NaNoWriMo, 2023 (Log 1)

Introducing Project Holy League Universe 3.0

As some of you may know, I’ve decided to take up the National November Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge. I’ve talked about it a little bit on Substack Notes, as you can see below:

With this post, I figured that now is as best of time as any to explain in further detail. For those who have no idea what NaNoWriMo, it’s a self-imposed challenge to write (at least) 50,000 words of novel in the whole month of November. The point of the challenge (or so I’ve been told), is to just write and get to paper what’s in your head.

As someone who had completed a novel in his second attempt, I can attest that much of the impediment to completing a novel is psychological. A lot of second-guessing and people not knowing where to go next. Some of it is a lack of planning, but it’s also a question analysis paralysis.

But enough about NaNoWriMo itself. I want to talk about my own project. To be honest, I’m kinda cheating. Why? Because much of the legwork had been done already. Let me explain…

My Project

My current project for this challenge is called Project Holy League Universe 3.0. An odd name to be sure, and one that I can explain.

As you can see from the picture above, I have three versions of the ‘Holy League Universe’. The first is one that I’ve had before I started seriously writing. Those things were mostly world-building though there were some stories there, but they were written mostly in a ‘Wikipedia summary’ kind of way. I talked about it a little bit in my interview with Mark Dykeman on How About This.

The second ‘Holy League Universe’, known somewhat humorously as ‘Holy League Universe version 2.0’ is the one that is currently on my Substack. You can check it out below:

It first started out as me writing my novel Inquisitor’s Promise. After it was done and released, I continued to expand on it with the help of the material that I’ve already built up from the first Holy League Universe. But I’m also not afraid to go off the reservation, so to speak. After all, this is an entirely new universe. Thus, I published entirely new stories that built up on and distinguished this Holy League Universe from the previous one.

This brings me to Project Holy League Universe 3.0…

For some time, I have considered putting together much of my short stories that I’ve posted on Substack in a collection. The point is to be able to have my stories in print. A lot of ideas ran through my mind until I settled on the Holy League Universe as the theme of this collection.

This then turned into a plan to write a grand narrative from the creation of the world until the absolute End of Time. This would span 14,000 years of history which was how long the Holy League Universe (since v 2.0) was supposed to last. In the Note that I linked to above, I’ve pitched it as ‘The Canterbury Tales but sci-fi’.

The issue with all this is that I don’t have enough published stories set in the Holy League Universe to sufficiently cover each of the epochs in that world. This is where the various stories that I’ve posted in Substack come to play. If you’re familiar with Germanicus Publishing, then you know that I have a lot of standalone flash fiction and microfiction published in that Substack.

Believe it or not, I’ve played around with the idea that all the stories I’ve published take place in the same universe. And with this project, I’ve decided to finally make that vision a (fictional) reality.

If all this sounds like a mad scientist’s experiment… it might be, lol. But I’ve also been told that as a newer author, I should not be afraid to experiment. So…

Photo by Nachristos on Unsplash

But that’s also why I call this project ‘Holy League Universe 3.0’. Because I still want to keep writing and publishing stories set in the Holy League Universe in Germanicus Publishing. And I don’t want my future stories to be constrained by this project.

Now that I’ve given you the spiel, I’ll tell you my progress so far…

My Progress

Honestly, I didn’t do much on Day 1 of NaNoWriMo, only getting 187 words in. Perhaps I should have some more sense of urgency, even if much of the legwork had been done already. Hopefully, I’ll have more to show for myself next week.

If you want to keep up with my progress, then check out my Chat which I’m planning to update daily.

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Thanks for reading. If you’re interested in the my novel-writing journey, check out a completed novel of mine: Inquisitor’s Promise:

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