I will start this blog post with a brief recap of matters discussed in other blog posts in the last few months which are relevant to the matter I want to discuss in this post. Well, no; before doing that I'll start this blog post by saying I'm going to do that, after which I'll include this sentence saying I'll start the blog post by saying I'm going to do that, and then I'll get to the brief recap of matters discussed in other blog posts in the last few months which are relevant to the matter I want to discuss in this post.

Anyway, this last month I participated in a November novel-writing challenge, and if you want to see how that turned out refer to the previous post. (Short answer: I technically succeeded in the challenge, in that I did just barely manage to hit 50,000 words before the end of the month, but I did pretty much everything else wrong.) However, I did not do this as part of the "official" National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), because... well, I don't think I've ever used the phrase "dumpster fire" before, but yeah, that's what NaNoWriMo has become. So I looked for other communities that were hosting a similar event that I could join. And one of those was NovelEmber.

NovelEmber was hosted by a worldbuilding site called WorldAnvil, which I'd previously been aware of—it was already linked as the first item in the list of "Other Worldbuilding Sites" on the main page of the Public Wongery—but of which I was not a member. Well, apparently to "officially" participate in NovelEmber, I would have to be a member, so I went ahead and joined. And found out there was another event running in October called "Spooktober" that I figured I'd go ahead and participate in as well.

(Incidentally, this may raise a question that I've been meaning to find a place to address on the site, and which I suppose for now I may as well address here: Why am I bothering with the Wongery, when all these other worldbuilding sites already exist? WorldAnvil, LegendKeeper, WorldPresto... those sites have a lot more features than the Wongery and are a lot more popular (admittedly an extremely low bar to clear at this point, because I am absolutely hopeless at self-promotion); why don't I just use those instead of trying to make my own site? Well, for one thing, those sites didn't exist when I created the Wongery; the Wongery predates them all. WorldAnvil was created in 2017; LegendKeeper started in 2018; and WorldPresto was just created last year and is apparently still in beta. The Wongery was created on December 23, 2008, and the first article went up on the first day of 2009. The Central Wongery was opened to the public (in the sense that the wiki was made publicly viewable; I didn't publicize it so nobody knew about it or visited it) on December 21, 2012.

Okay, fine^[1], but those sites were created by whole teams with a fair amount of time and money, while the Wongery site design and coding is all done by one thoroughly incompetent twit with absolutely no professional experience in either web design or programming (me) in my very limited free time, so even if the Wongery has technically existed for longer, those sites are a lot more polished and feature-rich. Now that those sites do exist, is there really a reason for me to keep trying to make the Wongery a thing, or would it be wiser for me to give up on it and just use WorldAnvil or another of those sites? Am I doing this just out of inertia, stubbornness, and sunk-cost fallacy?

Well... I am obviously not an impartial judge of my own motivations, but I really don't think so. I think, even if those other sites do exist, the Wongery still potentially has a place. The sites have different foci; they don't serve exactly the same purpose. The main purpose of the Wongery is to make the worlds there easily available for use by others in their own creative projects. To that end, everything in the Central Wongery and the Public Wongery is released under a Creative Commons license—and will be released under the Akinetic Media License, once I finally have the means to make that a thing. That isn't true of any of those other sites. Furthermore, although there's nothing there yet, I have plans for there to be lots of material shared on the Wongery's various subspaces to facilite the worlds' use in different media—RPG stats, rigged and animated models for use in computer games. That's not the case for those other sites either. On the other hand, WorldAnvil and those other worldbuilding sites have lots of tools to enable their use for running RPG campaigns: WorldAnvil, for instance, has a campaign manager, interactive die roll buttons, etc. These are not features I ever plan to add to the Wongery, because, well, that's not what it's for. So I think the Wongery and these other worldbuilding sites serve nonidentical and at least partly complementary purposes, and there's room for them to coexist. Though I really do need to get my derrière in gear and put more content in the Wongery; it's still nowhere near where I want it to be.)

Anyway, just as it hosted Spooktober in October and NovelEmber in November, WorldAnvil is hosting another event in December: "WorldEmber". The goal of this challenge is to write at least 10,000 words about one of your worlds, and there are 23 "special categories" participants are tasked with writing articles about. Now, apparently I have a thing for entering challenges, because I want to do this one too. The questions is... which of my worlds to choose to develop for the challenge?

One potential issue is that I... don't actually have my worlds up on WorldAnvil yet. Or rather, I have placeholders for some of them, but all those placeholders are is... well, this:

I have my own website where I share my worlds, and while I eventually plan to copy at least some of the content from there to World Anvil—if mostly to make it more accessible to World Anvil users—in the meantime you can read more about the world of [name of world] at this link.

(The words "this link" are, of course, linked to the main Wongery article about the world in question.)

I do in fact plan to copy information about my worlds from the Wongery to WorldAnvil... but I haven't done it yet. On the other hand, if I choose to develop one of my worlds for WorldEmber, that would give me the impetus to at least copy the information for that world over. So there's another reason to do it.

I do have one "world" that's a WorldAnvil exclusive, Stark Point, which was created for a worldbuilding game on Discord (which worldbuilding game I've mentioned in several previous blog posts, and I'm still meaning to write a full blog post about it sometime; I just haven't gotten to that yet either.) And I did want to write a lot more I want to write about Stark Point, so at first it seemed like kind of a no-brainer that that's the world I'd choose for WorldAnvil. Except... Stark Point isn't really a full "world", per se; it's a single small settlement on an island the size of Grenada. A lot of the WorldEmber prompts just don't apply. Oh, certainly I could write about a Stark Point character (in fact, there are a couple dozen Stark Point characters I do want/plan to write articles about), and I'd also been meaning to write about the Stark Point languages, and about the spirits they commune with, which I guess could count as species. And I hadn't yet written (but intended to write) an article specifically on the settlement of Stark Point itself, which would satisfy the prompt for, well, Settlement. And there were things I could write about or come up with for prompts like Building, Ethnicity, Geography, Material, Myth, and Prose. But Vehicle? They didn't have any vehicles. Well... wait, no; they have boats; I can maybe write about those. Okay, never mind that one. But Military Formation? That they definitely don't have; they were a scattered, (formerly) nomadic people who have never engaged in anything resembling a war. Technology? They're a low-tech people by design; they don't really have any unique technologies. (Magic, yes, but that's different.) Natural Law? Again, I didn't create the world where Stark Point is located, and there aren't any special natural laws unique to the island. (I guess I could argue that some of the ways the people of Stark Point relate to the spirits count as a natural law, but that's a stretch.) Title? Stark Point comprises only a few hundred people and it's a loosely organized society; the only things among the people of Stark Point that could possibly be considered "titles" I've already written articles about. Maybe, with some straining and loose interpretation, I could come up with things related to Stark Point to write about for these topics... but it seemed it would make more sense to pick a different world. I do still want to write more articles about Stark Point (and I do still eventually want to write a blog post here about Stark Point and the worldbuilding game it's a part of), but I guess I'll be doing it as a separate thing from WorldEmber.

Hold, on, wait, actually I just realized that the "special categories" for WorldEmber are optional; there are additional prizes associated with them but—unlike the prompts for Spooktober—you didn't have to complete some minimum number of the special categories to "win" the event. Eh, I'd rather try to do them all anyway, so the previous paragraph still applies.

Hold on, wait again; I just read the detailed rules and the FAQ and apparently WorldEmber doesn't have to be all focused on one world. I'd assumed it did because there's a Winner Certificate you can get if you complete the challenge (or apparently even if you lie and say you did when you didn't but who would do that), and the certificate has a space for the world you wrote for, which certainly strongly implies you're expected to focus on one world... but the FAQ explicitly says "you can write across as many worlds as you like!" Still, eh, I guess I will focus on one world, if mainly because, FAQ notwithstanding, the certificate still suggests that's the main intention.

But which world? Well... to decide which world I was going to focus on for the November writing challenge, I put a poll in the forum. And I guess I may as well—why not?—do the same thing here. (And yes, I'm already late starting WorldEmber, and waiting for the poll results is going to make me even later, but... eh. Frankly, 10,000 words should be easy. I'm not too worried about getting a late start.)

So that leaves the question of which worlds to include in the poll. Well, obviously if I'm the one doing this I'm going to develop one of my worlds—that is, the worlds that are credited to me, Clé, on the Wongery, and not one of the other Grandmaster Wongers. And obviously I'm going to want to choose a world that's currently underdeveloped, but... like I said, I haven't had nearly as much time to make content for the Wongery as I'd like, so frankly I'd say all the worlds there are still pretty dang underdeveloped, so that doesn't really narrow things down.

So that means the poll will consist of almost the same list of worlds as the poll for the novel-writing challenge. Almost, but not quite. I'm going to leave Dadauar off the poll, because of all the worlds on the Wongery it's probably the one that least needs more focus. I mean, even Dadauar certainly could use—and will get—a lot more development, but out of all my worlds on the Wongery it's the one that has by far the most articles about it, so I figure I should give some love to one of the others. I'm also leaving the Dreamsea out of consideration for WorldEmber because while sure, it could use a lot more development, and I definitely could come up with things to write about related to it for all those prompts, I just got done writing 50,000 words of a novel set there (okay, 50,078); I'd rather turn my attention to a different world for a while. On the other hand, I didn't include Ganyak in the poll for the novel-writing challenge, because I didn't feel like writing a novel set on what for now doesn't feel much different from any other generic superhero world—but it could use more development so that maybe I can get it to not feel that way.

Of course, the articles for WorldEmber will be written on WorldAnvil, and I'm not, incidentally, necessarily going to copy all of them to the Wongery right away... which means that at least for a while there's now going to be some information about one of the worlds of the Wongery that's exclusively on WorldAnvil. It'll get to the Wongery eventually, though.

So, anyway, I've got the poll up on the forum—here's the link—, and if you're so inclined (and you're somehow reading this article before the poll closes despite my complete failure to draw any attention to the Wongery)... maybe consider voting? Thanks.