WorldEmber 2024

This year, I created a new world, Mirielle, during Summer Camp. Since I have two worlds, I decided to create this world — JoellaKay — as an author world to keep World Anvil Events articles and general information about my different worlds.

Preparation

WorldEmber Prep 2024 Instructions

Week 1: Pledge Your Goal

Set Your Word Goal and World

For December 2024, I pledge to write 10,000 words of worldbuilding on Mirielle. I make this promise to myself, my readers, my fans and the world which is made better by my creative spirit.

—Joella Kay

WorldEmber 2024 Pledge for JoellaKay by World Anvil Fillable PDF

Choose Your Area of Focus

Mirielle is a brand new world that I created with the goal of simply having fun and especially giving myself the freedom to write about a fantasy world without any particular purpose or master plan (unlike Ruartei which I've been carefully developing for a number of decades).

My initial inspiration and ideas came from the Summer Camp 2024 prompts, and I have a number of stub articles that I did not have time to write.

My focus for WorldEmber will be to write some of those articles as well as any other articles that may spring to mind during the next month.

Create or Update Your Meta

For Mirielle, I actually created an initial, bare bones, meta to help remind me that it's a world to have fun and yet give me some loose guidelines and provide a bit of structure. At the moment, I'm not ready, nor have the time, to flesh it out further. But if I think of anything during WorldEmber, I will add it at that time (despite it not counting toward my WorldEmber goal).

Week 2: Prepare Your World for New Readers

Despite my lack of a good home page, world primer, or any real description of what the world is, Mirielle does have a few followers.

Review Your Homepage

I haven't really done much with the homepage yet. That's something that will have to wait until after WorldEmber.

Create or Review Your World Primer

The world primer is also something that will have to wait until later in the year 2025.

Set Up Your Community Tools

Since I'm a guild member, I've got the follow buttons. And I have a few followers and some comments on a few of my articles. I submit completed (or mostly completed) articles to the "New Articles" list on the home page as well as send out notifications to the world's followers. Most likely, I will submit or post to the World Anvil Discord about some of the articles I write during WorldEmber.

CSS Wizardry

I commissioned a lovely theme by notahumanhand/spleen after Summer Camp and made a few minor tweaks, here and there. Overall, I'm really happy with this theme and don't really see a reason to change much more at this point.

Week 3: On the Hunt for Inspiration!

My biggest inspiration is following other worlds, reading their articles, and appreciating their layout and appearance. I follow quite a few different worlds. And I'll try to add some of the more inspiring ones into this document over the next few days.

Read a Book or Watch a Movie!

Life has been busy (and stressful the last couple of months so I haven't had time to read or watch much of anything.

Create a Moodboard

I don't really do moodboards. But what I do is generate images for each article.

I know that a lot of people, especially artists, are unhappy with generated images. But visual inspiration for each article is important to me. I'm not an artist (although learning to draw is on my bucket list), and this is a hobby. I simply can't afford to commission hundreds of images. If I could, I certainly would — because machine generated images will never match the creativity and expertise of humans.

But I have started — and plan to continue — commissing art as well as maps, conlangs, fonts, and so forth — as time and my monetary resources permit. And for anything that I do commercially, I will certainly be using commissioned and properly licensed artwork.

Create or Expand Your Writing Playlist

I find it difficult to write while listening to music, especially if it has lyrics. So I don't have a playlist.

Week 4: Harness the Power of Friendship!

Find a Community

I'm reasonably active on the World Anvil Discord. And I also am in the Articles Anonymous chapter — which really provides wonderful comradary and encouragement. For example, we have a roulette challenge (that others may also join) that helps each of those participating by picking the next article to write (from a list that the participant provides). I plan to use this to help keep me on track during WorldEmber.

Plan Your Writing Schedule

I've been working through life distractions the last few months, with the goal of reducing the distractions, focusing on the truly important which includes making time for my writing and world building.

I also bought TJ's planning tool — which is quite good — to help me with my scheduling and making word count progress.

Other than that, I will just have to write in between my various commitments (as I continue to work on reducing them to something more reasonable).

Get Some Fresh Air!

I've recommited recently to making my mental and physical health a priority. So that's something I'm incorporating in my daily activities.

Status

WorldEmber 2024 Home Page

My Progress Report Page

Success! 10,760 words

Articles

Thoughts

I didn't get started on any articles until Christmas Eve. Rushed for time, I ended up adding some articles (that are mostly just notes) to Ruartei. For Mirielle, I was able to do 4 articles although I didn't have time to finish the Guild of Loremasters. Still, I'm reasonably happy with the Mirielle articles. And I even submitted the Web of Lies to the Myth category.

One thing of note: I would have given up (as I've done in previous years), but the fact that I bought a physical certificate and wanted to make sure Dimi and Janet could sign it — was a great motivator to write at least 10,000 words.