Worldember 2024 HW

Week 1

Wow, that time of year again already! This will be my second ever time participating in worldember, and I was really torn between working on zelda stuff again or my oc stuff, but eventually settled on officially doing worldember for Gilden this year and I can keep writing for zelda on the side, lol. Anyways, my area of focus seems a little generic, but really because this is a very new world I still need to lay out most of the basic groundwork foundational worldbuilding, especially overviews of key settings, lore, and characters, and I want to make sure I do that instead of just focusing on the nitty gritty details right away-- context, people, we need context over here! So 'context' is the main theme of my worldbuilding efforts for this year's worldember.

META. I'm sor terrible about keeping on top of my world meta, I swear. I had started to write a bit when I first made this world motnhs ago but haven't touched it since, so I went in and dusted it off and filled in most of the main things, and hope to continue refining it as I go.

Week 2

YEESH, I neglected this for a while! (it is currently the last week of november, oops) but in my defence being a full time university student keeps me pretty busy and lately I've been super obsessed with Frankenstein, because we're doing a unit on it in my english seminar, so pretty much all my free brainspace these last few weeks has been totally taken over by that. Anyways I tweaked by world homepage a bit and wrote out an intro/summary, but it's still pretty under construction, I want to draw a new world header and make art for the cover pages of my three main categories, but all that stuff isn't really my immediate priority right now, after actually writing. I DO need to make a new map, though...

Anyways, since my world is still quite barren of actual relevant content, I did go ahead and make a world primer, which gives a slightly more detailed and comprehensive to the world, but especially the story and characters that this world is for, both the general gist and some little spoonfulls of worldbuilding. There are a couple more things I want to polish up for it (namely, the map problem) but it'll do for now, so here it is:

Week 3

Inspiration-- reading books, watching movies, making moodboards and playlists for inspiration is something I already do pretty much all the time, lol, I already have pretty full playlists for writing, my world in general, as well as each of my main characters, and very exhaustive collections of hundreds of images on unsplash, so rather than focusing on that I decided to go through my notes and course materials for my art history class for sources of inspiration. It's a fairly broad, introductory course that looks at a huge range of art and societies from prehistory up to the thirteenth century, so there's tons of good stuff there to mine for ideas. As well as providing some pretty rich resources for general visual and cultural inspiration for my worldbuilding, I've had some flashes of inspiration from the lectures for more specific ideas, too, like long-forgotten gods that are resurrected after statues of them are unburied and rediscovered after centuries, a small matriarchal society whose greatest artists and philosophers are pregnant women and mothers and grandmothers are revered for their wisdom, and a pacifist monastery and a nearby small but powerful nomadic warrior tribe that have a sort of symbiotic relationship, despite not sharing a common faith.

There are already links to my playlists and image collections in the inspiration section of my world's meta, so I'll just link the meta here.

Week 4

Despite being really busy with school through November, December is actually going to be really light-- I only have two in-person exams both really early in the exam period, one final essay due at the beginning of December, and two take-home exams due at the end of December. Once all that's out of the way, I'll have tons of time to write as well as relax, which is very exciting! As usual, I'll have my sibling to help me keep on track as well. The next two weeks are going to be extremely packed, so I won't have time to re-draw my map before worldember starts, but after that it should be smooth sailing! Knock on wood, of course.