This year, in conjunction with National Novel Writing Month, I’m kicking off my own writing project, Untitled.

Untitled is a serial novel that will be written to coincide with NaNoWriMo’s goals, but is likely to carry on beyond that limit. It’s also designed in such a way that it’s not the end of the world if I don’t hit 50,000 words in November. I’d rather explore ideas than chug frantically towards an arbitrary word goal.

I designed a simple site around it. I can write new chapters in markdown, and they’ll be rendered in the website with full navigation, as well as added to an RSS feed. Additionally, the RSS feed powers a mailing list, in case anyone wants to follow along via email.

The site framework is written in Next.js, which allows you to easily write server-side React-based sites. That also allowed me to use Node projects like marked and feed to easily spin up site components. You can check out how I’ve strung it together over on GitHub.

The site is hosted on Vercel’s free tier, which will rebuild and deploy the site every time I merge a commit to the main branch. So once I start writing, all I need to do is commit and save (which I could even do using GitHub’s web interface), and the new chapters will be public. In common with my blog, I use iA Writer to write all my markdown pieces.

Finally, as always, my feed-to-email pipeline is powered by ConvertKit. Unlike my blog, entries will be emailed to subscribers 30 minutes after publication.

And that’s it. What is the story? How will it progress? You’ll just have to follow along and see.