Promises I won't keep

The trouble with setting goals is this often annoying but always interesting thing called Reality. Last year at about this time, I boldy promised to rework my world from a narrator perspective and add excerpts to all my published articles. I also identified the five article types I'd used least, explored the category submissions for inspiration, and vowed to add more of those types to my world.
Did I succeed? Err...sort of.
I got off to a good start, honest I did. But then I got...distracted. I started another world, kind of by accident, and didn't really get around to my New Year's resolutions until November. Those resolutions then became my WorldEmber plan, and that worked! I reached the finish line with more articles of the types I needed and more headway in the whole narrator-and-excerpt plan.
As I did last year, I'll present ten articles, two from each of five categories, and see how they will help me make my world better.

Spells and abilities

This is one of the article types I planned to work on last year. I'm not writing high fantasy or hard sci-fi, so I don't have much in the way of magical or supernatural abilities to explain, but I still managed to double my spell article count during WorldEmber by writing one about meditation. (If you're following the math, that's a grand total of TWO documented abilities in my entire world.)

Spirit Speaking

by Elspeth

A spell that does...nothing! Not a joke, it says right there in the article: "The spell has no effect." And yet that's not quite true, because those who "cast" it do get some intangible benefit from it. Peace of mind, comfort, confidence, direction...a short rest if nothing else.
For me, this article is a good reminder that spells don't have to be flashy or dramatic. They don't even have to be responsible for the effect they have. Bringing an umbrella to make sure it won't rain? Spell. Getting into the shower to summon the package delivery? Spell.

Final Service

by Tanai Cuinsear

Who says necromancy has to be evil? Why raise an army of undead to take over the world, when running it is the harder task? With this reanimation spell, people who sign the appropriate paperwork while alive can contribute their bodies (after death, of course) to the sort of tedious labor that not a lot of living people enjoy doing.
Raising the dead isn't a thing in my world, but there are similarly widely-feared practices that could be turned to beneficial purpose.

Natural laws

I meant to write more in this category too. WorldEmber gave me the opportunity to expound on a couple of real-life natural laws that apply to my world, but that still only brings me up to...three. So I went hunting in the submissions for this category in search of further ideas.

Clairvoyance

by ToothGardener

Sometimes I get CSS overload. Reading articles with bright colors and moving parts can be fun in small doses, but after a while it's just too much. When I open up a brief and tidy article in the default style, my brain gives a sigh of relief. Here is an example of all an article needs to be. Clear, well-formatted, informative without being overdramatic. And as I was reading about the future sight aspect, I realized that there is a similar ability in my world that I don't have an article for.
The most important thing about this article, at least for me, is that it was inspired by a worldbuilding prompt. I had actually forgotten that if I'm ever stuck for what to write, World Anvil has a whole archive of prompts I can dig through. Something in that list is bound to be exactly what I didn't realize my world needs.

Rabbit Hole

by E. Christopher Clark

I love this explanation of the proverbial rabbit hole, a phenomenon which regularly costs me hours of time and seems most alluring when I'm under deadline. That it's established as a concept in the very world we got the expression from in the first place is literary perfection.
There's no equivalent of this specific example in my world, but it expands the possible applications for the article template. After all, human traits like curiosity and distractibility are just as much natural laws as magic and weather, and my cultures surely must use some metaphors to talk about them.

Materials

I have a couple of material articles in my world, and they are boring. It's not that my world is lacking in stuff, but that none of it is magical or techy or any kind of interesting, so it's boring to write about. I may not be alone in this, since there weren't many everyday materials in this category.

Asteroid Ice

by spleen

In a space-based sci-fi world, water is at the same time an ordinary material and a scarce resource. When it's not lying around ready to drink you have to get it any way you can, even if that means scraping it off an asteroid and dealing with the metallic taste.
I don't understand how I haven't written an article about water yet. It's so abundant in my world, and it's the closest thing to a magic material that exists there. People can't drink it straight out of the ocean, so it has to get collected and processed somehow.

Meat Sources

by vvulf

I love the movie Zootopia, but it left me with a nagging question: what do the carnivores eat? This article provides an answer that makes sure no Morphic (sapient animal species) feels threatened as prey.
I hadn't been thinking much about animals as a source of material, but the primary cultures of my world do rely on birds for feathers and eggs. It's forbidden to kill them as food, though, which makes me wonder how my narrator would react upon learning that there exist cultures that eat bird meat.

Military formations

This category intimidates me because I know spit-all about military and warfare. The few formations I've written about are described in the handwaviest terms. I have weaselly reasons why there haven't been any major wars in my world, but there can't just be thousands of years of history without people fighting organized conflict somewhere.

Opening Gambit - Peace Treaty Tactic

by Elspeth

This article challenges my assumption of what a military formation is. There's nothing militaristic about these diplomats--their goal is to prevent or end war, not fight it. But all the same, it's a team of trained personnel with the objective of winning a victory on behalf of a larger organization.
I do have groups like that on my world. Until now I don't know that I would have considered the military formation template for them.

TMS Shock Unit

by William Lucas

A combat medical team? Why not? The primary role of this formation is rescue, not battle, but they're armed and they'll take whatever steps necessary to keep their target safe and healthy.
My world has rescue crews too. They may not take it to this extreme, but I could still write up those fleets with this template. And why stop there? Why shouldn't, say, a surgical team be considered a military formation?

Prose

Prose isn't exactly worldbuilding, but what am I worldbuilding for anyway? I'm a writer, or so I keep telling myself. Yet I've only used this template once for real prose. Here, I'm looking for the kind of writing that I aspire to. Read what you like, so the advice goes, and try to write like that. And let me tell you, it was HARD to pin down two favorites from this category.

A New Apartment

by LexiCon (WordiGirl)

The title promises a story of someone moving into a new place, and it is that--but it's more than that. Right away it's clear there's something unusual going on. This story is only a small corner of a much larger picture. It's loaded with secrets, but doesn't give any of them away. I want to be able to do that.

Something Between a Conversation and Death

by E. Christopher Clark

A beautiful story of grief and memory, of understanding between people and between peoples. This piece brims with emotion, which I have a hard time expressing credibly in what I write.

Well, what now?

So after all that, sketching out a to-do list of articles to write...I'm going to set it aside. It's easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm of ideas, but I know from experience that the harder I start the sooner I'll fizzle out. I'm thinking that this year maybe I should not pressure myself so much.
I want to write, but it's a struggle to balance that desire with my job, my volunteer work, my many other hobbies--all of these things that I love, that are part of the core of me, and that I don't want to give up. I'm going to make an effort to distribute my energy more efficiently around all the things I do.
This coming year will probably follow the same pattern as previous ones: I'll participate in Summer Camp, Spooktober, WorldEmber, and whatever challenges in between tug at my fancy. If I happen to be inspired in between those events, then great!--but I don't want to make any more promises I can't be sure of keeping.
What I really want to change is how shy I've been about interacting with other Anvilites. Instead of throwing more stuff into my world, this year I will spend time reading more, following more, supporting more of the writers and artists whose work I enjoy.