Imperial Norway 2053 The Novel

Are you guys ready for an actual novel set in Imperial Norway? Any thoughts on what you would like to see?

I am planning to write it in installments and get your feedback and ideas as we go. You may ask how this will be different from the short stories I have written.

A novel will differ from my short stories in that it will be self contained. It will proper introduce characters and their background. My short stories tend to rely on you already following me and knowing my characters.

Also the short stories are written very organically. I was winging it a lot. Often goofing around and having fun. The end result is that not everything hangs together perfectly.

The way to think of all my writing thus far and my short stories is that they are prototypes for an actual novel. It is was a place to play around with different ideas, develop characters.

I have tried writing novels before but I think this has been the best approach for me. It has been a sort of play ground to try out characters and see what works and what doesn't.

I don't plan to write something completely different. I want to keep the key characters and their traits and relationships as well as the key events. But a lot of the details will change. A big change I plan for instance is that Vieregg will become Swedish. Once you start seeing the first installments it will be clear why.

Many of my later characters will get introduced much earlier in the timeline. I want to get more of my characters together from the beginning. For those who never followed me from the beginning this setting will be from before Idun and Vieregg got together.

So this is from the period where Vieregg and Idun tended to annoy each other and always getting into an argument. It may be less clear in recent stories but the original Vieregg was a coward, sexist and prude. Idun in contrast is kind of feminist with an anger management problem, a propensity for violence, more clever than Vieregg but addicted to sex. The later stories make her more sex addicted but the original stories don't make her that crazy about sex.

This is something I will have to find a health balance on. As sex crazy as I made the matriarch women in later stories may not work that well when trying to make a somewhat realistic setting. A possible solution is that sex obsession follows more of  a hormone cycle.

What Will the Novel Be About?

The novel will center around how Vieregg and Idun meet up and the War in Neo Dixie. You may have read about that in my earlier short stories but this story will be made to introduce more of my characters earlier and link them together more logically than I have in the past.

Hucow rescue missions will be a key part of this story. So you will likely meet Daphny, Debbie, Jill, Delores, Nellie, Daisy and some of the other hucows on the Carter Evans farm. The Carter Evans setting will likely be different than what you have seen before as it was always unrealistic that he has only 3 hucows. In the updated version he will likely have the 12 hucows I later described.

The earlier story was of Vieregg and Idun working under the military. But I contemplate making them more like a hired mercenary group because I want to tell a story around a small unit. Not something of typical army size.

There are practical reasons for this. Despite the fact that I actually served in the army years ago, I don't think I would be good at describing an army operation in a novel. Also I am not particularly interested in a military story.

For me the war is primarily a backdrop for other events. I have no real intention of trying to render large battle scenes. My interests are much more about the relationship between people and their experiences.