Summer Camp 2026

I can't believe it's Summer Camp Season again already. It feels like WorldEmber was only a few weeks ago, and now I'm excited to get into Summer Camp. It's one of the few things that will make the hot summer months ahead significantly less dreadful, as it gives me an excuse to hide from the sun and heat at home or at the library.

But before Summer Camp can start properly four weeks from now, some preparation is in order, and that's what this article is for. I'll do my best to complete each weeks assignments and prompts. Prompts and links are found in the sidebar.

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Week 1: Love

Love comes in many forms. People can love people in all kinds of different ways, and people can love things like a job or hobby, nature, their religion, or any number of other things. In Leanor, different regions have different understandings and representations of love, the Acadean Pantheon being the only one that has a concrete divine representation of love.

As for romantic love, the people of western Leanor tend to be much more fussed by who does or does not love whom than the people of the east. The Serbaith and Valeori people are particularly unbothered about it. In fact, they are often confused or amused by the heteronormative "rules" of the western countries.

Whilst one would expect marriage to be an institution built on love, it often is one of social status or political gain, especially amongst nobility and royalty. Other kinds of love, be it between friends, siblings, or parents and children, obviously exist across the board, though the ways to express it may vary according to geographical location and status within society.

In my story, the predominantly non-straight main characters from western Leanor struggle not only with how to fit into society with their romantic inclinations, but also with their other interests, which often do not fit with the expectations put onto them according to their gender.

Pledging my Goal

By now, it has become something of a tradition for me to aim for the silver badge, regardless of which world I'm working on. With everything else that I usually have going on in July, that seems like a reasonable goal to me. I do have a slightly less busy July this year, but I decided to stick with Silver as my personal minimum requirement.

This year, I've chosen to go back to my worldbuilding roots and expand the world of Leanor further. With my most expansive manuscript of The Young Lion, which is set in Leanor, close to completion, that seemed to be the sensible choice, as my brain currently firmly resides there.

Rolled a 2, Maps and Timelines it is

A new Map!

Just last month, I shot slightly past the finish line on my Hitchhiker's Guide-article and created a whole new map of the city Angeleor. That being said, my overall world map of Leanor was in dire need of a revamp. The base image was grainy, and I didn't like the markers I chose on it. Also, my sloppy hand-labelling in the base image was a bit of a desaster.

As of June 2nd, Leanor has a new world map. After drawing and digitizing a new base image using the old one as a template, I could create a new map. There were some technical difficulties to overcome, but I figured it out, and now there's a map with (almost) all of the important locations marked. Unlike the old one, I really like this new version.

An updated Timeline

As far as timelines go, the most relevant one would have to be the one detailing the events of the War of the Lions, a.k.a. the events of The Young Lion. That one was for the most part still accurate, though some of my time-maths has changed and some of the events have evolved. So, a small update was needed here as well.

I have now updated the dates according to the new calender maths and added more in-depth descriptions of most events, unless I felt they didn't need more of an explanation. I also added a few events and removed others as I saw fit. Is it the end all be all of timelines? Unlikely, but it is now more detailed and up to the current version of the story.

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Week 2: Growth

The concept of growth can mean many, many things, not just the increase of physical size of a thing. Cities grow, societies evolve and expand, people learn and change. In Leanor, belief systems have changed, an Empire rose, spread and collapsed, kingdoms were founded, their borders shifting over time.

From a character-driven point of view, I find it particularly interesting to look into how my characters grow and evolve physically and mentally to adapt to and overcome the challenges they are faced with. Every one of the main characters comes out the other end of the story a changed, bigger person.

An Area of Focus

This year, I find myself struggling to pinpoint which area of Leanor I want my attention to go to. I guess I'll have to see where the prompts take me, but I will try to make sure to write about things that impact the characters in my story in some way or another.

A separate Area, but a Part of a larger World

I did roll a three, but with a fairly non-specific area of focus, figuring out its interactions with my world is not as easy as it sounds. The story does, however, discuss events that impact all of Leanor, so I guess by writing about things that impact the characters in it, I'm also writing about things that change and impact all of Leanor.

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Week 3: Loss

Loss is something that is omnipresent. It can be personal, be it the end of a relationship, the death of a loved one or something as simple as losing a meaningful thing, or it can be bigger than that. It could refer to the loss of a culture, belief or wealth of knowledge that no longer exists or has been forgotten or intentionally removed from public memory, or it could mean a whole host of other things.

Wanting to write about things that more or less directly influence my characters' stories and my story as a whole, loss could potentially be a great prompt. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single one of my characters who hasn't experienced some form of loss. Also, the region of Leanor has been through no shortage of changes throughout its long history, most of which have not happened without any loss.

Scheduling, my mortal Enemy, we meet again

Luckily, this July I have only one last written exam and two small writing assignments for uni and am otherwise mostly free to do whatever. I should also work on my bachelor's thesis, but I will definitely not be doing that all of the time. While worldbuilding and thesiswriting may both look like sitting and typing to the untrained spectator, worldbuilding makes for a great break from research.

Keeping that in mind, aside from week one, where I'll have to study for and take that one written exam, I'll theoretically be able to do at least a little bit of worldbuilding every day of Summer Camp. Knowing myself, I'll end up writing a bunch of relatively short, barely embellished articles. When I sit down to worldbuild, it will be likely a full article per session so that I don't leave my business unfinished. It takes me on average something like an hour to finish a draft of a short-ish article.

The creative Process, a.k.a. is there Method to my Madness

Funnily enough, in one of my uni seminars, which is all about how to do presentations, our teacher asked us to prepare topics for a spontaneous short presentation based on questions from a small group. One of my topics was creative writing, and I was asked about my process, or rather my method, of worldbuilding. I'll be honest, there isn't much method to my madness in regards to worldbuilding and writing.

I frequently find videos about history and fantasy literature in my feed, and I love learning about it. I'll generally pick details I find interesting and mix them with my own imagination, then throw on some music and start writing, and out comes my worldbuilding and stories. For bigger challenges like Summer Camp, I like to write down the prompts and my ideas on how to answer them down somewhere so that I don't lose track, and that's essentially all I can say about my process and routine.

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Week 4: Family

Family seems to me like the perfect theme to tie the three previous ones together. One might think of family as a group of people bound by a deep connection. In an ideal world, blood relatives would also love each other, though reality is often more complicated than that, and sometimes the coin of love flips entirely into hate. Members of a family, born or chosen, often go through moments of love, growth and loss together, sharing joyful moments and trauma alike.

Family is a big motivator for all my characters, though in vastly different ways. Whether it's shared trauma bringing a brother and sister closer, a daughter dreaming of getting away from her father and brother's opression, a woman determined to avenge her sister's violent death at the hands of a foreign attacker or a young man kicked out by his father for who he loved finding family elsewhere, family is important to all of them. Furthermore, the whole story begins with a fratricide and ends with a fight between uncle and nephew.

Some introspection has never hurt anyone

Why do I worldbuild?

For as long as I can remember, I loved inventing stories, characters and worlds. In my primary school, children had a lot of freedom to do be creative and do what they enjoyed. In year one and two, everyone in my class had a big blank-paged book to work in, and I filled three of them throughout the two years. Some of it was class assignments or maths, but for me, a majority was filled with short stories and illustrations.

What started as single-sentence stories that I have to read aloud to understand due to my terrible first grade spelling soon turned into stories spanning several short chapters. Though most of these stories were quite silly, there are some solid ideas in there, like a young pirate girl named Lina's adventures or the tale of the woodpecker Pickus and the seagull Laila, who become fast friends and travel the world together, just to name a few examples. From these humble origins grew what is now one of my favourite hobbies beside music.

What's the point?

I don't necessarily have a fixed goal for my worldbuilding, and I see myself more as a writer than a worldbuilder. I'd say I worldbuild and write just 'cause. I might publish a story at some point, but I don't really plan on it right now. Still, Summer Camp is a great opportunity to broaden my understanding of the world my characters live in.

Hop ... hop ... hop ... playlist!

I landed on a four, and I chose to tackle the playlist, and I kind of started to do so already. I've been picking the songs without lyrics from my favourites on spotify and named it "Songs without Words, kind of", in reference to Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's collection of piano pieces called Songs without words. It includes instrumentals of different genres and styles, be it baroque, romantic, modern, movie score, folk or metal. Less than a week before Summer Camp, it stands at roughly 80 Songs and five and a half hours long, but that won't do for my worldbuilding needs, so I'll expand it significantly until next week.

I could pretend to do the other prompt four and prompt three as well, but in reality, my writing space is already set up, and since my home is currently in the middle of a heat wave with temperatures somewhere between 30 and 35 degrees and quite high humidity, taking a break, hoping for a thunderstorm to temporarily cool things down and dreaming of living in Iceland for the summer is pretty much all I can do anyway.

Prompts

Warming Up

Write a Settlement that's associated with Love
Write a Geographical Location boasting different kinds of ecosystems
Write a language lost to time
Write a Myth that reveals the "true" meaning of family

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Love

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Growth

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Loss

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Family

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