November has arrived, and for me it brings more than falling leaves, shorter days, and another turn of the calendar. It brings an invitation to sit down with the unfinished pages, revisit the characters who have taken up residence in my imagination, and give their stories the attention they deserve. I am calling this season of writing Novel November. My goal is not to pretend that a manuscript can be rushed into greatness in thirty days, but to approach the work with consistency, curiosity, and a willingness to discover what happens when an idea finally finds its way onto the page.
This year I am working on two very different first drafts. One steps through the boundaries of our familiar world into a fractured kingdom where love, choice, and covenant carry consequences far beyond a single family. The other rides into a broken future of the Pacific Northwest, where a territorial ranger must navigate the dangerous intersection of frontier justice, machinery, secrets, and human nature. Both stories are distinctly different in atmosphere and genre, yet each returns to questions that have followed me throughout my writing: What remains when the familiar world falls apart? What does loyalty demand? And what happens when people must choose who they will become?
The Kingdom Between Us: Flipping the Script on Romantasy
A portal fantasy built around the Oathfire Covenant
The story opens in Snohomish, Washington, where Marcus Aruellis Duponte and Rachael Esther Graham Duponte are navigating the painful consequences of a broken relationship. Their thirteen-year-old daughter, Genevieve Rose Duponte, becomes the unexpected center of events none of them could have imagined. When Genevieve crosses the Veil into Vaelthorne, a realm marked by a fractured crown, scattered houses, ancient witnesses, dragons, and contested loyalties, her disappearance forces Marcus and Rachael toward a world whose history is inseparable from their own. What begins as a desperate search for their daughter gradually opens into something larger than a rescue mission.
At the heart of this world is the Oathfire Covenant. In Vaelthorne, covenant is not a convenient fantasy word for destiny, nor is it a magical excuse to strip characters of their agency. I want to explore the difference between a promise freely made and a loyalty coerced, between love that protects and love that possesses, between inherited identity and an identity consciously embraced. Bloodlines, prophecy, political power, and ancient obligations may create the circumstances in which my characters must act, but they do not excuse those characters from making difficult choices. The Oathfire is bound up with that moral tension, and it shapes the kind of romance I want to tell.
A kingdom that mirrors a broken family
There is another layer to the title The Kingdom Between Us. Vaelthorne is a kingdom divided by history, suspicion, competing claims, and the wounds left by broken oaths. Marcus and Rachael stand inside a division of their own. I am interested in the way those two fractures reflect one another, not as a neat allegory that resolves every personal difficulty through a battle or prophecy, but as a living conflict in which repairing what is broken demands humility, accountability, and freedom. Genevieve's place in that unfolding story matters deeply, yet she is not simply a prize to be recovered or a symbol for her parents to argue over. She has a voice, a will, and a future of her own.
I love the imaginative scale of fantasy: ancient orders, mythic creatures, perilous crossings, ruined powers, and the sense that the visible world is only a narrow portion of a much greater reality. I also want the extraordinary to sharpen rather than replace the ordinary human stakes. A dragon can be magnificent, a lost kingdom can be breathtaking, and a prophecy can change the course of nations. None of those things automatically heals the damage people do to one another. That requires something much more difficult, which is why this novel is as concerned with covenantal love and personal responsibility as it is with the wonders beyond the Veil.
Dillon Largo: Widow's Reckoning — A Frontier Mystery in a Broken Future
Dystopian Western meets steampunk and mystery
My second manuscript, Dillon Largo: Widow's Reckoning, takes an entirely different road. This is a dystopian, steampunk-inflected Western mystery set against a reimagined Pacific Northwest frontier. I am drawing upon the grit of Western fiction, the tensions of a society living amid the consequences of collapse, the atmosphere of mechanical ingenuity, and the slow-burning questions that make a mystery worth following. It is not a nostalgic return to a simpler past. It is a story set in a future where the old world has broken apart and people have built new systems of power, survival, and justice from what remains.
Dillon Largo is a territorial ranger, and I find myself drawn to the contradiction he embodies. He may not look like the towering, polished hero one might expect from a frontier legend. He is a weathered man whose boots tell stories, whose equipment bears the evidence of careful maintenance, and whose presence owes more to experience than spectacle. He operates within the Snohomish County Territory of the Pacific Northwest, including New Marysville, a place whose familiar geography becomes something stranger when viewed through the lens of a dystopian future. For me, setting is never merely a backdrop. Streets, buildings, weather, local history, and the way people inhabit a place all help determine what sort of story can happen there.
The title Widow's Reckoning suggests that someone has an account to settle, but a mystery ought to earn its answers rather than announce them too soon. I want the reader to feel the uncertainty of a frontier where testimony can be unreliable, authority can be compromised, and justice is not always synonymous with the law. The steampunk elements provide a texture of technology and improvisation, while the Western tradition supplies its questions of courage, violence, reputation, and responsibility. The mystery gives those elements direction. Dillon must move through this world as a human being with limitations, not as a convenient instrument for delivering an effortless resolution.
Why the Pacific Northwest belongs in this story
I have long been fascinated with what happens when the landscapes we know are transformed by imagination. In a conventional Western, the frontier often unfolds beneath broad skies and across deserts, prairies, or mountain passes. My frontier carries the memory of western Washington: rain, timber, worn roads, communities shaped by difficult choices, and the uneasy meeting of wilderness and civilization. By taking a recognizable region and allowing its political and social structures to evolve into something unfamiliar, I can build a setting that feels both invented and strangely close to home. In Widow's Reckoning, that tension between the recognizable and the altered is part of the storytelling itself.
Where the Manuscripts Stand at the Beginning of November
As November begins, I am not starting these stories from a blank page. The prologue and first two chapters of The Kingdom Between Us are completed in draft form. I have also drafted the first three chapters of Dillon Largo: Widow's Reckoning. That is meaningful progress, but it is only the beginning of the work each novel requires. A first draft is where I discover the story in motion. It is where characters can surprise me, where scenes reveal what they are missing, and where an idea that appeared perfectly clear in an outline may take on unexpected dimensions once it encounters dialogue, conflict, and consequence.
For Novel November, I intend to keep moving forward on both projects while remaining attentive to their different voices. The Kingdom Between Us needs space for its emotional and mythic foundations to unfold without forcing every revelation to arrive at once. Widow's Reckoning needs the discipline of a mystery whose discoveries arise naturally from the people and circumstances Dillon encounters. My measure of success will not be an arbitrary promise to complete both books by the end of the month. It will be whether I have written with intention, strengthened the foundations already laid, and left myself with substantial new material to develop and revise.
Two Genres, a Common Thread
At first glance, an Oathfire covenant in a dragon-haunted fantasy kingdom and a ranger working a mystery on a dystopian frontier may seem to have little in common. Yet I am discovering that the questions beneath them are related. Both worlds have inherited divisions. Both place ordinary human decisions against the pressure of larger forces. Both ask whether someone can remain faithful to a conviction when the easier road is compromise, avoidance, or surrender. One story expresses those concerns through family, marriage, covenant, and the fate of a kingdom. The other works through law, reputation, survival, and the pursuit of truth in a wounded society.
I do not want to write characters who are admirable simply because the narrative insists that they are. I want their choices to reveal their character, especially when those choices carry a cost. I also believe that genre boundaries can be useful without becoming prisons. Romantasy can explore a marriage in crisis rather than only the exhilaration of a new romance. A Western can travel into the future rather than remain fixed in the nineteenth century. A mystery can unfold amid steam-driven machinery and the ruins of familiar institutions. The important thing is not to combine genres for novelty alone, but to let each element serve the people, conflicts, and questions at the center of the story.
The Work Ahead: Writing First, Refining Later
There is a particular vulnerability in sharing that a book is still in its first draft. A finished novel presents the illusion that its author always knew exactly where every scene belonged and what each character would say. The truth is far less tidy. Drafting requires experimentation, false starts, revisions of expectation, and a willingness to recognize that a promising scene may still need considerable work. I am learning to appreciate that process rather than measure the worth of a story solely by how quickly it reaches the finish line. November is an opportunity to honor the craft by doing the daily work of writing.
I plan to share occasional updates from these two fictional worlds as their manuscripts take shape. There will be more to say about Vaelthorne, the Oathfire Covenant, and the people whose lives are bound to the kingdom between them. There will also be more to discover about Dillon Largo, New Marysville, and the reckoning suggested by the title of his latest story. For now, I am content to acknowledge the progress already made and return to the page. Six opening sections across two manuscripts—the prologue and two chapters of one, and three chapters of the other—represent a foundation, not a finish line.
An Invitation to Follow the Journey
If you enjoy portal fantasy that takes love, family, and freedom seriously, I hope you will follow the development of The Kingdom Between Us. If your imagination leans toward shadowed mysteries, dusty boots, frontier justice, and a future assembled from the remnants of the past, then Dillon Largo: Widow's Reckoning may be the trail you want to ride. You do not need to choose between them. Part of the joy of being a storyteller is discovering how many different worlds can emerge from the same imagination, even when each demands its own atmosphere, structure, and voice.
As Novel November unfolds, I would love to hear from readers and fellow writers. Which story catches your attention first: a divided family drawn through the Veil into a kingdom of dragons and broken covenants, or a territorial ranger confronting mystery and danger in a steampunk Western future? Whatever your preference, thank you for being part of this developing journey. For me, the most exciting thing about November is not knowing precisely where every page will lead. It is knowing that these stories have begun—and that there are many more pages waiting to be written.
Timothy R. Berman
Author | Storyteller | Creator of Worlds
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