In the previous blog post[1], I mentioned that I intended to participate in the WorldAnvil Spooktober event again this year—assuming there was such an event again. Well, almost immediately after making that post, I checked the WorldAnvil site—that was on October 25, and last year the event had run through the 26th, so time was short.
Not quite so short as I thought, as it turned out. Yes, there was a 2025 Spooktober event, but this time it ran through November 1. I had plenty of time. Or at least, I had a week rather than just a day.
But what, exactly, was I going to do? Like last year, the event provided a series of twenty-one one-word prompts, with the idea that participants were to write something related to their world for each prompt—it could be an article, an illustration, any sort of "original worldbuilding or art". This year, the prompts were all words taken from Tolkien's works in commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of the publication of The Lord of the Rings, but while the event page said that participants could theme their "answers to the kind of themes and creatures that live in Middle Earth", that wasn't required. Anyway, last year, thinking that writing a full article for each prompt may be a bit too much of an ask, I wrote a concept for an RPG adventure for each prompt, each set on a different world from the Wongery. I could, of course, do the same this time. But I'd rather do something different. But what?
What I settled on was maybe writing a work of flash fiction for each prompt—again each set on a different world, like the adventures of yesteryear. I thought this might be good practice. After all, the November writing challenge would be coming up; I am nowhere near as prepared for that as I should be, but that will be a subject for a separate post. And furthermore... well, maybe I could use more experience writing short fiction. I do not feel qualified to judge my own writing skills, but one thing of which I am fairly certain is that whatever virtues I may have as a writer, brevity is not among them. (This will come as no surprise to those who have struggled through these rambling and prolix blog posts.) I have enjoyed writing since I was a child, but what I have written has generally been novels, or even the starts of what I had intended to be multi-volume epics; I've finished more novels than I have short stories. It could do me good to try to do some writing in shorter formats.
So it was decided, but being the hopelessly incompetent procrastinator that I am, I didn't actually start planning out the stories I would write, let alone writing them, until, uh, November 1. That is to say, the very day the event ended and submissions were due. Specifically, I started less than three hours before the time that I inferred from some community posts on the WorldAnvil site that the event was to end. That wasn't much time, especially since I couldn't devote myself fully to the task even during those few hours; I was in fact working yesterday, and had to take some time out to deal with work-related issues[2]. There were, as mentioned, twenty-one prompts, and last year I wrote adventures for all twenty-one, but only thirteen were actually required in order to receive the badge that marks successful completion of the event. If not all twenty-one, I resolved to at least get stories written for thirteen prompts before the deadline.
And, somehow, I did. But while I had thirteen stories written before the deadline, I still had to actually post them on the WorldAnvil site. And that turned out to be a bit more of a hassle than I had expected. Until that day, I don't think I'd logged into WorldAnvil and posted anything there since the previous December, and I didn't remember exactly how it worked—and I'm pretty sure the interface has been changed since then anyway. Also, when I copied and pasted the stories from the text file where I wrote them into WorldAnvil, the paragraph breaks disappeared, and I had to manually re-add them, which was a bit of a pain—I'll do some experimentation and see if I can figure out a way to paste text and preserve paragraph breaks for the future. Anyway, fortunately, while I didn't quite get all thirteen stories up before what I thought had been the deadline, it turned out that the deadline wasn't exactly when I had surmised it was after all, and submissions were still open a bit longer. I did manage to get all thirteen stories uploaded and figured if there was time left I'd write a fourteenth—but by the time I finished that fourteenth story (which was, admittedly, significantly longer than the other thirteen, though still short enough to qualify as flash fiction), submissions had closed. Ah, well. I may not have submitted an entry for every prompt this year, but at least I still did enough to qualify for the badge. And anyway, even if I had had more time (which is to say, even if I'd started days earlier like I should have), I'm still not sure what I could possibly have come up with for the prompt of "Pocketses". That's, uh... rather a Tolkien-specific word. (Sure, I guess I could have just written a story involving pockets and ignored the reduplicated plural, but, eh, that seems kind of like cheating.)
With the challenge completed, and with WorldAnvil still open, I figured i may as well do some virtual housekeeping and finish setting up my worlds there. Hitherto, I had made separate "worlds" within my WorldAnvil account for a few of the worlds of the Wongery—Dadauar, Curcalen, Jhembaz, Vlastach—but all the articles not pertaining to those specific worlds (and even some of the articles that did pertain to those specific worlds) were just posted to a catchall world called "Miscellaneous" for... well, for just that; articles that pertained to a world I hadn't implemented. But I figured I ought to go ahead and create the worlds the other articles took place in as well. So I did, and I moved the corresponding articles there. That was a slow process and ended up taking most of the day, and I don't know how much of that was due to WorldAnvil's slow response time and how much to a slow internet connection at my current location, but in any case it's now done. The world of Miscellaneous is no more—technically not deleted, but renamed to "The Eversky", since that happened to be the world where the last article was set, and it seemed unnecessarily complicated to create a new world for the Eversky, move the last article there, and then delete the Miscellaneous world when I could just turn the Miscellaneous world into the Eversky.
This process did raise a question as to what exactly I should count as a world. For instance, one of the adventures from last year was set on Chee, one of the capital worlds of the Empire of Norg—but one of the stories from this year was set on an obscure unnamed world on the outskirts of Norg. Because of the latter, it would seem necessary to set up Norg as a world in WorldAnvil, but should I set up Chee as a separate world, even though Chee is within Norg, or should I simply put the Chee adventure in the world of Norg? I decided on the former course; essentially I determined that anything that was listed as a world in the index of worlds in the Wongery could also be a world on WorldAnvil—though of course not every world listed in that index is implemented on WorldAnvil yet, only the ones that I've written content for. I'll make more when and as they're needed. That means currently I have twenty-nine worlds on World Anvil, from Aarven to Ym, but that number will probably grow.
What do I ultimately hope to do with WorldAnvil? Eh... I don't know. Of course I have the Wongery, and most of my content will continue to be there; I'd planned on copying at least some information about each of my worlds to WorldAnvil to make it easier for other WorldAnvil users to do their own thing with it, and maybe I'll still do that, but it's not a high priority. I guess for now at least there's some WorldAnvil-exclusive content, in the form of the things I've written for Spooktober and other events, and for the moment that's good enough.
Anyway, I make no promises as to the quality of the flash fiction I wrote for Spooktober (some of the stories are better than others, but I wouldn't say any are that great), but if you want to read them, you can read them on my WorldAnvil Spooktober page. And of course there's also the fourteenth story I didn't finish in time for it to be an official WorldAnvil submission, if you want to read that.
- ↑ I seem to fairly often begin blog posts with recaps of what was in previous blog posts. Should I start by saying something like "Previously, on the Wongery blog", like an old TV series with an ongoing serialized story? No, I probably shouldn't, for several reasons. Anyway, I'm not going to do that.
- ↑ As a matter of fact, I had to devote some of that time to driving to work, since the start of work that day happened to be during that less-than-three-hour period. That wasn't as much a problem as it might seem, however, since I'm working out of town this week and am staying at a hotel only a few minutes from the work site.