World Ember 2025

Preparation

WorldEmber Prep 2025 Instructions

Step 1: Pledge

Writing Goal

For December 2025, I pledge to write 10,000 words of worldbuilding on Ruartei. I make this promise to myself, my readers, my fans and the world which is made better by my creative spirit.

—Joella Kay

WorldEmber 2025 Pledge for JoellaKay by World Anvil Fillable PDF

Area of Focus

This year, I'm planning to focus on Ruartei with special emphasis on the background that I need for the second draft of my first book.

This is the world of my (WIP) Arke Portal and (future) Arke Station books.

Create or Update Your Meta

For Mirielle, I actually created an initial, bare bones, meta to help remind me that it's a world to have fun and yet give me some loose guidelines and provide a bit of structure. At the moment, I'm not ready, nor have the time, to flesh it out further. But if I think of anything during WorldEmber, I will add it at that time (despite it not counting toward my WorldEmber goal).

Step 2: Bingo

World Ember 2025 Prep Bingo Card by World Anvil

I didn't find a row or column that contained the items I had time/inclination to do, so I just picked 5 of them.

Scope for World Ember

I've given myself a lot of latitude on what to write about, but I am limiting it to the things I need to know now to revise my current draft. I don't want to restrict it too much because I may wander into productive areas, but I also want to get a bunch of background settled so I can focus on the book's plot changes and actual writing.

Pre-writing Research

For the last 2-3 months, I worked on and finally finished (as much as I need, anyway), a program that simulated lineage of the House of Livy, an important dynasty in Ruartei with special emphasis on the nonaLivy branch, which is the main dynasty in the Arke Portal books. Along with the simulation, I created the nonaLivy family tree at various stages to show their progression and chart the major dates for important events.

In the last 2-3 weeks, I gone back over my notes on my dimensions, with the intent to refine and nail down the terminology, history/timeline, and beings that appear or affect the Arke Portal story.

Review Category Tree

My category tree is under current revision. I've made notes on the changes I want and will create/revise categories (based on those notes) as I write the articles. A complete overhaul will have to wait until next year.

Re-read Core Articles

I've been re-reading the world meta and core articles (as well as my notes) to see what I'm missing, need to revise, and to refresh my mind on what I've already decided.

Community

I'm part of the Discord community and will be participating in the WorldEmber channel.

Status

WorldEmber 2025 Home Page

My Progress Report Page

Articles

Thoughts

Well, at the beginning, I started a couple of articles that remain stubs for now. But then, nothing. I finally got back to it around Christmas. I managed to write one very long article and a couple of short ones. The long article is over 10k so I reached my WorldEmber goal. The long article is House of Livy Dynastic Records. And I really need this as reference for my book series.

The key to writing this was deciding to just write what I needed without thinking of making it for others to read. I did occasionally think how it would look to others, but I mostly focused on adding enough information so I wouldn't wonder what I meant when I look at it later.

For those who might happen to skim it (and as a reminder to myself), the financial numbers all come from the simulation program I wrote this summer. Not all the numbers went into the article, of course. The final output of my program was 22mb (and that was after turning off a bunch of the print statements) and it takes over 5 minutes to run.

I am really satisfied with the simulation program. (I started writing it a few years ago and had to give up because it ran out of memory on the software I was using.) But I wrote it in a different programming language this time. And going through the coding process really did help me flesh out rules and how the House of Livy works. The program doesn't simulate everything, but it's a reasonable approximation. And given how rich the Livy families are, a few million here or there is simply a rounding error to them. (It was truly enlightening just how rich a successful dynasty could be after 370 years.)

But back to WorldEmber. I managed to write more than I did last year. And this is the second year in a row that I've participated and succeeded.