World Ember 2022 pledge and preparation

Yarik - Kros? What was that? I looked away a moment and...
Kros - Yeah... well, it was a moment for you because I was not writing...

Y - Life has been difficult?
K - Life has been eventful...
Y - I see... do you need a moment to recover and reflect?
K - Yeah...
Y - I know just the place for you to rest and relax a little.

I, Kros, pledge to participate to the next WorldEmber to have fun with my friends and the larger community and to relax and explore in my happy space while I relearn to be me. I will let my characters guide me, but most likely I will set aside all the "should write" and only write small stakes, high magnification articles or spicy and cuddly stories as a self care exercise and stay within the known and safe confines of Hottest Spices and its surroundings.

The Why and the How

My main external goal with Hislariya is to keep learning to write better, edit better, do some basic CSS coding and continue improving as a mapmaker. This year it is added to it the need to recharge my emotional batteries. To achieve this I will need to continue producing new material and sharing it with others, opening it to comments and feedback, but also be compassionate with myself and write the things that make me happy even if they end up without an audience.
Hislariya is much more my private garden than something to appeal a vaste audience. While I will seek and accept criticism and feedback, I won't change the direction of my concept to make it enjoyable to a larger audience or let some challenge veer the worldbuilding in a direction that is not relevant to me and the stories I am creating.
Hislariya is also a gift to the people who believed in it from the very first spark of an idea. I will give back to my handful of followers who pushed me forward with their enthusiasm something I am proud of and that they can enjoy.

Don’t write for an imaginary audience - write for yourself, your dick, and your six closest friends that will respond with a dozen fire emojis and an exploding gif.

Hottest Spices Mini Meta

Hottest Spices and its immediate surroundings are not only the scene where most of my stories are set, but also my happy place, a location that I have been purposefully describing in great detail and in tones of domesticity to be a mental refuge for myself and my readers.
It is the place to explore the weird and marvelous, the eccentric, the moltitude of facets relationships and identities and pleasure can have, all in a safe place, where the hardships of the external world are perceived as just a vague echo.
In this moment I need to retreat in its comfort to understand myself better and to refill my tank of warmth before I can go out to give it to others.
At a first glance the setting is all but done, but there are a lot of layers I can dig deeper into, shelves and cabinets to explore and stories to tell, so I hope my readers will be happy to join me once again in discovering Hislaria's world through the little pieces of it that land on the shelves and between the sheets of the Hottest Spices.

Unofficial Challenge

While for competition purposes only new public articles count towards WE competition, I have several articles that are past the stub stage and other articles that I want to keep private. I still would like to keep track of the total words I will write, even if I won't write them in eligible articles. So I decided that I will screenshot here the starting and final wordcount of my active worlds for my personal record and add the articles I worked on in my WE recap article.