Phew! I’m heading towards the fourth base!
How my books happen
My writing process goes like this:
1. Draft zero, where I just vomit the text on the page to see what I don’t know or what I’ll be writing. I don’t even re-read my draft zero and I even more don’t show it to anybody.
2. The first official draft, where I figure out the missing parts to the best of my ability.
3. Many, many revisions, which in my case tend to be complete rewrites. I’m actually shooketh, because the last redraft of Bloodbath & Beyond – the sequel to Why Odin Drinks – was a revision/edit. I haven’t rewritten the whole thing. This is truly unprecedented. It means two things: a) it’s really good already; b) it feels like I have written the Worst Book Ever.
4. I send the text to my editor. In this case, I am delighted to announce the return of Megan Thee Editor, who worked on all my books except Land. I actually already have some text back from her, the first part, which requires substantial rewrites which is why I haven’t posted any of it here.
What is Bloodbath & Beyond?
Well, apart from being the sequel to Why Odin Drinks, it’s how I imagine Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett would have tackled the Norse mythology if they ever got to collaborating on that.
I’ve had high hopes for Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology. I was quite upset partly because I spent money on it and got a book that felt extremely perfunctory, but also because in his pre-creep-cancellation days Gaiman was HUGE and I knew this was going to be most people’s first introduction to the Norse lore. (I have repeatedly complained about this on my blog.) So, I decided to write the book I wanted to read, starting with Creation, which then got incorporated into Why Odin Drinks, confusing many reviewers and readers. Oops.
Bloodbath & Beyond is mostly the Freya’s coming-of-age book. If you’ve read Children and Land, you’ve met Freya you love to hate. B&B explains how she has become that person (deity).
The myths
I tackle the following myths this time (this is a semi-spoiler if you know the Norse mythology already, but then if you do, it’s hardly a spoiler):
– The war between the Æsir and the Vanir
– The creation of Brísingamen, Freya’s (in)famous necklace
– Theft of Brísingamen
– Angrboda’s and Loki’s children (Hel, Fenrir wolf, the Serpent of Midgard Jörmungandr)
– The (triple) burning of gold-greedy Gullveig
– Mímir’s talking head
– Queen Taylor (she doesn’t feature in the actual mythology, but the real Queen Taylor has repeatedly saved my sanity over the last few years)
I also do the same thing I’m doing with all my Norse books. The Norse lore is incomplete and sometimes leaves me with questions. How come Thor married Sif, yet Magni is his son with a jötunn lover, Járnsaxa? (That latter part will be explained in book three.) Why does Thor battle the jötnar when the Gods keep having, um, relations with them? Who exactly started the war between the Æsir and the Vanir, and who and why stopped it? Why do Odin’s brothers appear in the myth of creation (see Why Odin Drinks) then disappear from the preserved lore? And how do I make some parts of it funny?
Remixing the Norse lore
The Norse mythology is really character-based. The stories themselves have been written, and I am sorry but it’s true, by drunken bards wishing to get more free drinks. The Gods, however, are surprisingly consistent in how they appear in the Eddas, which is what I mean by ‘character-based.’
What the myths are definitely not is child-friendly. What can I say? The Vikings loved their drink, having personal relations of the adult sort, and battles. This is what the stories talk about. The original lore is often funny, since the skalds knew that funny sells, but I drag it further and further into the satire territory until… this is where I warn you, please do NOT think that you’re learning the real Norse mythology from Why Odin Drinks. I remix the myths rather than re-tell them. Hopefully the existence of a Goddess responsible for arranging Frigg’s sneakers gives a good hint, still, I thought I’d mention that.
I love putting all sorts of anachronisms in those books. The first book is more slapstick; the second largely drops the juvenile jokes, because the Gods had enough time to grow up. Ish. If you know some of the Norse mythology I have kept for the further books, you know that not even Odin ever becomes a proper, serious grown-up who is above things like petty fights or taunting Thor from safe distance.
What happens next
Once my editor is back to me with her remarks on the full manuscript, I get to work on that. I expect it will take me about 3-4 weeks to incorporate all the changes. Well, almost all; Megan is only right 99% of the time. Her work is largely about pointing out inconsistencies and things that are unclear. When working on Storytellers I first left explanations as comments until it dawned on me that I won’t be there for every reader to explain things.
Once I’ve gone through the book a few more times, I will send it to Megan for the second and final editing round. Then I go through it again and when I feel it’s finished, I send it to be proofread. Hopefully (please keep fingers crossed) that will be done before November, because I’m aiming to publish this winter, i.e. before March 21, 2026. The ARCs, advanced review copies, will be available earlier, and of course my Ko‑fi supporters will be getting the book four weeks before release, as usual.
No AI has been or will be used in the creation of Bloodbath & Beyond, but I hope I don’t need to say that.
The cover by the superb Ragrfisk, who created the illustrations for the first book, is ready and I am so excited by it I keep wanting to do a cover reveal before I even get anywhere close to finishing the book! It’s fantastic. I can’t help it. Ragrfisk is just so talented.
In the meantime, I keep posting #WIPSnips, i.e. unedited snippets, on Bluesky. Find them all here. Do they count as spoilers? Yes and no. As I’ve mentioned, those are myths that already existed, although not in this form. If you don’t want any spoilers… don’t look!
And what happens NEXT next?
I’m about to return to The Blue King, the third (and possibly fourth, because it’s…long) book in the The Ten Worlds series. I’ll give it as much time as I have before I get the corrections for B&B. And once B&B is finished and for a change The Blue King is with my editor… I go back to the follow-up to Storytellers. Nope, I haven’t forgotten about it!
Work is always in progress. Even when I can’t write – my neurospicy brain sometimes decides a break is in order, or life happens at me – I keep working on the books, coming up with new ideas, taking notes. I already have a few stories sketched for the third Why Odin Drinks instalment. But that’s so far in the future I can only hope humankind still exists, which doesn’t seem all that obvious these days…