Summer Camp 2026 Prep

Though I began originally cataloguing my worlds in WorldAnvil some time ago, I did not at that time explore many features or devote much time to learning the system, and eventually returned to my old ways of semi-organized Google Documents. I was recently reminded that WorldAnvil exists, which prompted me to check the site out again. After refreshing my memory on just how little of my worlds' lore I had actually input to WA, and seeing that there was a Summercamp sale on guild membership, I took the leap and joined, in the hopes of finally organizing my messy lore and timelines. And then, upon seeing that there was effectively a worldbuilding jam going on next month, I realized that was exactly the kind of motivator I needed to get some of these ideas written out, while being a semi-guided tutorial of WA's features. So here I go!

Week 1: Love

The world of Falsehoods spans many years and many lives, brutal upheavals and prolonged empires. The gamut of love can be found there. But, for the purposes of Summer Camp 2026, I will be focusing my attention on a particular storyline, Penelope (more on that in Assignment 2). The love featured in this storyline is uncomfortably intense, ideologically complicated, and existentially depressing. The majority of the plot follows two people who were literally created for each other. Penelope is a young girl whose entire life has been directed by the intelligence agency, PAX. PAX orchestrated the marriage of her parents (as well as their deaths) ; PAX raised and trained Penelope in spycraft, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence; and PAX gave her the greatest gift she could have ever imagined - John. John is an android prototype, developed and built by PAX to serve as the ultimate agent and programmed to protect Penelope with his life. John believes he is a real man - Penelope's uncle and the last of her family, who's been raising her since her parents died in a car accident in her infancy. Both characters are, in the beginning, deeply loyal to PAX and grateful for all that the organization has done for them. But an investigation into a terrorist group glutting the cybernetics black market with military-grade augments on the cheap leads the pair to uncover mysteries that PAX would prefer remain hidden, bringing loyalties into question.

Assignment: Pledge Your Goal

I've had the benefit of discovering this event, and particularly the Homework Assignments, late. Which is to say, I was able to read the prompts for all four homework assignments before I even decided to pledge. So I did a little bit of self-testing before deciding to pledge to commit to 24 prompts. It feels like a large enough number to be a challenge, but going for 32 challenges might be more than I could handle, considering that I'll be travelling for part of July. I'm going to participate with my world "Falsehoods" because I've been thinking about it alot lately, especially the linkages between various storylines that take place in it.

Hopscotch 1

2B) I'm new to this, so I don't have any maps or timelines! I've created a new "Overall Historical Timeline" and started gleaning large-scale events from my disorganized notes and plotting them on the timeline. My focus area for this challenge won't require much in the way of maps, so I'll leave that alone for now and possibly add maps if there are Summer Camp prompts that are map-focused.

Warm-Up Prompt: WILD EYES Facility

Week 2: Growth

The inciting incident of the Penelope storyline is Penelope and John being assigned their first real case together: to investigate a cybernetics smuggling ring that's finally done the one thing that pisses the United States government off more than anything - providing safe, effective, life-saving medical care, and sometimes weapons, to poor people. This exponential growth of the number of everyday people with augments that would otherwise be available only to the wealthy is having a two-fold effect on local communities: greater economic advancement for those so inclined, and more violent gang and terrorist activity for those so inclined. The investigation itself will reveal clues to Penny and John, leading them both to question the stories they've been fed by PAX, and straining and strengthening their bond, like exercise builds muscle.

Assignment: Choose your Area of Focus

My area of focus for Summer Camp 2026 will be to hash out the details of a specific storyline in my Falsehoods world, Penelope. This storyline encompasses a period from about 1920 to 2000, building an alternate history via character backgrounds, while focusing the action on the year 1999, when the past decades’ activities culminate in what I hope will be an emotionally intense exploration of identity, generational trauma, and familial love. I've also chosen to focus on quality of detail, not quality of writing. I don't want to agonize over the finer connotations of a word and whether that really suits the mood of the piece. If I use the same sentence structure repeatedly, to the point that it reads like the world's most monotonous spoken word poetry, so be it. This is about organization, not novelization.

Hopscotch 2

1) I’ve chosen this to be my area of focus for a number of reasons. First of all, keeping my focus as broad as a storyline will enable me to easily find gaps to fill in just about any category the SummerCamp prompts might throw at me. I can develop timelines on scales from decades to scenes, I can develop organizational structures and cultures, locations, characters, visuals, etc. But the nature of the Penelope storyline will organically limit me to a fairly restricted space: There are only four primary characters, and the majority of the plot takes place in one of two environments - government facilities, and a road trip - over the course of perhaps 6 months. I’ve also chosen this scope because it’s been too long since I worked on this storyline and I’m beginning to forget the details. Also I’ve been getting a bit burnt out on the romance heavy storyline, The Will of The Gods, that takes place much later in the Falsehoods world. I’d like to spend some time on a darker, more complicated kind of love - that between two people engineered to have the kind of devotion that can become everyone’s problem if the engineers lose control. This kind of relationship is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine, and this storyline involves alot of violence and body horror, which delights my id and engages my scientific interest.

Warm-Up Prompt: Washington State, USA

Week 3: Loss

Loss abounds in the Falsehoods world, especially in the Penelope storyline. Loss of life, loved ones, sanity, loyalty, purpose, control: all plague the characters of Penelope. And the losses experienced by these characters have ripple effects over a thousand years into the future, where mystified and decontextualized impressions of the characters are worshipped as Gods. In the centuries between, whole cultures are eradicated, reborn, and eradicated again, knowledge is deliberately destroyed or hidden, and human rights become an afterthought in the face of survival.

Assignment: Plan Your Writing Time

I used my week 2 assignments to test how long it took me to write 300 words - about an hour with interruptions (it would have been about 30-40 minutes had I not been interrupted). That's a reasonable amount of time to expect myself to be able to get in most days. There will likely be days that I have more time and can tackle more prompts, but there will certainly be days that I won't be likely to answer any prompts. In particular, there is a week that I'll be travelling. While I may yet be able to write on some of those days, I expect to be quite tired and want to give myself the leeway to not write at all those days.

Hopscotch 3

4A) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzPZI8Uxuy8GZiUimdc9N-zAqaZnrwe76

4B) I've purchased a copy of Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely. I read The Big Sleep in a weekend and I suspect I can do the same with the second Philip Marlowe book. I'll update this with a little book report once I have. The Penelope story is heavily inspired by the hardboiled genre and film noir. Though the presence of cyborgs and androids in the story might tempt one to think it's more cyberpunk, along the lines of Blade Runner... this particular story takes place prior to mass-commercialization of augments within the Falsehoods world. The hypercommercialization, megacities, and corporate oligarchies quintessential to cyberpunk will be missing, replaced with normal sized cities, shady government-sponsored research, and a burgeoning black market. Much more of a film noir vibe than cyberpunk. There will be later stories in this world that get more cyberpunk, once androids are getting mass produced (look out for The View from the Dollhouse; I'll get around to draft 2 sometime).

Warm-up Prompt: GodTongue

Week 4: Family

The question of what makes family is a foundational theme within the Penelope storyline. Is it the people genetically related to you? The people who raise you? Who teach you? Who protect you? Can you decide who counts as family regardless of what others may think? What do you do when individuals disagree about whether or not they are family? Can organizations be families? Should abuse and/or neglect be forgiven for the sake of family cohesion?

Assignment: Your Goal as a Worldbuilder

Way back when I first started constructing fictional worlds as a child, it was to escape the real world, and to emulate the fantasy authors who had helped me do so. But that was way back. Nowadays, worldbuilding still serves those goals, but there are more goals, and specific goals more pertinent to Summer Camp and my chosen focus area.

• Penelope is a storyline that my partner and I developed as a collaborative effort, but that we let fall to the wayside in favor of our individual projects; I’m hoping to use the Summer Camp prompts as opportunities to reopen our conversations and deliberations about this storyline and possibly even to build momentum to make more progress on the final project - a limited comic series - after Summer Camp.
• It's been some time since I put much thought into this story and I'm forgetting details and revisions I've made in the past, and what I have written down is not very well organized; I'm hoping that Summer Camp can help jog my memory and elucidate gaps that I hadn't even been aware of, much less ever considered filling.
• I am not familiar at all with WorldAnvil, but I'm pretty convinced already that it will be immensely helpful in pinning down details and keeping my future writing lore-accurate. I'm hoping that Summer Camp can be a bit of a Boot Camp for me in learning how to use WA and leveraging the various connections among elements.

Hopscotch 4

2B) My partner will be my accountability buddy! I've informed him of this challenge and the goals I hope to achieve with it and he's fully on-board. He's excited to help me remember and work out details, and to see what kinds of thoughts and schemes will come out of this challenge!