For today’s post I thought I’d tell you the story of the genesis of How to Succeed as a Supervillain by Following the Evil Overlord List. I’d been thinking of writing a story based around an evil protagonist for some time but was unsure if I could string the idea out to the length of a full-blown novel (normally I aim for something in the region of 100,000 words).

Then I discovered something called Novel November. This is the successor to the now defunct National Novel Writing Month, often shortened to NaNoWriMo, an organization which promoted creative writing around the world by encouraging participants to attempt to write a 50,000-word manuscript within the 30 days of November.

I decided this was the perfect opportunity to have a go at writing my evil protagonist novel, so I took time off from my usual schedule and took on the Novel November challenge instead. By basing my story on the Evil Overlord List I had plenty of material to work with, additionally I made use of a number of real-life events which were featured in the news at the time of writing. All of this was a great help when writing against the clock. I was quite taken with the idea of writing a story which was fully complete within the time range of the challenge.

In the end it all worked out quite well. I was pleased that I managed to finish my story in just under the month and ended up with a coherent work of just over fifty thousand words, complete with a twist ending. Not having so much invested in this one-off tale made it easier for me to take the plunge and decide to self-publish it.

Technically it qualifies as a novel, albeit a short one. It remains a slim book, but it’s longer than a novella and could probably be best described by using the Japanese term, light novel. The lengthy title is something else it has in common with light novels which are often published with elongated, multi-word titles.

And this is the result…

Back to Fiction.