Stay this madness! Release the book already!
August 9th, 2022
When writing out the date just now, my fingers automatically wrote August 9th, 2020 instead of 2022. I had to backspace a few times with a smile on my face to make sure I got the correct date written down.
I’ll chalk it up as a Freudian slip. I’d hoped to complete NOVA 01 by 2020 but life got in the way, didn’t it? It’s been a fun journey, and, though nobody but my wife can truly appreciate the ups and downs, I thought I’d use my first blog post to catch everyone up to speed.
After scraping my way through an accounting degree and landing a full-time job in January 2018, I left my brain with a nightmare of an assignment. I still had to pass my CPA exams. What does this have to do with the NOVA series, you ask? Well, I’m getting there. By the time I graduated I’d passed 2 of my exams. But … as a self-respecting procrastinator, I’d obviously left the 2 more difficult ones to study for while working full time.
Six months later, I’d somehow done it. I failed several times on the way there, mind you, but hey, who’s counting? I’d given myself a goal and I’d have pursued it all the way to my deathbed had it been required.
Summer 2018
But after I completed that goal, work by itself began to feel shallow. Never because the people. No, I’ve always loved the folks at work. I just no longer had a goal. It couldn’t just be work that I channeled my energy into.
See, in passing my CPA exams, I’d built up a routine. Every morning, from 5am to 8:30, I sat down to study. When I finally passed the last exam, I felt a whole lot of “now what?”. That study time now felt like a void. I tried to fill it with sleep. That felt cheap. I tried getting into fitness, but who are we kidding?
None of it scratched the itch in my brain. Eventually, I realized I needed to do something that felt spiritually fulfilling. A curse brought upon me by my hardworking, missionary serving parents. I’d love to tell you there was a specific memory tied to that revelation, but truth be told I came to it gradually. Over several months I finally realized work would never scratch the spiritual fulfillment itch. But it could be a means to an end. A source of funding. But for what?
By fall 2018 I’d come up with a replacement “hobby.” No longer did I spend the early mornings studying accounting (shudders). I switched over to something much more fun. I began world-building.
Fall 2018
It was an open-ended assignment. I had no motive other than to create a fantastic world where a system of magic merges with perceived reality to explain human events. A world with a historical background tied to the intrinsic struggle humanity has had since day 1 (are we inherently good or evil?). A world where an Other Side existed. I spent months playing with the assignment, and I enjoyed every second of it.
I got to create a whole new world from scratch, and the more I did, the more I felt pieces clunking into space.
First came the idea surrounding Nova’s magical force, pushing and pulling magic into working order like gravity every thousand years, but only while its orbit brought it near enough to Earth. Then, came sifting through our fantastic world history to distinguish ages of darkness from ages of orbital proximity. Every year of our existence since the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia is peppered with rich events, people, and plotlines to draw inspiration from. With my world, I could go back in time and select whatever event I wanted and chalk it up to the return of that respective Age’s magic. The cradles of civilization and the Peiligang Culture? Yeah, those came about during the First Age of magic. Oh, the rise of the Sumerian city states? Magic in the Fifth Age, baby. King Narmer’s unifying Egypt? Also, the Fifth Age. Fall of the Sumerian Dynasty? Invaded by witches and wizards during the Sixth Age. Amenhamat III’s renaissance? Magic, too. Carthage! The assassination of Ceasar! The birth of the greatest Khan! It’s all down to magic! As Oliver’s headspace puts it in Chapter 1, “after all, hadn’t magic’s presence been sprinkled throughout history? Only dismissed in the modern-day by science?” My gut feeling guided me on.
By the end of my world-building exercise, I’d filled in the gaps on my world’s ancient history, magical manifestations, magical sources, ways to wield magic, rules of magic, magical creatures and monsters, historical magical artifacts and their locations, currency conversion rates, the split between the Original Side and the Other Side, methods of travel, existing rule of law, existing state of the Other Side, and more. By the end of it, I landed at over one-hundred pages of written world-building considerations.
So, then. What to do with the world I’d built? It was time to create a story.
But I didn’t start with Oliver, my protagonist. I started with The Damned, my villain.
Though corruption only gets touched on briefly in NOVA 01, as a concept, it represents the series’ foundation. We only see three types of sacred beasts in NOVA 01. Why aren’t there more of them? You’ll have to keep reading my books to find out, but it’s all tied to the central thesis from my world-building exercise - are we good or evil? Corruption, in my world, seeks us all out to our eventual collective demise. It’s reared its ugly head throughout history and has a special relationship with humanity that other sacred beasts don’t. At least, not all of them.
One step beneath this foundational layer is a spectrum that has always fascinated me - the spectrum of psychopathy. In most media, psychopathy is chalked up as overly simplistic good vs evil. In practice, psychopaths operate along a broad spectrum. We see them in business all the time operating at a much lesser degree than we see portrayed in American Psycho. It’s more complicated than that.
On one end of the spectrum, a psychopathy exists that allows its owner to make any decision agnostic of moral boundaries. They relish the free will they possess and can perform any heinous act without hesitation in the name of logic. See Nietzche. In the middle of the spectrum, you get Machiavelli. He was mentally aware of decisions that are necessary to control the masses but remains cognizant of the depravity and slippery slope affiliated with that awareness. See discourses on Livy and the Prince. At the other end of the spectrum, I feel, we see someone like a fully established Trinova. Their Wisdom grants them a clairvoyant level of psychopathy balanced by a clear understanding of what is wrong and evil. They can genuinely serve as an arbiter in this regard because they’re Gifted by the Heavens to see it where no one else can. That is entirely unique to their status.
The Nietzchan example we explored represents the typical side of the spectrum where villains can fall. No disrespect to other villains, but people are more complicated than that. I’m not going to tell you where The Damned or any other characters from NOVA 01 lay on this spectrum, but I’m telling you this journey is going to be one worth following through NOVA o4.
After I cooked up The Damned and his motivations, I completed the assignment and came up with the modern-day scope surrounding Oliver, Emma, and Lance, our main characters throughout the series, and how they intertwine with the recent history backdrop featuring The Damned along with the more ancient history foundation composed of Tenochprima Academy’s founders going all the way back to the Cradle of Civilization in Mesopotamia. Again, everything fell into place easier than it should have.
Which takes us to December of 2019. 13 months after I’d begun my world-building journey.
That month, I began to write. At first, it was exhilarating. But, as someone who struggles with concentration, writing ended up being a lot harder than the world-building phase. No longer could I sit and exist as a creative puppet-master. I had to grind out the words. Eventually I got better at it, but I didn’t finish my first draft up until July of 2020. At that point, one of my best friends and I sat down and discussed how we could get this story published. Two years of overarching story rehauls and a twenty-thousand-word outline for the remaining 3 books of the series later, I felt ready to publish NOVA 01. Which brings us to today! August 9th, 2022.
We’re only a few weeks away from launch and I am EXCITED! The subreddit is launched. My Instagram page is live. And all that remains is to complete the book cover and format the text for the paperback and Kindle versions of the books. I couldn’t be happier with where NOVA 01 ended up and I am ecstatic for my friends, family, and potential new fans to read it.
If you made it this far, rest easy knowing no other blog post will be this long.
The end always arrives.
C. T.