The Wongery

So. About two hours before this blog entry was posted was the deadline for WorldEmber, a challenge on the worldbuilding site World Anvil^[1] that involved writing 10,000 words of worldbuilding in the month of December. (Well, mostly in the month of December, with a few extra days on either end; the challenge technically ran from November 29 to January 4.) I described in a previous post my intent to participate in this challenge. So, now that the challenge was over, how did I do?

Well... about the same as I did in the November novel-writing challenge. Which is to say that technically I successfully completed the challenge, in that I reached the required word count (barely), but I didn't really meet all the goals I'd had in mind for the challenge. In the case of the novel month, this meant that while I did write 50,000 words, I didn't finish the novel, and I didn't really participate in any of the communities that were discussing the challenge. In the case of WorldEmber, I did write more than 10,000 words, but I only answered thirteen of the twenty-three prompts provided. Which is okay, I guess; the prompts were optional anyway; but I had wanted to try to respond to all of them. And I'm pretty sure I could have, had I gotten an earlier start on WorldEmber and not—as I did with the novel-writing challenge—left the bulk of it till so near the deadline.

(The last-minute rush wasn't quite as extreme for WorldEmber as for the novel challenge though; for the November challenge I spent the majority of November 30 working on the novel—even taking out the time spent for things like eating, a brief nap, and a few other activities, I'd estimate I spent at least fifteen hours that day working on the novel, and likely more than that. But in this case even on the last day (that is to say, today) I spent less than four hours writing for WorldEmber. Should I have devoted more time to it? Eh... honestly, no, I think probably not. I had other things I also wanted to get done this last week, and after all while I didn't answer all the prompts (or meet the optional higher-word-count subchallenges) I did still complete the challenge. I definitely should have gotten an earlier start... but once I did start, I don't think devoting more hours a day to it would have been a good idea in the long run.)

Still, even if I didn't quite meet all the goals I'd had for the challenge, it did serve one useful purpose: it got me thinking more about Jhembaz, the world I'd chosen to focus on for the challenge. Jhembaz was one of the first worlds posted to the Wongery—well, to be exact, it was the fifth world posted to the Wongery, after Dadauar, Curcalen, Vlastach, and Kadis. And unlike some other worlds of the Wongery—Dadauar and Vlastach among them—Jhembaz didn't have years of prior development to draw on; it was created just for the Wongery, and that initial article on the world was the first thing I ever wrote about it. But despite having been on the Wongery for so long, Jhembaz has had little development, and I haven't really given it as much thought as I should have. (That actually goes for a lot of the worlds of the Wongery—maybe even most of them—but Jhembaz is the one I'm discussing now.) Oh, I've given it some thought, and I've come up with some ideas for things related to Jhembaz that haven't made it to the Wongery yet, like the Ivory Empire and the Godtamers (those are both redlinks at the time I'm writing this post, but hopefully eventually they won't be). But coming up with all these new articles about Jhembaz in such a short time frame has forced me to give it more consideration than I really have before.

There are a lot of logistical matters about the world of Jhembaz that I realized needed to be addressed. The core concept of Jhembaz is that it's a world pretty much entirely covered by giant trees—the article at the time I'm writing this says it's "sometimes referred to as a jungle world". (I'm not a fan of single-biome worlds; I think they're generally unrealistic and boring; but Jhembaz isn't really a single-biome world, since the different types of trees and the differences between the vertical layers from the forest floor to the treetops means there's a wide variety of distinct environments.) Which is... fine, but that raises a lot of questions that I hadn't really considered, and realized I should, such as the following.

• Just how big are these giant trees? There are arboreal seas held up by the trees, and entire nations layered above each other, so they have to be really tall... but how tall? (The article currently says "the foliage... is at its center as thick as the earth of the disk itself", which in fact I somehow missed until I glanced at the article just now as I was writing this post, but that... anyway seems like a bit much.)
• If cities and entire nations are built on the branches of the trees, then... what happens when the trees die? (Or are they immortal?)
• If we're talking hundreds of meters of foliage, then... is the forest floor just pitch black because all of the layers of foliage above blocking the light?
  • If yes, how do new trees grow, if there's no light for saplings to take in?
  • If no, then what's providing the light down there?
• How many distinct vertical layers are there to the world, and what's distinct about them?

I admit I still don't have firm answers to all these questions, but now I've at least thought about them. (I'll probably have to come up with good answers for them when I finally get around to rewriting the Jhembaz article, of course—it's, let's see, the forty-eighth article ever posted, so yeah, hopefully I'll get to that within the next few months.)

Between considering these questions and coming up with all these new articles on World Anvil, though, I feel like I've got sort of a greater feel for Jhembaz now than I ever have in the past. Certainly there's still a lot to be figured out, and a lot of work to be done, but I feel like Jhembaz has had more development in the past week or so than it had in the preceding fifteen and a half years. Purely in terms of word count, that's certainly the case; all the articles about Jhembaz currently on the Wongery total only 8,298 words... though they'll no doubt be longer when they're rewritten. So anyway, there are now 11,360 new words about Jhembaz on World Anvil. All the information in them will make its way to the Wongery eventually, but those articles aren't ready for the Wongery yet... most of them are significantly shorter than I shoot for for Wongery articles nowadays, and they were hastily written and need some editing. But in the meantime I guess you can read them on World Anvil if you're so inclined.

If World Anvil is doing WorldEmber again next year (as I assume it will), I'll participate again, and this time I'll get an earlier start. (What is it about me that makes challenges like this (or novel month, or 24 Hour Comics Day) so appealing to me? I don't know, but for some reason they are.) I'm not going to hold a poll next time to choose what world I'll focus on (even if I somehow do have enough people interacting with the site by then to make it easy to get people to vote on it). I'll just go with whatever new world was most recently posted to the Wongery, because that will of course be the one with the most development. (Unless it happens to be a world which, like Dadauar and Vlastach, predates the Wongery and has a body of information already written about it to draw from, in which case I'll go with the most recently posted world of which that isn't true.)

But to be honest, I was feeling maybe at least a little stressed about completing WorldEmber, and I'm glad the pressure is off for now. And now to put some time in on some of the other things I need to do. Like finally getting those stat block templates implemented for the RPG space, which is something I've kept saying was a high priority...

And also, of course, posting some new articles!