The Wongery

So in my last blog post I enumerated the November novel-writing events I planned to participate in. Of the six events I listed, two seem to not actually be going on, or at least to not be ready yet. The site for Writing Month still shows the "coming soon" message, and while the site's creator has been posting occasional progress updates, most recently this last Wednesday... well, again, the main site still shows the "coming soon" message. As for Novel Quest, I am fairly certain one of the following three possibilities is true, but I'm not sure which: Either (a) this event also is not ready yet, (b) the event is completely uncentralized and requires people to choose to host and organize it locally, or (c) the event is fully functional and working just fine and I am just too stupid to figure out how to join it.

The remaining four events, however, I have been interacting with in one way or another. I've joined the r/nanodiaspora2024 subreddit, and the Plotterati and Stygian Society Discord servers to participate in those organizations' respective events (the November Writing Challenge and The Novelist's Initiation), though the former doesn't seem to have a dedicated channel in the server for the event, so I'm not sure how much there'll be to interactive with there.

That leaves NovelEmber, the event hosted by World Anvil, which is the one connected to the main topic of this post—but, as usual, I've rambled on for several only tangentially relevant paragraphs before getting to the main point. (Only two paragraphs so far, though, which I think is significantly less than usual. Although I still haven't actually gotten to the main point yet, and it'll be another few paragraphs before I do.) As stated in my previous post, I had certainly heard of World Anvil, and in fact already had it linked in the list of "Other Worldbuilding Sites" on the main page of the Public Wongery; but I hadn't really looked into it and didn't have an account there. And didn't necessarily intend to create an account there, at least not right away; I thought I'd read somewhere that you didn't have to have an account on the site to "officially" participate in NovelEmber. But either I'd misremembered or things had changed, because as far as I could now tell I did have to create an account to participate. So I did.

But now that I was finally looking at the WorldAnvil site, something else caught my notice. Aside from, and before, NovelEmber, they were hosting another, smaller event: "Spooktober". The site provided twenty-one "spooky-themed" prompts, and users were encouraged to "create something in any medium that relates to the prompt in any way (worldbuilding, art, poetry)..." The prompts were chosen in honor of the 70th anniversary of the first Godzilla movie, and so it was suggested that entries could be themed to kaiju, but this was explicitly stated to be "totally optional".

Anyway, users who submitted articles for at least thirteen prompts were to receive a badge, which... I don't know where the badge shows up or what it looks like, but for some reason that I'm not sure of myself I wanted to participate anyway. But there was a problem. The event was running from September 28 to October 26, and I only found out about it on October 22. That meant I had about four days to write twenty-one articles... or twenty-one something. So... what exactly was I going to do?

The obvious answer would be to write, well, articles for the Central Wongery. Could I write twenty-one articles in four days? No; absolutely not; that was ridiculous and there was no possible way that was going to happen; but I am an idiot and I refused to acknowledge that. Anyway, I figured I'd set each article on a different world—there are certainly more than enough worlds on the Wongery for that to happen—and I'd split them as evenly as possible among worlds created by the six Grandmaster Wongers. Which since of course twenty-one isn't divisible by six would mean four articles pertaining to worlds written by each of me, Tada, and Antefyn, and three each for Alarcus, Oscqr, and Ealeel.

ANd so I spent... more time than I should have that day trying to come up with ideas for articles for each of the prompts. But the next day—by which time I had come up with ideas for sixteen of the twenty-one prompts—I realized two flaws in my plans. First of all, I think this was supposed to be a personal challenge; I'm not sure it wouldn't be cheating to farm out some of it to the other Grandmaster Wongers (if any), and I didn't want to write articles myself (or at least credit them to myself) set on other Grandmasters' worlds. So for the purposes of this challenge I probably ought to stick to my own worlds. (Of which there aren't twenty-one, so I couldn't have each article set on a different world, but that was okay; I could divide them as evenly as possible between worlds.) So I mostly started over with coming up with article ideas, though there were a few that had been set on my own worlds that I could still use. Second, I finally came to terms with the fact that expecting to write twenty-one full articles by the 26th was completely unrealistic. The average length of articles in the Central Wongery is more than 1500 words (and that's with a lot of short early articles bringing down the average); twenty-one articles of that length would be well over thirty-thousand words. I'd have to write a number of words equivalent to two thirds of a fifty-thousand-word novel writing challenge in a few days. Now, honestly, for writing a novel, if I already had it outlined and had designed the significant characters and settings, that might be doable, if I wasn't working those days (which I was), and didn't have anything else I had to do (which I did). But given the research and thought that goes into a Wongery article, yeah, there's no way that was an achievable goal. But what I could do is at least start writing twenty-one articles, and post on WorldAnvil as much of each article as I had by the deadline... and then I'd fill out the complete articles on the Wongery later.

But then the next day I had a better idea. Now, I do like some of the article ideas that were come up with on the first two go-rounds, and at least some, and maybe all, of those articles will probably be written later. But the entries for Spooktober didn't have to be normal articles... and there was something else that I wanted to eventually do that I could use this event to lay preparation for and that I could more realistically get done. Eventually, I do want to release free adventures and supplements set on worlds of the Wongery for various RPGs. (I even mentioned the possibility in a past blog post of publishing an adventure for Free RPG Day... unfortunately, at this point I think it's pretty safe to say that I'm not going to ready to do that for next year's Free RPG Day, but it's still on the table for the year after.) Maybe I could come up with ideas for twenty-one RPG adventures for Spooktober. I obviously wouldn't be able to actually write all or any of the adventures before the 26th, but for the purposes of the event just coming up with twenty-one ideas and writing the summaries could be enough.

And while I wouldn't necessarily want to write (or be credited for) articles on the other Grandmasters' worlds, I didn't see much problem with coming up with adventures on their worlds, so I could go back to my original plan of choosing a different world for each prompt (and dividing them as evenly as possible among worlds by the six Grandmaster Wongers).

So that's what I did. Got the last one up this morning. I won't post them all here, but if you want to read them you can read them on my Spooktober page on the World Anvil site, if you want. (Warning: Link may contain major spoilers for adventures that have not yet been written and may never be.) Was this really something I should have been spending my time on the last few days, when I could have been outlining the novel I want to write in November, or writing articles for the Wongery, or doing any of the other quite possibly literally hundreds of things I want to get done? No, probably not. But I can't say it was a complete waste of time. Again, I do, after all, eventually want to release free RPG adventures based on Wongery worlds, and now I have twenty-one ideas for adventures I can write, which is a nontrivial thing to come up with. (I've often seen it said that ideas are cheap, and that it's all in the execution. This is not necessarily true, or rather it's true only if you choose particular definitions of "ideas" and "execution". But that's another subject I want to write (and indeed have already started writing) a blog post about in the future.) Am I going to use all of those ideas? Maybe not. And to be honest, I don't think there are any that really leap out at me as great ideas that demand to be expanded on. But on the other hand, there aren't really any of the twenty-one that strike me as hopelessly bland and unusable, either. So we'll see. I didn't specify what RPG each adventure would be written for, and that was intentional; that's something I can decide on later—I do eventually want to release adventures for many different RPGs, after all.

Oh... there's one more thing I should probably comment on. So on World Anvil you can set up worlds connected to your account (in fact if I recall correctly I was required to set up one world when I created the account—I chose Dadauar, since that was the first world posted to the Wongery), and each article you write is connected to one of those worlds. So I was going to set up a world on my World Anvil account for each world an adventure was set in... but it quickly became apparent that wouldn't be possible because, previously unbeknownst to me, free accounts on World Anvil are limited to two worlds. I tried to figure out if there were a way to create an article not connected to a specific world, but couldn't find a way to do so, so eventually just changed my second world from Meptus (which it originally was only because that happened to be the setting of the adventure idea corresponding to the second prompt) to "Miscellaneous" and put all the non-Dadauar articles there. Apparently those with paid accounts can move articles between worlds, so if I do upgrade to a paid account I can create those other worlds and move the articles into them later.

Should I upgrade to a paid account? Well... honestly, yes, at some point I think I will. On the one hand, I don't need a World Anvil account to have a place to share my worlds, because I have a site where I can do that. This one. This site right here. The one this blog post is posted on. On the other hand, the main purpose of the Wongery is to make it easy for other people to use our worlds, and, well, "other people" includes World Anvil users, of whom there are a not wholly insigificant number, and who will find it easier to use the worlds of the Wongery if they're also up on World Anvil where they can copy the relevant pages easily to their own accounts if they want to run an RPG campaign on a Wongery world. Plus, I just noticed looking at the account pricing page as I was writing this article that if I had a "Grandmaster" account, which is the minimum account I'd need anyway since a "Master" account only allows ten worlds and I have a lot more than that (plus, I call myself a Grandmaster Wonger; how could I not have a Grandmaster account?), I'd also get "[a]ccess to World Anvil API keys to develop your own apps," which, ooh, maybe that would let me implement other ways to integrate the Wongery with World Anvil and make it easier for World Anvil users to utilize our content. Plus, anyway, like I said before, I do want to support other worldbuilding sites.

So... yeah, at some point I probably will upgrade to a paid World Anvil account. But not necessarily right away. Money's kind of tight right now (though then again, it pretty much always is). On the other hand, if I am going to upgrade, maybe now's the time, because there's 50% off Spooktober flash sale going on, as announced by a popup that comes up every time I load a page on the site. On yet another hand, though, the popup says the sale is in its "LAST 12 HOURS", and I'm pretty sure the popup was coming up and saying that last night, too, which was significantly more than twelve hours ago, so I'm not sure whether it could be that the sale is already over and the site administrators just haven't turned off the ad yet. So... eh, I think maybe what I'll do is after I post this blog entry I'll see if the flash sale actually is still in effect; if it is, I'll go ahead and take advantage of the sale to upgrade my account, and if it's not, I'll wait till I'm maybe in a slightly better financial situation.

Speaking of events I don't have time to participate in but want to anyway, when I posted on the Stygian Society discord about the poll to help me decide which world I'll set my November novel on (because yes, that's still a thing I'm doing), someone pointed out that the Order of the Written Word was also hosting another event, "The Trials of Verse & Vignette", which (as one option for completion) involved writing eight short stories. If I have eight different worlds I can write stories about (there are eight entries in the poll), then maybe, they suggested, instead of writing a novel on one of those worlds for The Novelist's Initiation, I could write a short story in each of them for The Trials of Verse & Vignette?

Well, I definitely would rather write a novel in November than eight short stories, for several reasons. For one, there are the other events I'm simultaneously participating in that don't have the short story option. I think it might actually be easier for me to write a novel than eight short stories, even if the total word count is greater; ideas for longer stories come easier to me than shorter (though possibly this is largely due to lack of practice with the latter), and I think coming up with ideas for eight short stories is a much more formidable task than coming up with an idea for one novel. (Although I guess if I'm going to be trying to develop possible concepts for novels set on each of the worlds before I find out which one won the poll I'm going to be trying to come up with eight ideas anyway...) But most importantly, the whole reason I'm writing this novel in November (well, the main reason; I guess another reason is just because I enjoy writing) is so that I can self-publish it and use it to bring attention to the Wongery—and novels are a lot more marketable and more attention-grabbing than short story collections. Still... there is something tempting about trying to write a short story in each of those worlds. My plan to write a novel set on a world of the Wongery this November hasn't changed... but maybe if I end up making good enough progress on the novel that I feel I have some time to spare, I'll try to come up with a short story for each of the eight worlds in the poll in addition to the novel.

Of course, I almost certainly won't have time to spare. Between work and other obligations and all the other things I have to get done, it's going to be challenging enough to write a novel in November; it's unlikely I'll have the leisure to try to write eight short stories as well.

Unlikely, but not entirely impossible. Maybe things will go more smoothly than I expect; maybe I'll get on a roll with the novel, and I'll be able to make some time to come with some other story ideas.

But probably not. I'm busy enough as it is without trying to find time every day to write a novel; it's not very likely that I'll be able to find time for other new projects as well.

But maybe.

But probably not.