Snorri Kristjansson's Blog

I am still alive. I am also quite busy, and the time to write is dedicated 100% to books and stuff. I’ll write more later.

So, yeah. It’s the end of the year, which is when people do updates and summaries and such. However, I am also going to a party very shortly, so this is (in theory) going to be less wordy than usual. In short: 2014 has been a very, very full-on year. I’ve lost count, but I think […]

..and tea. These two things go together rather well, I find. And yes, I am alive. Well, sort of. The vibrant, energetic professional writer of July-August has been replaced with a beardy ham robot teacher who gets up at 05:40 in the morning, trundles to his train and writes on the way to school, so […]

(I saw a thread over on Chuck Wendig‘s Facebook wall about Amazon’s newest move in their spat with my publisher, Hachette – the site Readers United (which incidentally sounds like a less-than-terrifying football team) where lots of publishing folk spoke sense of varying degrees. I was moved to write this comment. Then I got shy, because […]

My humble website must be updated to reflect my ever-improving lot. The years are no longer lean nor London, and this must be properly documented. Expect random permutations of pictures, shifting navigational sands and increasingly snarky text as I grow exasperated of reading about feeds, bars and inward-facing widgets. As you were.  

Not that I am in any way, shape or form intending to turn this into a monthly thing. Truth be told? I couldn’t think of a title. Some writer, I am.

However, there is no denying that right now I am a writer wot wrote two books, as ‘Blood Will Follow’ has been unleashed on the public in its very mild-mannered, marauding way. There are even some reviews out there, and they are pretty much very positive indeed. It seems like people who read Swords and liked it like this one even more, which is an encouraging trend. This also means that the third book, roughly*quarter of which is now finished (for a given value thereof) needs to be better than the first two, because otherwise that wouldn’t be so good. At the moment, that might happen. However, that might also not happen. The next two months will be pretty important as far as that is concerned.

 

As usual, film stuff moves at its own pace regardless of how much I huff and puff. This does not stop me in the slightest from huffing and puffing, because I am a little bit of a huffer and a puffer. In addition to the things I’ve already got going** in that area I’ve recently launched another thing up into the air; whether that lands or no remains to be seen. My strategy for my fledgling writing ‘career’ is basically that of a suicidal juggler – chuck things up in the air as hard as I can, keep chucking and hope that I can catch and re-chuck before I get buried under an avalanche of comically various but similarly falling objects.

 

At the moment, though? Things are going okay. In the flash-bang-boom world of Snorri*** I have neglected to mention a couple of things.

- Translation rights have been sold to The Netherlands, where I will be published by the excellent Karakter publishing house. Hallo, Karakter uitgevers! Ik ben erg blij dat je mijn vikingen. Gelieve geen horens te vertalen op mijn helm.

- Translation rights have been sold to Poland, where I will be published by the terrific Rebis publishing house. Witaj, Rebis! Pochwalam kraju. Chciałbym iteracyjne punkt o hełmach, choć. Proszę nie tłumaczyć rogi na nich.

- I will (appropriately) have a short story in an anthology published by the good people at Ragnarok Publishing. The story will be called ‘A Kingdom and a Horse’, and will feature the youthful escapades of two familiar faces from the Valhalla Saga.

- I have done some guest blogs here and there; at some point in the future I am going to start reposting them here. So I suppose technically I’ve been doing guest blogs there and there.

- Yesterday I did a bespoke guided tour of the Viking exhibition at the British Museum for competition winners off the Jo Fletcher Books website. I realised**** that I know a reasonable amount about the Viking era. I also realised that I am not – ever – above cracking a stupid joke. I may have pointed at a picture of camels and very seriously explained that they were Swedish reindeer.

- There is other stuff going on as well which I cannot rightly tell you much about, but I am not in the habit of hiding my light under a bushel so rest assured that the moment I can, I will.

 

Now, though? I’mma go crack on some cheerful music and go Full Domestic Viking on some dishes and some laundry.

 

BOW BEFORE ME, HOUSEHOLD CHORES!

 

 

* Possibly/maybe/I make no promises

** In the same way that tectonic plates ‘go’. Seriously, though. For about 98% of the time, Film has none of the urgency and sense of direction that Publishing has.

*** The Glitz! The Glamour! The ‘Oh-shoot-I-haven’t-marked-ninth-grade-English-yet’!

**** Two-and-a-bit books in, how this is a realisation I’m not quite sure. I suppose I’m just ‘so immersed’. Yeah. We’ll go with that, rather than ‘an idiot’.

Before we start: How the h*ll is it May already? Freakin’ May? It was Christmas yesterday! The year is almost half over! I need to not think about this, because frothing at the mouth is apparently ‘not nice’. That’ll teach me to write in such hoity-toity cafés. Today marks the reverse monthiversary of my second book!* In English, this means that my second book comes out exactly a month from now**. Interview requests and guest blogs are apparently being discussed, and Plans are Afoot*** for other things related to shouting and waving and going ‘Hey everybody! I done a book! Another one! I done it!’ and so forth, during which posts on here might become more frequent, but also not. I profess that I am a bit nervous about going through the whole song and dance again – when Swords was released I googled myself so, so many times, and went through the thing of getting very down when someone dared have minor criticisms (which were usually true and fair, tbh) – but on the other hand I am quite happy with Blood Will Follow. It needed a fair amount of editing – but then again, it was also handed in as pretty much a first draft, whereas Swords came in at draft seven or so. It’s gotten a lot better, too – and now all that remains is to learn what you lot think of it. I’m well into book 3 and picking up pace – most of it is laid out, but other things are sort of shaking into shape as I go. As I near the end, I can quite understand that my hero Joe Abercrombie wished to have his second trilogy**** outlined from start to finish before he started on book 1. Other writings are by the by – film work rests for now and the Other Thing I’m writing sits none-too-quietly at 23k words, yapping at me to get going. However, the Vikings shall be pushed as a matter of priority for now – ideally I’d like them to be sitting at 25-30k or so before the end of June, which is just about achievable with a fair amount of work and puts the rest of my plans into the realm of plausibility. Those plans, in full: – Finish the Vikings before the end of the year. – Finish the Other Thing before the end of the year. – Write at least one, if not two films before the end of the year. (and I am fairly aware that #3 of those might be a tad optimistic) That puts me in the hole for at least 145.000 words, give or take, before the end of the year, and 7 months to write them in. For those of you playing the home game, that’s 21.000 words a month, which makes for about 700 words a day. This is doable – or thereabouts. If only it weren’t May already… -S

* I had great plans for this blog entry. I really did. But, y’know. If you wish, read it as a post-structuralist comment on the essence of The Absurd. ** As far as I am aware. Pirates may still hijack the book boxes, meteor showers are not unthinkable and apparently Will Self says the novel is dead, so who knows, really. *** I love the phrase ‘afoot’. Logically, this writing session is ‘abutt’. **** Go buy it. The first book is called ‘Half a King’, and the whole series promises to be annoyingly good.

 

Time, eh. Where does it go? And why? And what is it up to while it’s there? No-one seems to be asking these questions.

Right now I am questioning the validity of space-time and the Gregorian calendar, for it is the end of Easter Break. It has been both fantastically long and incredibly short, both fantastic and awesome. I’ve spent time with my beloved family in a tiny Cornwall village, gotten a delicious bit of writing done on several things, and gotten a lot of much-needed rest. Good food has been eaten and bad jokes told with great gusto.

I still will need 9 27-hour days a week to write everything I should write, but that’s all good. One day I’ll find the place where all the left-over time goes, and then I’ll be sitting pretty.

Tutuloo.

Every society and culture that has ever made something delicious to eat has had to grasp the idea that all good things come to an end.  Predictions of apocalypse are made regularly – here‘s a handy list.

The Vikings, those bearded funsters, were possibly the most impressive of the lot when it came time to predict the end of the world. They called it ‘Ragnarok’, which was pretty cool to start with. They were well aware that the Norse Mythology had far too many characters, so they prophesized that vaguely ‘some time in the future’ bad things would happen and everyone would die, spectacularly, when more or less all hell broke loose.

According to various reputable sources I found on the Internet and must therefore be true, the precise date is 22.02.2014. Further supporting this, Viking myths claimed it should be after a ‘Fimbulwinter’, which is like 3 winters rolled into one.  This fits neatly into the 3 winters’ worth of rainfall we’ve had this year.

So we’ve pretty much established that the world is about to end today.

However, some of you may have made plans. You might be about to bake a cake. Maybe some football takes your fancy. There might – nay, should – be a good book or two waiting for you somewhere. So with that in mind, here’s Snorri’s Handy 3-point Plan for Surviving The Apocalypse.

1)      Stay away from massive, fire-breathing wolves. Fenrir will be released, and he will eat Odin. Unless you want to be a human-sized doggy snack, look out for paws the size of a house – although to be fair, that’s probably not going to take too much effort.

2)      You might want to give the seaside a miss. The serpent of Midgard will toss and turn, causing huge waves and general flooding. People currently able to grow rice in Devon and Cornwall will not need to change their daily routine.

3)      My personal favourite – watch out for marauding hordes of giants, particularly Hrym who will be sailing on his ship ‘Naglfari’. It is made from the finger- and toenails of the dead. Goes well with the general life rule of avoiding giants who craft ships out of body parts.

If you make sure you remember at least two out of these three you should be fine.

With regards,

Snorri

…when you think you’re standing on solid ground, then the rug gets pulled out from beneath you and all of a sudden you find out that you were in fact standing in mid-air over a gaping abyss that you’re now staring into, and then the badgers start shooting at you with their laser guns?

No?

Me neither.

But something funny happened to me on Wednesday that wasn’t entirely dissimilar.

I’d been pushing and pushing to get my cast of 17 maniacs aged 11-18 to some kind of presentable level to do this year’s high school play. As always in theatre, there were Grand Plans to get the costumes done by some theoretical point, source all props by another point and whatnot; as always, everything was fabulously last minute but still somehow got done. The kids came through with flying colours, did an open dress on Tuesday which went all right-ish, a matinee for the staff on Wednesday and then a show for the parents on Wednesday evening. All good, applause, bows, bright lights and whatnot; a very tired director heading home on Wednesday night after a good 13-or-so hour shift*.

I flumphed down on my train, exhausted – but still… sometimes when I have theoretical writing time but am feeling melodramatic, I mutter ‘Make it count’ to myself**.  This happened; I pulled up my trusty old battered warhorse of a laptop, thought to myself that it would have been more cool to pull up an actual war horse, turned it on and had – nothing.

My second novel was still in copy-edits.

I couldn’t get a handle on the third until I’d gotten my grubby fingers into the second for some key changes.

I’d shipped new and improved versions of all three of my screenplays and I had promised myself I would not start a new one for a little while - and I had nothing to write.

I’ll tell you how that felt: Uncomfortable. It felt really, really uncomfortable.

I ended up hunting through folders with names like old/old computer/docs/old/ideas, and found a couple of things I could be getting on with – but that feeling, though. I don’t particularly want that feeling ever again.

I reckon I may be stuck with this ‘writing’ lark.

 

* And yes, I am aware that some people regularly work 13 hour shifts. If one of them is you, dear Reader, you are a Badass. Feel free to sneer contemptuously.

** If I’m feeling silly, I add a comma.