparatively wild (but inhabited) lands of the Eastern Saibh archipelago, then the truly wild and uninhabited lands that require cartographic survey, a progressive culture shock for folks used to the glamour of the Etoile Capital City (which is itself a subtheme I explored in my prose work Fulcrum, submitted for the World Anvil anthology).

On Relics

I can't think of a more obvious setup for a Hero's Journey than these three consecutive themes, you may as well add The One Ring and be done with it. That being said, the backstory of my world (which is inferrable from some of the articles I've written) is centered around relic discovery, something I called 'Conceptual Objects of Creus' three or four years ago when I was developing the fundamentals of the world. Unfortunately, any story that deals with those Conceptual Object relics in a meaningful way (i.e. not just shiny MacGuffin) will irreversibly change the world, and I'm not quite prepared to go down that path yet.
I have gotten a lot of mileage from magic being new in the world, though. It's not just people discovering they're magicians, but also mundane objects being discovered to have magical properties. The existence of these magic objects is not well known and their mechanics are poorly understood, and the Principality of Etoile (my Empire) is on a frantic search to find them, gather them, and hoard them, due to their potential to destabilize the state. It's a lot easier to write short stories about these things and how they impact society and the world, rather than the stuff that'll sort of usher in a new era for the world.
I've found, however, that relics don't necessarily have to be magical or powerful. I have a category of relics in my world already; one off objects that are significant or interesting in some way, including contracts, prank items, sheer stupidity, and the like. All that matters is that they have some sort of significance to people, with a history naturally inferred from that significance. Maybe I'll write an article about the very first Power-Wagon that's in a museum somewhere, a testament to Progress and the advancement of technology, an object of near-worship by the Progress-obsessed cultural leaders of the Principality.

On Communication

As the technology level of my world is analogous to the mid victorian era, most people think about telegraph lines and similar - the world suddenly shrinking as it becomes easier and easier to dispatch messages over long distances. Without electricity, however, the closest thing in my world (that I'll be writing about) are semaphore communicators, basically people on tall rocks or buildings waving flags while other people watch them through telescopes - these existed in real life, but were as problematic as can be imagined. How will magic change this? Who knows!
Communications are vital for keeping a large unitary state, well, unified, so detailing all the ways the Principality maintains communications and verifies those communications is going to be a fair bit of work. The unification also presents all sorts of interesting conundrums when those of the Principality talk with those few small societies outside of it, which I explored in my prose work prior and will likely do so again - the language barrier is one thing, but the cultural barrier is quite another. This will also exist as a distinction between the urban and non-urban rural parts of society - the urban-rural divide is a major contemporary issue, and it'll be interesting to talk about a world that's only just even conceived of such a thing.

A Request for Edit-ees

Last year as part of Summer Camp I read live on stream a number of articles submitted to me by people who wanted editing and feedback. I'm more than happy to do so again this year - please reach out to me on Discord if you'd like articles read and edited. I was able to read a lot of super-cool stuff last year and people seemed to really appreciate my feedback. In the counter, I give express permission to anyone who would like, to read and send me edit suggestions on my own stuff this camp (not the old stuff, I don't want to dive into some of those really bad 5 year old summer camp stubs...).

On AI

I will be generating AI art for some articles that I believe would be illuminated by a piece of fore or background art - my articles on WA have historically not featured much art, and I think thoughtful placement of art would be very helpful. All my Art will be generated from a local installation of stable diffusion, and I'll attribute both the model, prompt, and seed for any art I use, in lieu of trying to attribute the original art used as training data and inference weights.
I'll likely use text generation AIs to brainstorm and help iterate on some ideas (and I would encourage people to do the same, especially to overcome writer's block), but I'm committing to no submission of AI text in any of my writing. No single word from any generative AI will be present in any of my World Anvil articles, now or ever.