New Year's Resolutions 2025

What a year it's been! My first year crafting Terramora has been a wonderful adventure of internal and extrenal exploration, skill development, and community building. While the metadata will tell you this world was created in 2023, I registered originally thinking WorldAnvil was a mapmaking website, and thus left the account dormant until I began discovering the world of Terramora in March of 2024. On March 10^th, 2024, the very first articles in Terramora were published, covering Battle Island, Breakwater Falls, and the City Governor. Today, less than one year into this project, Terramora is less than 3000 words from reaching 100,000 total words, less than 10 likes from reaching 200 while boasting 101 published articles.
Most impressively, Terramora has garnered 18 followers in the past year. That's 18 more wonderful people who have showed in my work than I ever could have hoped for, and to them I am eternally grateful. While Terramora may be a passion project that I would continue to work on regardless of the attention it garners, the support from these folks and other travelers who have stopped by to leave likes and comments constantly keep the fire stoked.

2024 - A Retrospective

Early 2024

Early 2024 was focused on the early discoveries of Terrmora and the WorldAnvil platform. I had no idea what I was doing here other than writing down some fun ideas for a campaign setting. These early articles were written in a wiki-style format, with the sharing of information trumping immersiveness, leaving many of these articles in need of some rewriting, not to mention the fromatting issues and lack of imagery. While sure, these articles aren't bad at all for a new Anvilite, there's so much room for improvement just to reach my current level of expectation, let alone what some of the best anvilites are capable of.

Recommended Early 2024 Reads

Summer Camp 2024

My first Summer Camp was the event that started bringing Terramora into it's own. Prior to this event, I had not participated in, or really had any idea about the amazing community here on WorldAnvil. It was through the homework that I was introduced to the amazing Discord community where I began meeting and interacting with some of the best worldbuilders, css wizards, and above all else, human beings, that the site has to offer. The buzz around the event and the creativity that the prompts offer really pushed the discovery of Terrmora in new directions, while engaging with all these amazing worlds started a collection of incredible inspiration for the content and design of Terramora moving forward. Susinctly put, Summer Camp was incredible!

Recommended Summer Camp 2024 Reads

Late 2024

While Summer Camp was an amazing experience, it also burned me out. As much as I love working on Terramora, this worldbuilding project is simply one of approximately 9-12 hobbies I partake in. As a multi-passionate person, I thrive on weaving unrelated projects between each other, as I often find more inspiration in totally unrelated experiences - completing a woodworking project may refresh and inspire my mind for a short fiction story, or an early morning hike might lead me to a new life lesson that is important to include in coaching. Whatever it is, these many facets are extremely important to me, and maintaing balance is both a delicate process and a necessity which I failed during Summer Camp.
Thus, late 2024 was about engaging in other activities. Though I continued to do much brainstorming on Terramora late at night to help empty my mind, my days outside of work were focused on things like photography, gardening, and hiking. With that refreshment of clean air and new activities, I was able to put together some of the most important pieces for adventurers new to Terramora with a pair of primer articles, along with my first foray into prose here in Terramora, creating the journal of adventurer Delvin Faroe as part of Tyrdal's wonderful challenge: The Longest Journey. These projects finally felt like I was bringing Terramora into a cohesive unit rather than a smattering of articles related to a small area of a single continent.

Recommended Late 2024 Reads

WorldEmber 2024

Much like my first Summer Camp, I had no idea what to expect for my first WorldEmber. Ultimately I found some pretty good success by writing over 15,000 words for the month and covering a number of important subjects for the expansion of the continent of Dendralis. However, WorldEmber taught me an important lesson - I'm not inspired by volume.
While the flurry of writing by the greater WorldAnvil community is both impressive and inspiring, I found myself slogging through these articles, which resulted in some of my least favorite writing from this year. I lost the narrative bent I was developing in my early WorldEmber articles, and did not feel I put my best foot forward. Luckily, my later articles picked this form back up, resulting in some of my favorite articles I've ever written, but the lesson was learned. Writing for me is inspired by topic, not by completionism, particularly when creating new works like we do with WorldEmber.
Will I do WorldEmber again? To be frank, I don't know. I've enjoyed reading lots of great new works, and created a few solid ones myself, but felt a clear lack of direction and inspiration. When factoring in the hubbub of the holiday season, it makes the prospect of striving for volume over creativity fairly undesirable. I do expect to register for most future WorldEmbers because my verbosity makes achieving 10,000 words in a month a fairly simple prospect, I do not anticipate making that goal my main focus, short of having a very specific series of articles already planned and ready to write. I am wholly content with working at my normal pace in future Decembers, and writing all the great material published by my fellow Anvilites.

Recommended WorldEmber 2024 Reads

WorldEmber Through the Anvilverse

Arguably the best part of WorldEmber for me was reading all the great works created by amazing writers and worldbuilders. It was hard to keep this portion of articles down to only 10, but frankly it was hard to keep that number below 30 even, so ultimately it was a crap shoot who ended up here and who didn't.
Without further ado, here is a selection of articles by other Anvilites that I fell in love with during WorldEmber 2024.

From Imagica comes what might be the most beautiful story I have read on World Anvil.

If Dendralis didn't give it away, I love any people whose lives are interconnected with nature, and the Bloomwardens from Leijona are no exception.

What a bittersweet tribute from Tillerz to ducklings that have passed on to the great pond in the sky.

I love how gritty this offering from Rumengol, diving into the underbelly of Risenhall.

Taking conlang to a whole new level, Mihkel Rand has created an entire script alphabet that is an impressive combination of visually pleasing and realistic.

I've long been fascinated by dreams, but Demongrey's Dreamwalker Syndrome has me hesitant to play too long in my next lucid dream.

This one shot may not be inspired by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, but the name pulled me in, and Jon's writing kept me hooked.

These moons from Alan Byers does a great job feeding on my love of moons, and the idea of world with multiple moons. Imagine seeing these in the night sky all over the place!

Fun item from Sorianna Choate that leans into the duality of an item that can be boom or bust.

A fun take on the record player from Pandora 9.

2025 Resolutions

Looking forward into 2025, I have lots of aspirations for where I would like to take Terramora, both in terms of the content available, and the visual design of the world. However, these goals need to be tempered with the reality that this is just a hobby for me, which I hope to directly address with the first of my 2025 Resolutions for Terramora.

Resolution: Pacing

Like I've mentioned at multiple points above, Terramora is simply one of many hobbies for me, though like most of the others, is one in which I can completely lose myself within, creating burnout and negelect of other projects. My first, and most important goal is to find a balanced process for building this world, one in which I can continue a steady pace without wearing myself thin, or dropping the project for extended periods. This resolution extends well beyond the bounds of Terramora, but is an extremely important one here.

Resolution: Narratives

I want to lean more into a more narrative style with the majority of articles in Terramora. Though certain types will always remain more of a straightforward wiki-style (looking at you, flora, fauna, and funga), I'm much more proud of, and see more readers enjoying - the articles in which I lean into narrative. Whether it's a biography, history of a town or item, or even the obvious choice of creating more prose, I want to lean much more into narrative writing in 2025.

Resolution: Focus

The land of Dendralis has so much depth left to discover, and that volume has left me a bit scattered as I come up with so many different ideas and directions to take them. As such, it can make the actual creation of the articles slower due to the volume of ideas in my head at once. In 2025, I would like to do a better job of focusing myself, particularly the actual writing of articles. I know the ideas will continue to flow all over the place, and that's okay. The plan is to do far more brainstorming before writing new articles, especially ones not connected to challenges, with the goal of using the brainstorming to free up my mind better come writing time, have my ideas fleshed out better when I sit down to write them, and to allow myself to choose amongst all these notes which area of the world I want to focus on fleshing out rather than casting out endless tendrils all over the place. Ideally, you will see a articles being published in batches of related articles in 2025, rather than sporadic random publishing.

Resolution: Organize

I have a google sheet that helps me track everything I do in Terramora. It is a hog of a file, and fairly discombobulated, but is vital to the progress I make on this project. In order to help me narrow my focus on this project, I will be going through every article so that I can update this file, update my tags, and reevaluating the organization of my categories. This is not a fun process, but as I have seen in other aspects of my life, this level of detailed organization frees up a lot of my brain RAM, and lets me focus on what's most important.

Resolution: Format

Part of going through and organizing my articles will also include formatting updates. Though I had orginally hoped to dive heavily into CSS this year, I have decided to step back from this goal, as I need to manage my time tightly. As such, big css and aesthetic changes will simply wait until I upgrade to a grandmaster membership. However, that does not mean that even in the most basic form I cannot clean up my articles, particularly the older articles. Aesthetically this will primarily focus on the use of white space and images, while functionally, expect to see a lot more links placed in articles, particularly the older ones. Expect cleaner and hopefully slightly more attractive articles in Terramora in 2025.

Resolution: Rewrite

Lastly, and possibly least importantly in terms of timing, is rewriting. Many of my earliest articles do not meet my expectations, not only in formatting, but in style as well. As I work through organizing and formatting of my articles, I will be creating a list of articles that need a bit of a rewrite based on my qualitative expectations. This list will be chipped away at slowly, letting new articles take precedent. As such, I don't expect to get more than 50% of the way through this effort in 2025, but I am excited to bring new life into some important articles. Be sure to click the Follow Terramora button below to be updated when these rewrites are published!

BONUS Resolution: World Mapping

I took on Blue Fairy 74's challenge for 2025 in which she challenged me to define the world of Terramora more. Luckily for me, i had already begun a process of revamping the world maps, so now I will put more focus in creating the full world a bit more. While I was hesitant to do this in the past, the reality is Terramora really doesn't exist right now beyond Dendralis. While most detail about these new lands will remain quite vague, it is time to finish out the foundation before building the tower up too far in only Dendralis. I probably wouldn't expect to see any of this published before Q3, if not Q4 of 2025.

2025 looks to be an exciting year coming in the Anvilverse, and I am so excited and grateful to be apart of all the wonderful things going on here. Wishing everyone all the best in their worldbuilding and beyond for this year. I can't wait to see what new adventures come to Terramora and all of our worlds.

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