The Punishment of Loki

This entry is part 9 of 9 in the series The Songweaver's Vow: Easter Eggs & Background

I just found this post in draft form, never published, and I thought since The Songweaver’s Vow is the March 2018 read for the Fellowship of Fantasy online book club (join us!), now would be a good time to add some more background. (Check out the rest of the posts in the series.) Plus, everyone likes to talk about Loki.

Warning, some spoilers ahead.

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Celebrating 2017 — With Loot

list of handwritten creative ideas
I need a bigger fire for all my  irons.

We need to step back sometimes to be able to see the bigger picture.

I had been a little down on myself for not publishing as much as I’d wanted and being behind on my idea list. I have a beefy project list that feels like I’ll never catch up. (I wrote it out as an Idea Debt Inventory for a productivity lesson. Lemme tell ya, that’s simultaneously inspiring — look how much I can create! — and super-depressing.)

But then I started doing the math for this year, and wow, I’ve had a more productive year than I thought. No wonder I felt busy.

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Hey, Gold Star!

Brag moment! Even though I get no real credit for this one.

I’ve been an avid appreciator of Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer site for some years, and I keep an eye on his cover design awards and commentary as a useful educational tool (and a fun one). I’ve entered several of my covers, commissioned and self-designed, and gotten nice feedback on them. But this month I landed the coveted gold star. Continue reading

The Songweaver’s Vow: The Wyrmhole

This entry is part 1 of 9 in the series The Songweaver's Vow: Easter Eggs & Background

Today’s another entry in the Background & Research posts for The Songweaver’s Vow.

When Thor goes to fight Jörmungandr, he seeks the sea-sized serpent at a place he calls the Wyrmhole, baiting him out with a bull cut into quarters. The Wyrmhole is shamelessly based on a real place I visited in Ireland. (Though I saw fewer sea serpents.)

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The Death of Baldr

This entry is part 3 of 9 in the series The Songweaver's Vow: Easter Eggs & Background

Spoiler alert: Baldr dies.

River Song warns you of spoilers.

Okay, seriously, there be spoilers ahead. Mythology nerds likely already know some of what goes down in The Songweaver’s Vow, but if you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you grab a copy and then come back for the background material. (Though to be perfectly fair, even knowing the base myth won’t give you a complete picture, so as long as you’re fully apprised of the spoiler-ific nature of this post….) 

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Norse Mythology: What We Know

This entry is part 2 of 9 in the series The Songweaver's Vow: Easter Eggs & Background

So to start, we don’t know very much about Norse mythology.

By Mårten Eskil Winge - 3gGd_ynWqGjGfQ at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22007120
Thor’s Fight With The Giants by Mårten Eskil Winge

Oh, sure, we have quite a lot of stories, and we’ve made them into quite a lot more stories. But we don’t really have a grasp of how old proto-Germanic religion functioned, how seriously people took these stories, and how these stories fit together.

The Songweaver’s Vow was a tough book to write, for a number of reasons. For one, this was the first time I was writing a story which wasn’t entirely mine and I had to follow a previously-defined plot, as the base story of The Songweaver’s Vow is a Greek legend. And Euthalia brought her Greek stories with her to Asgard, so this meant that I had two separate mythologies to blend while simultaneously trying to make the determined plot my own. It was like writing historical fiction which had to fit both our history and an alternate Earth history. Not gonna lie, it was a workout.

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