Our story / Why I built NovlHeim
With the first draft of my novel complete, I wanted a home for the story I was still shaping: the manuscript, the notes, and the world taking form around them. Somewhere beautiful to work, affordable to own, and easy to take with me, while keeping the work first and foremost on my own computer. That search became NovlHeim.
An independent beginning
NovlHeim is an indie development project, shaped by a varied background in business and management, and by the experience of writing a novel.
That mix informs the approach: make complicated work easier to organise, think carefully about what people need, and take the details seriously. Writing gives those ideas a very personal purpose.
There is a direct connection between the people using NovlHeim and the person building it. Questions, suggestions and honest accounts of how it feels to write here help shape what comes next.
The writing
I came to this as someone trying to write a novel. I kept moving from app to app and subscription to subscription, looking for a place that felt right for the way I wanted to work. Each time, I hoped I had found it. I was never quite satisfied.
The search
What I wanted was a home for the whole project: the manuscript, the plan, and the people and places taking shape around it. Somewhere I could move between writing and the work that supports it, without constantly having to rethink where everything belonged.
The beginning
Eventually, that search became a project of its own. I decided to create NovlHeim—the writing app I had been looking for.
I’m still writing that novel. The writing and the building are now part of the same journey: one keeps me close to the work this app is meant to support, while the other gives me a chance to make that work feel more at home.
NovlHeim is still growing, too. I want it to give writers useful tools and room to make their own choices, whether they start with a sentence, an outline or a world they can already imagine. I hope other writers recognise something of their own experience in the problem that started it, and help shape a better place to work. The story, and the decisions behind it, remain theirs.
04 / Why a tree?
The connection begins with something you can hold.
Trees give us much of the paper on which stories become books. For those of us who love reading, that is already a meaningful connection: the page beneath our fingers, the shelves we return to, the hope of one day holding a novel of our own.
But the tree means more than its material. It is alive. It grows, shelters other life and belongs to something larger than itself. A forest can hold countless kinds of trees, each with its own shape and way of reaching towards the light.
Literature feels like that to me. Intimate or immense, familiar or strange, every story adds something of its own. The tree is a way of giving that idea a visible form.
05 / From a seed to a world
A story can begin with almost nothing: an image, a question, a voice. With attention, that small beginning can become a universe of its own.
The idea that will not leave you alone. A first possibility, small enough to carry and full of things you have yet to discover.
The foundations beneath the words: what matters, what came before, and why this story needs to be told. They give the work something to draw from.
The story taking shape. The central thread that holds it together as scenes accumulate and the first idea becomes a manuscript.
Characters, places, histories and possible futures. One idea reaches outward into many lives, perhaps many novels, perhaps whole worlds.
A home for the words, and everything growing around them.
06 / The northern roots
That image leads naturally to Yggdrasil, the great World Tree of Norse tradition. At the heart of that cosmology is a living tree connecting nine worlds: an immense, shared structure reaching beyond any single life or place.
For a writer, it is an extraordinary image. A cast of characters can have separate lives and histories, yet belong to the same larger story. A place mentioned in one chapter might hold a whole novel of its own. The world grows beyond the part we first set out to write.
Yggdrasil gives that possibility a cosmic scale. This is what draws me to it: the idea that something living can hold so much, with every branch still connected to its roots.
07 / Knowledge, imagination & the old stories
Odin’s search for wisdom belongs to that same world of imagery. In the old accounts, he gives an eye for wisdom and hangs upon the World Tree to gain knowledge of the runes. Knowledge carries a cost; understanding asks something of the seeker.
I find an echo of that curiosity in writing: the wish to look beneath the surface, understand another life and discover what a story has not yet revealed. The runes, the magic and the journeys between worlds speak to the power we give words when we make something with them.
Norse stories have inspired generations of writers, including Tolkien. NovlHeim draws on that inheritance with affection and respect for the traditions behind it. The tree is more than decoration here. It is a way of remembering where the imagery comes from, while making room for the new stories you will tell.
08 / Why NovlHeim?
The novel. The story you came here to write.
A home. An echo of the northern names for worlds and dwelling places.
Together, they express what I want NovlHeim to be: somewhere your manuscript can take root, your ideas can branch out, and the world you imagine has room to live.
Where your stories grow and blossom.
Our tree and writing analogies are a personal interpretation. For the Norse background, read the Swedish History Museum on Yggdrasil and the nine worlds and Odin’s search for knowledge, the Danish National Museum on runes and Norse influences in Tolkien. Accounts and interpretations of the old stories vary.
