When I was reading this book, I was on fire with drafting Norse City Limits. When I stopped reading it (due to other reading obligations), the writing dried up.

Coincidence?

Ideas don’t come from thin air. At least mine don’t. Mine come from what I see, what I read, what I listen to, what I notice. When I’m reading a book that’s bursting with ideas, suddenly I’m bursting with ideas. When my reading is directed toward something related to my work-in-progress, my work-in-progress gets a boost from that reading.

And when my reading or attention shift elsewhere?

The writing does too. It shifts into that other elsewhere or it withers a bit from lack of sustenance.

Donna Tartt’s process seems right to me: read something related to your work-in-progress at the end of the day.

Of course, the lesson here is to get back to my Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe book.

The difficulty, is that I have a growing stack of books I need to read for my winter semester classes, and a book club book, and some library books that will soon be called back to the returns bin. Making time for my weird mythology book is hard to justify.

Still. I need to justify it. I need that sustenance. That juice.

Watching more film noir will get me that juice too. I can’t keep running off the fumes of what I remember from my twenties and early thirties when my art diet consisted of a steady stream of movie noir and hard-boiled fiction. I need to dive back in. Myths and symbols, alleyways and wise guys. More jazz. More Led Zeppelin. More Thor and Odin and trolls.

I started writing NCL because of my love for both Norse mythology and film noir. But that love needs nurturing.

My fantasy writing (maybe all my writing) really thrives from using symbols, thinking about symbols, reviving and trying to breathe life into old, familiar symbols. The Davidson book is full of these: blood, birds, wood, stone, feasts, water, wolves. The mystery surrounding our understanding of these early northern European pagan peoples is part of the fun, part of the allure. Using these half-guessed at rituals and rites, tales and traditions, as the material for my story is part of why I tell stories. I want to remix and re-imagine. I think most fantasy writers do. Whereas science fiction writers are farseeing into the future, we are farseeing into the past. And then we mix it together with whatever else is swimming in our imaginations. Fantasy is a synthesis. Neither old nor entirely new. A bridge between times (and worlds).