Announcing Season 12: Multiversal

Y’all. Havok’s new contest season isn’t just out of this world. It’s out of this UNIVERSE.

The shorthand version is that each month will feature a character prompt. All stories submitted for that month’s contest must include that character, although the character doesn’t have to be the protagonist.

But that’s just the story we tell people to keep them from looking too deeply into the multiverse and going mad. It may already be too late for some of us here…

Over the past six years, Havok has compiled almost 2,000 stories, and earlier this year Andrew—our editor in chief—started noticing some… disturbances… in the deepest corners of those archives. Deviant lines of dialogue, errant action beats, unexplainable exclamations… almost like some of the characters from those stories were taking on lives of their own. And as he dug into these anomalies, he discovered that some of those characters stood out—unforgettable personalities that began haunting him. To the point where he found them in other stories, as if they were hopping into other dimensions, or perhaps there were alternate versions of those stand-out personalities.

Friends and family cautioned Andrew against delving too deeply, but curiosity overtook prudence, and he decided to set off on a journey to find the multiverse’s most interesting characters—the ones with personalities strong enough to echo across the very fabric of reality. But he was not so vain to think he could take on this task alone. No, he would have to call on the help of other experts in the field. And what better experts exist than seasoned authors who know how to navigate the wild landscapes of fiction?

Exactly. So Andrew assembled The Havok Experts of Multiversal Exploration (T.H.E.M.E. Team for short) and each professional, fueled by a thirst for discovery, brazenly broke every rule of literary convention and quantum physics in order to find a single character that existed in multiple dimensions and stood out to that author in unforgettable ways, then reported back with a summary of that character’s most defining aspects.

So far, T.H.E.M.E. Team members who have successfully returned and reported in their discoveries include Kerry Nietz, Nadine Brandes, Ben Wolf, and Jill Williamson.

Across each dimension, these characters maintained their primary physical attributes, core values, character traits, and inexplicably, even similar names, but they presented with drastic differences based on their unique experiences, histories, and even the physics of their home dimensions. For example, one character’s simple ability to think outside the box resulted in such widely varied things as creation of sentient artificial intelligence, delving into deep magics, and even solving the mystery of the Atlantis in various branches of reality! In short, the results were positively fascinating, and we knew we had to share the multiverse’s most interesting characters with Havok’s author community—and the world!

Each month, one of these characters will be highlighted, and it’s up to you to follow in these bold explorers’ footsteps, swimming into the vast ocean of universes, searching for variations of these characters in unique settings and circumstances. They’ll surely span the full scope of our editorial genres (mystery, sci-fi, humor, thriller, and fantasy) and stretch the bounds of reality itself. So, it’s time to go boldly where no author has gone before, because we may explore the infinite at Havok, but we never split infinitives (bonus points if you actually get this joke).

Go check out our Season Themes page for the latest details for Season 12: Multiversal.

Godspeed and good luck!