Since finishing both Avalon Summer and Gates to Illvelion, I haven’t been idle, though I do wish I was further along with my draft of the second Merlin book. I’ve written a few short stories that I’ve been sending out to different magazines, but so far, no luck.
And I’ve started drafting another novel, Norse City Limits, a story which I’ve had rolling around in my brain for almost ten years.
When I was in college, I took a class called “Icelandic Sagas,” and we read a whole bunch of them: Njal’s Saga, the Volsunga Saga, Grettir’s Saga, and a host of shorter sagas.
I always thought the style of the saga writers reminded me of the way screenwriters write screenplays: terse description, a focus on dialogue and action, and a point of view that resembles the “camera-eye-view” we get in a script. There’s no room for inner monologue; the thoughts and feelings of the characters are expressed in conversation and action. To my mind, these sagas worked a lot like the old film noir/hard-boiled movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age: fate and bad luck often played a huge role, society was controlled by a few rich and powerful networks that often manipulated the system to maintain power, and down-on-their-luck individuals had to find a way to survive in a hostile environment that answered only to money or force.
So Norse City Limits is my idea for melding Icelandic sagas with film noir. I know mixing hard-boiled fiction with fantasy stuff isn’t anything new (it’s Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files or Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid, right?), but I really love film noir and I really love the Icelandic sagas and the Norse legends and mythology that they’re infused with, so I wanted to write my own version of this urban fantasy staple.
For Norse City Limits, my main character is not going to be a detective, but instead a “regular Joe” who is down on his luck and trapped in a bad situation. Much more of an Out of the Past situation than a Big Sleep one.
I’m hoping that Norse City, the fictional island metropolis that is cut off from the rest of the world, will serve as a setting for other books inspired by the sagas. Norse City Limits book 1 is partially based on Grettir’s Saga, but it’s not a retelling of that story. It’s more of a jumping-off point for an original tale of my own invention.
I’m not a very fast writer — partly because I need a lot of time for thinking and exploring, and what often looks like procrastinating is really my way of letting my brain ruminate on things — but, despite the way my brain works, I’m trying to write 2500 words per day (with Saturdays a little bit less, and no writing on Sundays). I know I have to work up to that amount, a bit like a runner working up to a 5k or a marathon, but I figure 2500 per day isn’t too high of a goal for now.
