New Year's Resolutions 2026

A not-so-great worldbuilding year 2025

2025 is over, and it hasn't been my best worldbuilding year. Aside from my participation in Summer Camp and WorldEmber, I barely wrote anything new, and in both challenges, I barely made it across the finish line. For Summer Camp I only just reached the silver badge, and for WorldEmber I managed 10016 words. (If you are wondering why the certificate below says 10006 words, there were some technical difficulties.) Other than that, I participated in several unofficial community challenges, though I mostly did complete article rewrites for it or submitted scenes from my not yet existing novel.

However, even though I was perhaps lacking some worldbuilding spoons, my creativitydid not go unused. For Adventure MAPril, an amazing map-making challenge hosted by the wonderful Tillerz, I made an entire fantasy map from scratch, which turned out to be perfect for my newer world, the Kingdom of Keider, and has helped out my worldbuilding for Summer Camp and WorldEmber both.

Outside of World Anvil, I have also done some creative things. For one thing, I've made a lot of progress on several drafts and ideas for stories, particularly the one set here in Leanor that I hope to finish in 2026. I've also taken up creative bullet journaling, which I found to be a lot of fun and, more importantly, very helpful to keep my brain a little more organized and less crowded with appointments and other life admin data.

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New year, new goals

After I've had a hardly better than mediocre worldbuilding year 2025 with the main focus being on the Kingdom of Keider, my newer world, I'm hoping to be able to find the energy to do a little more creative writing in 2026, but I know that that will be hard.

Between hopefully finally finishing my bachelor's degree this year, trying to find somewhere to work afterwards and just generally figure out how to do this mysterious life thing everyone talks about, I may have to put my creativity on the back burner for a bit.

Still, I'd like to finally finish a draft of what's shaping out to be a whole novel set in this world of Leanor. There are multiple nearly finished versions, most of which are only missing an ending, floating around on my computer, not even counting the notebooks and loose pieces of paper that also contain ideas for it.

I already started to consolidate those into a multi-POV draft in 2025, but I'm less of a quarter of the way through the plot at this point, so there is a lot of work ahead still. The hardest part will undoubtedly be figuring out the end. I know what happens to my characters, but I struggle a lot with finding the best way of how to end the story.

There is potential for a very nasty cliffhanger, which would be the easiest way to do it, but I don't want to do that. Unfortunately, that opens many, many possibilities for alternative endings. Right now, I'm leaning towards having just a short epilogue and a fairly open ending after aforementioned cliffhanger, but I'm not sure. As you can see, lots to think about in an already busy time.

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Anyway...

Way to write about anything except the challenge you clicked on this article for. Sorry about the little ramble there, it just feels good to finally write all of that down somewhere. In preparation for finally finishing that draft of my novel, I decided to stick to the plots and prose of WorldEmber 2025.

While the plot of my novel is mostly set already, it can't hurt to look at and get inspired by the ideas and writing styles of more experienced writers. You'll find the five articles I chose for this challenge down below. Inspired by them, I'm hoping to finally write that plot-article for my novel that I still haven't made yet.

It will act as a kind of summary and overview over what at this point exists as individual character arcs and a rudimentary timeline. Ideally, I'll be able to put what my brain knows about the plot of the novel into writing in a generalized place so that my brain cells won't need to continually hold on to it as more and more details pile up on top.

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The Inspired

Note: This article definitely contains spoilers, so read at your own risk. Enjoy.

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The Inspiration

This article by Make lore, not war was a truly enjoyable read. Not only did they manage to turn a rather silly concept - in the best way possible - into a great story, they also made me laugh out loud several times.

I really enjoyed reading the story, but what really got me was their engaging and captivating narrative style and sense of humour. Even though there are hardly any fleshed out individual characters, I still felt for the inhabitants of Yelsin, who's lives are being narrated and controlled by a incorporeal Narrator who just doesn't shut up.

Overall a great article that tells an interesting story in a narrative style that I find very inspiring.

Kitoypoy's The Mystery of the Missing Souls is a plot-producer and thus a choose your own adventure-type deal and seems to be targeted mostly to TTRPG-players.

In it, you can roll the dice to get some corner stones for a small campaign looking for a missing soul. It outputs who is missing, where the party goes and what they find out there, who is responsible for the disappearance and what their goal and their minions are, as well as a final plot twist.

As a writer who's never participated in a TTRPG, it is not super useful for my purposes, but I still enjoyed looking at it and rolling for my own little story, which turned out to be quite wholesome.

Demongrey has put out this great plot for a TTRPG session. With a captivating writing style, they set a very interesting and definitely slightly terrifying scene for a party of adventurers in the roles of the Special Branch of Lundeinjon.

Under the Eldritch Moon, they will have to do their best to survive a night full of scary encounters with all sorts of horrors, monstrous or otherwise.

As an enjoyer of classic rock music, I also appreciated the slightly changed song lyrics quoted throughout, songs which Demongrey states inspired the article as a whole.

This short and sweet article by Asmo outlines the story of writer and explorer Moon Crow. It structures their adventure in a brief and factual fashion without unnecessary details.

While there could have been a few more details for my taste, the article stands as a great example of how to outline a plot without getting lost in the sauce. I'm interested to read more of Moon Crow's world and their story of self-actualization in the future.

This prose article by Tonarus I chose mainly because the title sounded fun. What I found was an interesting scene that turned from two people talking in a bar into a fast-paced action sequence, complete with magical powers.

Whilst I still don't really know who anyone is and what the heck was going on, it was a fun read, introducing what I can only assume to be an adventure with some interesting characters.