So, I've recently participated in an event called WorldEmber. It's a thing hosted by WorldAnvil, a worldbuilding management site. Real good shit, really complex and allows for you to create a perfect wiki for your worldbuilding projects. Or Tabletop RPG stuff.

Cool stuff! And every December, they host an event called WorldEmber, which is a challenge for people to write 10,000 words in the span of a month. Of course, you can go far over that, with some people going up to like; 25,000 or 50,000 words.

Of course, as luck would have it, November and December would be rough fucking months.

Alongside some personal troubles and stuff, a certain election happened.

So you know, that was a fun time _/sarcasm. Despite that, though, I was able to continue focus on my setting, on my worldbuilding, and I had gotten myself prepped up pretty well. Eventually I had ended the event with writing around 20,179 words.

Alongside that, though, I chatted with friends and pondered various ideas, I wrote personal; private stories with my partner, and I continued work on various music-related projects, including two distinct albums, one for my worldbuilding project and one for something else (Of which you can listen to below:)

_{it doesn't have an actual lead playing yet, and is also a snippet so, yaknow, WIP and shit.}

Afterward, though, it kinda got me thinking about my relationship with writing and my experiences doing it, worldbuilding, and what-not.

So my biggest things growing up were the Metroid Prime games and Metal Gear Solid games. While I enjoyed the story of the games, I also thoroughly enjoyed the amount of worldbuilding and lore that would be put into them. Metroid Prime with both the visual storytelling of the world around you and the logfiles you can find from all over. Metal Gear Solid with all the codec calls that let you in on more and more of the world and the depths of everything going on.

A lot of that kinda rubbed off on me, enough that I found myself drawn to writing about the worlds I make more than anything. Storytelling is... not an easy task for me.

I used to play with legos as a kid and make up a bunch of stories in my head, all of them being some variation of "Hoho the bad guy actually isn't so bad, but also everyone keeps getting their asses kicked anyway so lol." I was not a good storyteller as a kid clearly.

I used to write fanfiction for... Total Drama Island? I think? I'm not gonna lie, a lot of it was just, awful weird crossover stuff. Atleast one of them was just a ripoff of a Youtube Poop I saw and had sonic fought an old internet meme. It was weird. I remember writing a crossover between Metroid and Total Drama Island of all things, and it was some shit about how one of the characters was corrupted by the evil shit from Metroid Prime and-- it was awful lmao.

When I joined some friends on Skype, Me and a few others would begin writing private stories where we all pretended some fictional characters of ours would get into some wacky, zany adventures and shit. Fun things but also really, really bad and melodramatic in hindsight.

Two particular influences would come to me at that point in time. One that holds a dear place in my heart, and another that... for better or for worse, inspired me but also kinda ruined my ability to tell a story in hindsight haha

So, my early attempts at telling stories all kinda sucked. Yet I kinda, still kept writing and trying to tell stories among my friend group.

For the longest time, though, I wanted to do something that would be big. I wanted to effectively create a playground of sorts for me to write my stories in, where I can tell the stories I want to tell so badly. Stories based off of the things I've experienced and learned over the years, things I wish other games and stories I read growing up delved into.

I would get this chance soon after discovering WorldAnvil. Originally, it was used some by me and my friends for keeping track of one of our private stories' characters and worlds and shit, nothing major, it was fun.

Then one day, I had a silly idea.

For context, in a private story me and my partner wrote, My partner had a character that came from a deep dark chasm. Although the chasm was made to be uninhabitable, an idea came about from one of us imagining what would lead to people deciding that a warm, dark, and very dangerous cavern system would be a better alternative than living on the surface.

And thus, The Frost was born.

The idea was that, in a world that had made the discovery of Magic, a combination of events would result in a particular kind've nuclear war during the Cold War that resulted in a global ice-age occuring. One that was partially magically-enhanced, partially nuclear in nature.

Humanity would live in small secluded pockets of society, making use of broken down machinery and leftovers of the old world to try and survive the immense cold, from the horrific frozen humanoids that wander the earth to tensions arising between the various groups of survivors, cultists, and freaks.

I guess you could call it Fallout but Magic and Frostpunk honestly. Either way, by itself, it was a fine idea for me to work on. I didn't have any idea for most of what I was doing, though, as a lot of the stuff felt like it didn't naturally mesh together, and other stuff was made based on no actual research done to properly understand shit.

It was not perfect but I was happy with it, and one day I'd like to revisit it. On that note, though, it didn't feel like the "playground" i wanted for my writing and worldbuilding, and at the time my ass got ambitious, and it would result in something far more complex forming, with The Frost being one piece of what would become a much bigger setting. And by god, with Homestuck having absolutely ruined my brain at the time, the possibilities to me were endless.

That would come in the form of Omniverse.

OmniVerse (not to be confused with the Ben 10 series of the same name (which yes actually did happen which always cracks me up lmao)) was to be the "playground" i desired to make. The Frost was made as a part of this, as one of the timelines that split off from the main one. In it, Earth's history continued unabated until sometime after the 2020s, where an event called The Withering occured and devastated not just it, but all the realms connected to it.

I had no clue what the fuck I was going for with it at the time. I had only a vague idea, concepts, and what-not that was all scattered about and not fitting together perfectly at the time. The tone was dissonant all around it and a lot of the work I put into designing the site was... off the cuff and messy because of that. It also just kinda looked ugly, honestly.

Tonally, I ended up writing things with one half of it being too silly in contrast to the other half of it being too serious. I had an idea of it being this sci-fi and magic mashup but the way I went about it didn't work well at all. There were other realms but I never properly explained things about them or delved into them, and the one time I did I don't think I stuck the landing right.

Then the issue i mentioned before about leaning too heavily into making things complex with timey whimey bullshit got involved. I wanted three timelines but only of the mainline earth, but there was nothing for the other realms, but there might've been, and the other realms could not interact with the other timelines but the timelines could interact with each other somehow, also one of the timelines was super sci-fi and not magic at all and I had to keep track of who would've existed in these timelines vs who wouldn't and-- yeah.

It was a mess.

What killed this world for me at the time, though, wasn't just all of this. I lacked the skills I needed to truly make Omniverse be what I wanted it to be. I wanted more than I could do, like music and artwork made by me-- and I was NOT happy with my artwork abilities at the time. The world went mostly unnoticed and at the time, I felt that the value of my work was dependent on how many people were viewing it. That was a big mistake for me, at the time. And so, I quietly sunsetted Omniverse. At the end, I tried to start another writing project on WorldAnvil about a radio station at the end of the world, but that too didn't go anywhere due to me feeling frustrated with my writing.

And thus, from Jun 30th, 2022 to April 14, 2024, I didn't do much writing at all publically. The most I did was a story I submitted for a Newgrounds Contest for the briefest of times I was on there.

Then a few things changed. For one thing, I got high.

No, really. I got high from taking THC and over time, my mind gradually opened up to new ideas about my own writing and ways I should take things with it. Allowed me to more easily see what ideas would work good and what wouldn't work, alongside just allowing me to open up with myself and what I am. I think my tenets page speaks for itself really.

Something else happened. A funny lil' social media that didn't make me crave death like Twitter did. Although it's closed now, It left a change on me and how I approached my own work as well as what to think when it comes to people percieving it.

_{MAY A FLIGHT OF ANGELS SING THEE TO THY REST AND MAY EGGBUG NEVER DIE}

Cohost was a social media site that I can only describe as being rather Tumblr-like in function, with fully edible css and no character limit, but there was no algorithmic systems in place. You would have a feed composed of either the people you followed or tags you had bookmarked. There were no follower counts, no like counts, or repost counts. It was perfect and it broke me off of a bad habit I had with social media, that I had to judge my posts and my content based on how many people were viewing it. It's a liberating feeling, really.

The best advice I ended up with thanks to cohost was "Make something for yourself and the twenty other freaks following you." And by god, I took that to heart.

Although Cohost is over, I enjoyed my time on there. Ended up making a killer post ranting about The Backrooms, and I learned about microfiction-- which allowed me to write many different smaller stories, of which included a more surrealist piece about a man and his friend, two different interpretations of the issue with AI artwork whether it's about how much resources they use or how horrifying it must be to be an AI-Art entity, freaky shit about a jesus christ statue, a minor vent about Capitalism, and a weird thing about a fucked up Twitter Q&A site.

Before I truly delved back into working on my worldbuilding, to make this "playground" for my writing, I partook in two other activities to help reach my vision. 3D Modeling & Music-Making.

With the fromer, I'd experiment on-and-off with it, making small models to use for a Garry's Mod map that I've been holding off on working on, and just gradually working my way up to making passable things. So far it's going well (though I've been considering some recent advice i saw about using pre-made public domain assets for assistance, apparently that's common in gamedev as long as you're smart about it!)

As for the latter, well... Here's something I made from the beginning of 2024 (from my first album, Withered Worlds I):

And here's something made at the tail-end of 2024 (which I have NOT released yet, it'll come soon... eventually):

Combined with eventually deciding on a look that would resemble that of old retro systems such as the Sega Genesis, SNES, the PSX or the Dreamcast...

_{One of the first sets I made for the new direction I decided to take my worldbuilding project. Originally it didn't have texture warping or vertex distortion going on until i got a Blender Addon that added a lot of cool stuff for making PSX effects. Really cool stuff!}

I kinda ended up with a set idea about what I wanted my worldbuilding project to be. And so I began working on it at the start of 2024, beginning with the music and privately planning things out before eventually unveiling it just before another event on WorldAnvil, called Summer Camp.

And that's how I ended up here now with my current worldbuilding project, Withered Worlds (Which you can read about by clicking the image below to go to the website!!!)

So what does that bring me to right now?

I love writing. But I also realize a problem: I don't know how to tell good stories. The little bit I've done so far, with the microfiction I wrote on cohost, and this one story I wrote for Withered Worlds about a businessman getting what was coming to him, I like to think is good, but...

I truly ain't sure. It's a worry I'll have for a while, which sucks because I want to write many, many, stories. I don't think I adhere well to structured storytelling stuff such as the hero's journey, though I also find the process done by Yoko Taro to be more fascinating than ordinary writing.

I worry, though, that I may not have the skill to do the same type of writing he could do. It's the same worry I had when I ran into the wall with Omniverse, about feeling limited with my skillset. With the private stories I've told with my friends, they were always supplanted by the help they gave me, the ideas they had bouncing perfectly with mine, and us working together flawlessly. I don't have that as much with Withered Worlds, it's fully my own hands crafting the stories I want to tell.

Maybe one day I'll figure it out.

I like writing. But sometimes it feels like the ability to create worlds well is completely seperate from being able to tell a good story.

I worry that I may not be able to do the latter.