I have been logged into a hidden game underneath the real world for twenty five years. I just did not know that's what I was doing.
The next series is The HoloGem Series. Ten books. YA LitRPG. Four kids in a dying Ohio mill town find four gem hilted swords inside an abandoned grain silo. The moment they touch them, a holographic interface flickers to life over the gem. Stats. Levels. Quests. They have just been drafted into something that has been running underneath the surface of their lives for a lot longer than they realize. The man who built it is lying about why.
That's the pitch. The reason I'm writing it is older.
2001. RuneScape.
A friend showed me a browser game on a family computer. You logged in, you got dropped on the shore of an island called Tutorial Island, and a guy in a robe walked you through how to chop wood. I never recovered. RuneScape was the first time I saw a number on a screen go up and felt something move in my chest. Woodcutting 5. Then 6. Then 7. The number was telling me the truth about who I was becoming. I have not stopped chasing that feeling since.
2004. World of Warcraft.
Eight years. Consecutively. I do not know how to summarize what eight years inside Azeroth does to a person, so I won't try. What it taught me, distilled, is that a world is more than a setting. A world is a system you live inside long enough to start making decisions the system did not predict. Every story I have written since has been trying to build a system that big.
The years I was a tourist.
LOTRO and the way Bree felt at three in the morning. Aion's wings. Rift dropping public events on top of zones I thought I knew. SWTOR walking me through cinematics like I was the lead in a Bioware film. Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, which I still miss. I was inside a public quest the night I realized that game was getting shut down, and I logged out angry.
Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 broke my heart. A Realm Reborn taught me that broken things can be remade. To this day, the fact that one character can level every class in that game is one of my favorite design decisions in any MMO. It is the truest expression of "you are not your job" that I have seen in a genre obsessed with classes.
Guild Wars 2 had me for four years. I maxed every class. I ground out multiple legendaries. Anyone who has done a legendary grind knows it is not a feature. It is a relationship. You and the system, agreeing to keep showing up. TERA, in the meantime, was teaching me what action combat felt like when you had to actually aim. The commercials were the best in the business and I will defend that take.
Then Black Desert and Blade and Soul brought the East over the wall. ESO let me walk through Tamriel with friends. Trove let me build castles out of voxels. Albion taught me that a fully player driven economy is more interesting than any quest log. New World gave me territory to fight for. Lost Ark broke Steam. Throne and Liberty made the weather a mechanic. Once Human was the strangest thing I had played in a decade.
And right now, on my phone in waiting rooms and on the couch after the kids are asleep, I am playing The Division Resurgence. Some habits do not stop. They just change platforms.
What MMOs taught me about story.
Most novels do not let you feel progression. They tell you a character has grown, but they cannot put a number next to it. They cannot ding when a level rolls over. They cannot show you a stat panel at chapter twelve that proves the character at chapter one would not survive five seconds in here.
LitRPG can do that. LitRPG is the genre that finally borrowed the language games invented and started using it on the page. When a HoloGem character looks at the gem hovering above their sword and sees their own stats for the first time, that is not a gimmick. That is the same feeling I had on Tutorial Island in 2001, written into the prose where I always wanted it to be.
Why HoloGem.
I wanted to write a story for the kid who used to be me, plus the version of that kid who exists right now, looking at a phone, wondering if anyone is going to write something that takes the experience seriously. Stats are honest. Levels are honest. A quest log is more revealing about a character than most internal monologue. I wanted to put all of that into a series and still write the kind of friendships, small town stakes, and quiet moments that make a YA novel land.
HoloGem is also the longest series I have committed to. Ten books. Bigger than Elementari, twice the size of Treenosphere, with a system I get to build out across every volume. The world is going to change shape over those ten books. The kids are going to age up. The gem is going to mean something different at book ten than it meant at book one. I have a roadmap and I have not been this excited to write something since I was on Tutorial Island.
The number on the screen does not lie. Neither does this story. That's why I'm writing it.
The series is coming. All of it. Ten books, one road, mapped out from HoloGem: First Bond all the way through HoloGem: Last Bond. Book one is the one with a manuscript right now, but the rest of the series exists in outlines, character sheets, world docs, and a wall of notes I keep adding to between drafts. The full series page is already up with every title laid out. The placeholders on that page are what the covers look like in my head before they exist in the world. They will look different when they get here.
If you have an MMO that left a mark on you, I want to hear about it. Find me on Instagram at @myth.root and tell me what world you logged in. The next chapter starts there.