There was a time when I wrote novels on the web, too! (And now I do it again.)

On the 14th of NaNoWriMo, the month formerly known as November, I had written 50 000 words on one and the same novel, which is the “winning” requirement for the National Novel Writing Month. So that didn’t take too long, especially since I started over on the second day.

It was pretty fast writing because it was fun to me. That does not mean it is fun to other people. I like superhero-themed massive online games, especially City of Heroes (2004-2012) but I have also repeatedly played Champions Online (although not weekly or monthly, but several times a year) and even tried my hand at DC Universe Online (not so much a fan of that). I occasionally donate a modest amount of money to Valiance Online (which is still in development, and very slow development at that, but can already be tested online) and especially to Ship of Heroes, another “spiritual successor” to City of Heroes which aims to especially preserve the optimistic, heroic atmosphere of the original game. I will surely play City of Titans as well, the first and biggest of the “successors” – if I am still alive and lucid when it becomes available. The official release date is still “fall 2018”, which is a couple weeks ago now. I believe their first release date was in 2015…

So I’ve written a number of attempted stories before that tended strongly toward City of Heroes fan fiction, despite changes in names and the addition of an extra power set. There is certainly some CoH fanfic tendency even in this fall’s story, but it is toned down further and the whole power system is replaced with one based on colors rather than origins. This is something I have used in my fantasy writing for some years, an earlier version of it was very similar to the system in Master of Magic and Magic: The Gathering, but again this has evolved with each story to become more and more unique. Writing a lot is important for this process, I believe, based on my own experience. There was a wave here in Norway of teachers writing their debut novel about a frustrated teacher. You have to write that stuff out of your system. There should be some of you left in your novel, but it should not be autobiographical unless you make that the point. And in the same way, I write the fan fiction out of my stories until it reaches a balance. It took four or five stories to get to this stage.

At this point, I enjoy developing my own imaginary superhero game with a unique power system, and turning it into a world with somewhat lifelike heroes (and somewhat less lifelike villains, so far). But at 50 000 words, we haven’t actually gotten very far at all. Many of those words are describing fights where a small group of newbie heroes goes into a cave or a warehouse to fight criminals, most of which don’t even have superpowers. Of course, we are not talking Superman-level heroes here either, getting shot with a handgun or hit with a baseball bat still hurts, even if it takes a number of such hits to send them to the hospital.

At the end of the 50 000 words, our main character is still level 2 out of at least 60 – and each level takes more to achieve. If I were to continue in this much detail, it would literally take millions of words for him to reach the highest level or anywhere close to it. Not that this is his goal, really. But just to put things in perspective. The main plot is barely touched upon. Interpersonal relationship are few and generally businesslike. Romance is limited to sporadic one-way flirting. We don’t know the general layout of the city where the story takes place, nor the specific layout of any of the locations mentioned. We know at most the uniform colors, sometimes race and general body type of the most important characters.

So what are those 50 000 words? Mostly fight scenes, characters talking about fights, and the narrator (who is also the main character) explaining the superpowers in enough detail to make sense of the fights. Hey, it works for actual superhero comic books. (And Goblin Slayer, but let’s not go there today.)

So anyway, you can read it here, as far as it has come, but I don’t particularly recommend it unless you can’t get enough reading about newbie superheros fighting criminals. Trigger warnings for violence (obviously), poorly hidden sexual innuendo occasionally, and an apostate main character. (Not autobiographic.) It is also a lot less funny than the stories I wrote when I was younger and more carefree.