WorldEmber 2023 Tracker
This is a tracker article for WorldEmber2023. To see my pledge article and the prep work I did for this event, look to the right. My goal is a little...ridiculous this year, but I have a ridiculous goal every year!
My Focus for this year is mainly in Magic and Magic Items, but I will also be focusing on geography and species to a lesser extent. The vast majority of my worldbuilding will be on my fantasy world of Vreathe (where you are now), but I will also be writing a little bit in my sci fi world of Cairn Sector.
Word Total: 117,395
Goal: 150,000 words
Vreathe Word Goal: 125,000 words
Cairn Sector Word Goal: 25,000 words
Stretch Goal: 250,000 words
Stupidly Unrealistic Goal: 1,000,000 words
Total Article Count: 90/100
Progress Blog
((Would you just rather see a giant list of all my articles? There's also World Anvil's individual World Ember Tracker Page))Day 1: 2231 Words
Unfortunately....I work for a living, and I work the weekends, so I won't be getting more than 2-3 thousand words for the first few days. Once Monday rolls around though, it's go time, like 10,000 word a day go time!
Other than that, I decided that I want to have one Showcase article a day. This is the one I put the most effort into and is the one article I think is the most worthy of your time to read. It will also be the only article I ping you guys with for notifications (plus this tracker article from time to time). My Showcase articles will be displayed to the right as an article block each day, while the other articles will be listed as text links.
It's not that I didn't put effort in the other articles, it's just that people are getting thousands of notifications and there's no way to ever read them all, so I think this is a good compromise!
Day 2: 1968 Words
Unfortunately still spinn my wheels until I'm off monday. Gettins 2000 words in today though wasn't that bad. I also got another one of my major characters written! Soon, the floodgates will open...
Day 3: 1616 Words
Wheels still spinning. The worldbuilding apocalypse starts tomorow
Day 4: 6,195 Words
Alright, NOW World Ember can begin! I wrote 6,195 words, which would be a decent amount and would guarantee I reach my 150K word goal. The issue is that by today I should already be at 20,000 words...Oh well. Let's keep going to see what happens!
Showcase Article:
Other Articles:
Mount Cendi Lava LakeInstant Heal Tonic
Healing Potion
Hydrocarbons
Water
Tritium
Deuterium
Day 5 4,952 Words
I spent way too long in midjourney trying to get the right images for the fairy article. I had the fairy images already, but only 1 human form, so I needed to put in the time to get human forms for the other three which took at least four hours...Oh well! As always I try to go for quality first before I lose any sense of that and start spitting out words.
Day 6 9,110 Words
I got all the way ramped up!....only to have to slow down again because I work the next four days...Darn it! The bright side is that I managed to catch up and I'm only slightly behind on my 150K word goal now.
I also managed to get 16 articles done in a single day as well! I think that 9,000-10,000 words is the absolute upper limit on what I can put out in a day unless I make a stupidly large number of short (>250 word) articles, but I'm not willing to do that yet, because once that nuclear option gets pulled, there's no going back!
Day 7: Rant incoming (0 words)
Took a short mental break and stopped worldbuilding. Caught up on notifications and read everyone's work. While I mentioned in my journal post that it was so I wouldn't get burned out...Please! It's me we're talking about here! Burnout is something I simply do not experience! The real reason I am taking a day is to reevaluate my strategy with my word count goals. This is because when I was clicking around the leaderboards, I saw two people who already had over 50,000 words.
Seriously?!? How!?! And this isn't like 2021 where the people on top were copy/pasters who copied text from somewhere verbatim (or in the case of the top writer that year, ran english DnD rules through google translate that copy/pastes the portuguese version). The ones with over 50,000 words this year already on day seven are known members of the community. I checked them, there's no excessive copy and paste (with one exception...)
How the hell am I going to catch up with this!?!? I barely got past 25K a day ago!!!(Deep breaths Chris... DEEP BREATHS...Few more deep breaths...)... So what am I going to do about it? I guess I'm just going to take a day and evaluate how I am going to hit a high word count.. My goal remains at 150,000 words for now, but winning the wordcount game seems incredibly unlikely. Oh well...
Day 8 2,193 Words
Since I do have to work Friday/Saturday/Sunday, I can't get much worldbuilding done. I went through all my existing notifications yesterday (then almost immediately got 30 more...). Today I looked at a way to make it easier to understand why I keep mentioning Aethercite in my world... The article to the right should hopefully explain what each piece of Aethercite does and what magic does to it. there are only five entries, plus an example guide. I am hoping to have 100 or more before WorldEmber is done.
Day 9 2,436 Words
Same as friday. Wheels are spinning until Monday when I set myself loose again. All of my words written were in the Aethercite Catalogue article. The number pf aethercite was doubled from 5 to 10 and I reworked two of them. There are also 13 variations with shorter entries. My goal is to have 100 different types of Aethercite eventually.
Day 10 1,496 Words
Same as friday and Saturday. Wheels are spinning. I added three entries to the Aethercite Catalogue. I might add a few more this week, but otherwise, tomorrow, I'm going to focus on several magic items, as well as more locations.
Day 11 6,428 Words
Still worked primarily on the Aethercite catalogue. I got the last of the major gem groups described. Other than some organic aethercite like amber, resin, petrified wood, bones, teeth, scales, etc. I'm mostly done with it. Yes, it does need to be split into roughly 40 or so smaller articles. I will do that...eventually! I Also wrote a few smaller articles...
Day 12 2,961 Words
For this day I vastly expanded the article for the Barony of Palma, explaining why dragonblood resin is so expensive. I also expanded the Aethercite Catalogue from the last few days EVEN more....Yeah, I need to start turning those into individual articles. It got to be over 12,000 words at one point...
Showcase Article:
Other Articles:
Day 13 5,541 Words
For this day I started with writing some individual aethercite articles (finally!). I also expanded on the information I already had from the catalogue article (I did delete the Gravity stone entry from that article so I wasn't going against any WorldEmber rules). So now each individual aethercite article is probably going to have 800-1250+ words in each. I could probably spend the rest of my world ember doing just that and probably hit 150K words with ease!....but Let's still write about other stuff...
The Floating Gardens of Azura ended up becoming my favorite article so far this WorldEmber and I wasn't even planing to write it, or even have floating islands. I wrote about it only after I wrote about gravity stones, and thought having some areas with floating islands would be a cool idea. I also needed a domain for one of the country's fairies so it worked out pretty well!
It also provides some development for Vreathe's angry fire elf Renelle Vernador, which will be detailed in a short story at some point (once I get the courage to show that off here...), and it also gave me a thousand ideas for an Adventure April article next year (going to require a lot of CSS. It's a project for next April, not right now!)
Day 14 0 Words
Took a day to catch up on my rapidly growing notifications and read the WorldEmber work of others. As of this writing I read and liked 82 World Ember articles, and I have recieved 44 likes, which is actually a pretty good ratio with all things considered. I have never gotten a ratio that high before in any other event I have taken part in (The treasured companion competiton for example, I read literally every single article and left a like, which was somewhere around 140 entries. Only 28 people looked back at my work and liked it. A 1 in 5 ratio is pretty much normal.)
It is still possible for me to hit 150K words, since I am still off for 14 days straight... I just have to work the next four days. Articles the next few days will be short, so I might look at finally doing something for my poor neglected sci fi world again!
Showcase Article:
Other Articles:
Day 15 500(-ish) Words
I started a large showcase article in my sci fi world but it is nowhere near completion. It will be my big article for that world. It kind of requires a lot of art (both touching up some hand drawn art and getting the right AI art since I don't have time to draw everything...yeah I know...). Because of this, I didn't get many words today. Don't worry folks. The big numbers will come starting Monday!
Day 16 0Words
Had to work extra hours today, so spent what little time I had editing images for future articles. Trust me guys, the absurd word count is coming. I just want to make sure the articles have the same quality as my previous efforts. As much as I would like to pump out daily 8000 word articles with walls of text so long you need to hire a sherpa to climb over... Not happening!
Showcase Article:
Other Articles:
Day 17 1,000 (-ish) Words
Still did some prep work, but I also finished the main article for the Ekandra for my sci fi world. Now that that is done I can start to expand it with the rest of the articles.
Day 18 4,392Words
Completed four articles for the Ekandra today, totaling over 4000 words. I need to ramp into getting larger word counts, so I only got just over 4000 today. I think I'm going to do more writing for my fantasy world tomorrow before I pivot back to more of these ekandra articles.
Day 19 7,132Words
Wrote two massive articles, and they were word sprints in the strictest sense. The first article Magic Scrolls, I wrote 2673 words in just over an hour. The second article Planet Rosia, I wrote 2220 words in 43 minutes. I'm not going to claim they are high quality articles, but...I'm about 30,000 words beind if I want to reach my goal of 150,000 words. So...it's going to start happening now.
I was going to out-Bonus Action Bonus Action, but that apparently isn't allowed in World Ember (didn't he win last year though?!?...whatever), but as that's not an option, I now need to do something I am very good at, but also little inconsistent at. I love doing it and I dread doing it: Writing History.
Showcase Article:
Other Articles:
Day 20 5,600Words
totally forgot to update this blog...Luckily there's time stamps! Also luckily I was convinced to take the 22-25th off from writing so there isn't much to update!
Day 21 7,502 Words
I did write another aquatic lizard for my sci fi world, but this day was almost enitrely dedicated to finishing every potion article for Mercure Elixers. These potions are super powerful but have downsides and in some cases are just plain dangerous to use....and now...4 days off!
Showcase Article:
Other Articles:
Day 22-25 7,840 Words
I did write a few articles during this time, but it's basically nothing. Four baronies of the Valley of Kings, and that's about it. I also added the history and friends section to my Aerynn Vernador article so I would say that article is now complete!
I spent most of the 22nd and 23rd reading articles and getting my notifications knocked down. Having only 160-ish notifications right now is a blessing of sorts because it means I won't have much to catch up on when the new year hits. I know some people are stuck with over a thousand in some cases, so they just mass delete notifications instead (which sucks for both them and the people who worked hard on their stuff and wanted to share)
Day 27 11,983 Words
So I noticed I was way behind...like, WAY behind! Like I said way back on the 21st, I don't think I'm going to be able to hit first place or hit 150,000 words, but 125,000 is doable. So with that, I put out over 10,000 word today! I did more than 10% of my worldbuilding from the last 25 days in one. That's just a little absurd.
With only four days left in the writing challenge, my word counts might get even more absurd! But..that also means the quality of my writing is suffering a little bit. I'm going to have to spend a month going back and just editing the spelling errors out of everything! (which is not something to be proud of...)
Day 28 7,131 Words
Greatly expanded my Izi article and also wrote about another moon of Tarsuros, Lazulia. I also added bits and pieces to too many articles to count. This is also the day that I went over 100,000 words!
Showcase Article:
Day 29 12,193 Words
I started a completely new world (that I really don't want to show off quite yet, but...WE articles have to public and all that). Because I started a new world, I was able to throw out a lot of words incredibly quickly, but I do need to refine it, and give it a proper CSS theme. Right now, it just uses the same theme as this world. This new world is means to fucntion as a game design document, so it's going to be somewhat compact with less overall worldbuilding and a bit more mechanics and plot built in.
Day 30 4,995 Words
Yeah...I got a little annoyed about AI writing, so I wrote a whole article about an in-world technology that was used to write an awful book. I don't care if people use AI writing or AI art (I use plenty of AI art). That said, if you are entering a writing competition (or an art competition) keep AI the hell out of it!
I also expanded a few articles, did some minor edits here and there, and did a few other things. Since I can't touch these article for roughly a month, starting in 11 hours or so, I fixed what errors I saw.
On a last note, I definitely lost the word count game to Notahumanhand, which oddly was the most human writer of anyone with higher word counts. Too many people had copied and pasted a little too often, or they used AI art. I don't mind. Technically I should be in second or third place, but with the bullshit of people cheating, I am unfortunately going to be in 5th....oh well.
Day 31 of December is going to be spent compiling stats for an article to be published on January 1st.
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