In the course of writing Fimbulwinter, I’ve been diving deep into academic works on Norse and Celtic mythology, history, and archaeology. I came across a way that the Norse would consecrate their enemies to Odin that has been stuck in my head ever since. It is, no doubt, a method known to my astute and educated readers who have an interest in the subject.

At the start of a battle, as the lines of shields squared up and faced each other across a field or a pass, or jockeyed for prime position, one single warrior would grasp a spear sacred to the Ecstatic One, the god of trickery, intoxication, magic, inspiration, battle, and overall chief of the Norse pantheon. Shouting, “Odin owns you all!” the warrior would cast the spear over the enemy formation, thus dedicating all those enemies about to die to Old One-Eye. I can’t help but wonder what would’ve gone through Saxon, French, Arab, or Irish minds as this spear sailed overhead, and the battle-shout in a foreign tongue drove fear deep into their hearts. Was there a pennant or flag fluttering from the spear? Blood or strips of fur? Would this ritual have seemed familiar or totally alien?

This has been one of the great benefits of writing about subjects I want to know more about. Through this, I’ve learned how much more complicated the Norse myths are, their antiquity, and how little we truly know.

Through this, Odin has emerged as one of the most complex and nuanced gods I think I’ve read about in my comparative mythological research. There are so many facets to his being, good and bad, but he is always himself. Conniving, cunning, and full of a desperate need for remembrance, I cannot help but admire this figure once beloved by my ancestors. He gives the gift of inspiration to poets and kings, but also binds and takes, bestowing battle-madness. I find it utterly fascinating that Odin did not begin his godhood as chief of the Norse pantheon. Rather he seems to have supplanted Tyr in the far-distant past. Odin seems not to be a stern and judging figure, watching from on high, or dallying with mortals solely to anger his wife. He comes across to me as a character with agency, with a story arc, with a drive and needs and desires of his own. He plans and plots, sacrifices, and teaches, befuddles, and beguiles.

As I slog my way through the query trenches, as the artillery of form rejections thunders all around me, a spear flies overhead, wrapped in strips of bear and wolf fur. Words chanted in an ancient tongue cut through the thunderous roar across the battlefield. Inspiration and madness walk hand in hand in their wake.

Two ravens take wing.

I rarely post many pictures to social media yet I take loads. Usually, they stay for me, to garner a smile at a needed moment, or to light up Michelle’s face at the latest capers of our companions.

In honor of Pumpkin the Badger, a lost companion slowly rediscovering herself and her family, I thought I’d switch up my blog content with a bunch of pictures of dogs and cats in case anyone needs some cheering up.

It occurred to me, in the spirit of continuing professionalism, growth, and actual self-promotion on my own gods-damned website, that I should post some more things on books I’ve finished or am working on.

The pitch for This Red Business has seen the most iterating and is hopefully the most polished:

GIDEON THE NINTH meets OVER THE GARDEN WALL in Sasquatch country. On the night before she is hanged, Pumpkin the Badger, an animal cursed with sentience, receives a letter from her old cult leader, revealing his ties to evil dragons and threatening the territory she loves. Pumpkin jumps into action, breaks free from prison by selling her soul to a sinister fairy, and returns home to reunite her family of retired adventurers. Through grit, research, and violence, the Chickenshit family punches through the cult ranks in a desperate bid to stop a Second Dragon War.

This new one is more feral and wild, perhaps fitting for this book in an apocalyptic, bleak, but beautiful era. I’ve been a bit more on edge lately, a little hungry for change, so I’m trying something different with this one. I am going to attempt a Young Adult Historical Fantasy novel tentatively titled Fimbulwinter. I don’t have any comparative titles yet, as I’m relearning the genre, beyond movies and TV shows. Here’s that pitch:

THE SECRET OF KELLS meets AVATAR: THE LEGEND OF KORRA in 10th-century Viking Age Ireland in the style of Gene Wolfe’s LATRO IN THE MIST. A shield-maiden searching for her mother, a half-starved, haunted berserker, and the goddess of storms reborn as a bard, journey across the island after a volcanic eruption triggers Ragnarok. Freed by the apocalypse, an ancient force of imbalance stirs. As the gods fail, and the old powers slip from memory, three mortals must resurrect the devoured sun or lose their world.

Michelle reminded me that this map I sketched out for my plotting purposes when writing the book would probably sit pretty well on the ole blogosphere.

Behold in all its rough, ridiculous glory, the Free Territory of Ascham.

https://www.worldanvil.com/w/allyoa-captainofchickens/map/87a9127c-9fdb-40f8-8bbe-ae9fadd40801

I thought it might also be amusing to add in my initial sketch. Also on display: my atrocious handwriting.

I’d like to spend some time talking about what is now called This Red Business after a Walt Whitman poem I quite admire. Usually, I use this space to talk about the things that bother me, the places I’ve succeeded, the everyday life I’ve led. Sometimes I talk about writing.

Rarely do I talk about what I’ve actually been working on. Most of these are things I’ve kept private, from Michelle, from my beta readers, or my confidants. Some featured within the first bleary attempts at pitching my novel. Most have gone unspoken, but should probably be mentioned.

The old writing adage is to write what I know, so just before my writing frenzy I took this to heart. I wrote the stories I wanted to read, something that started as a fantasy novel that would be pure entertainment, to scrub clean the ashes of my failures, that went from Scotland and a cautious approach to my unspoken ambition to write a fantasy novel series about the American Civil War. I’ve been fascinated, utterly consumed and obsessed with that conflict since I was a child. I grew up in suburban Maryland, surrounded by the detritus of the war. My great aunt’s house has divots in the backyard where I used to play which were originally dug by Union pickets. Every month, my dad took me to a battlefield, to learn, to breathe, and to study. In 8th grade, on a summer vacation to Gettysburg, long after we moved to the Pacific Northwest, I spoke so in depth with a National Parks guide that he handed his business card to me and told me I had a job there when I was older. I lost that card. I’ve been offered spots in reenactor companies, but always refrained. As I grew older, I learned nuance, saw past the myth and glimpsed the men beneath. Everywhere, I saw pro-confederate propaganda, the Lost Cause infects wide layers of American life, pernicious as the devil. So I thought instead of being cautious, why not be bold. Why not go straight for the throat here. If all I can see is the Lost Cause, then someone needed to give voice to the Union. I devoured Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, began to understand he’d seen the same danger in his later years. Fuck, it still feels crazy and ambitious for me to type these words, but let’s keep going.

Alongside these American mythologies, I added my obsession with folklore, with other histories, both foreign and close to home. I scoured my brain for worldbuilding I’d never quite bothered to do, knowing that only 10% was the recommended maximum visibility. To ease my imagination, already consumed with fever dreams of elves and dwarves, dragons, and gnomes, and the watchful Neighbors. I set my story here, at home. In a secondary world inspired by the Frontier Pacific Northwest in the decade before the Civil War. To gain inspiration, all I need do is get off my ass and go for a hike, listen for the dwarves laboring beneath our mountain ranges. Under the dripping boughs of the old-growth rainforest, I could hear the hoots and whistles of the Neighbors.

From this inspiration, I surrounded myself with talismans, crafted towers of books by authors I admired, by books that I read in childhood when all seemed dark, books with words that still drive me to this day. I started not just to write words, but to see the scenes in my head, to watch the action unfold, and to eavesdrop on Pumpkin and the rest of the Chickenshits speaking. The characters I had created were taking the reins, and I was going along for the ride

To add new twists on old classics, I poured in my fascination with Ice Age megafauna, paleontology, classical history, archaeology, Celtic mythology, bread baking, cooking, and my family history. Orcs were no longer broken and enslaved elves, but neanderthals. Survivors who swore the Oath of Survival which required total isolation. Dwarves and gnomes were descendants who fled underground or across to wandering The Other Side. I messed with structure and form, played with expectations and language. All these things live in This Red Business. Nana Cobbles, a hag and my cross between Merriweather Lewis, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Mary Berry, named for a contestant on the Great British Bake-Off’s nan, turns a kaiju-sized Quetzalcoatlus-like white dragon’s bones to bronze and then commands them to bake. This happens in the first third of the book.

Later, Pumpkin defeats her antagonist by using a lawyerly artifact to provide nuance to the statement turning her mother, inspired by Ulysses S. Grant and Merida from Brave, into a god. Before the end, Confederate velociraptors are raised into undeath by a reluctant dwarven lich to fight against their former comrades, I kill my first major character, pastries are baked, and Pumpkin, an actual North American badger, sells her soul to a fairy.

I took inspiration from the writings of Terry Pratchett, Victoria Schwab, Joe Abercrombie, Patrick Rothfuss, Chuck Wendig, Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Dan Abnett, Tamsyn Muir, Ursula K. Le Guin, Diana Wynne Jones, and so many others. I watched shows like Over the Garden Wall, Critical Role, and Gravity Falls for lessons on combining danger with absurdity and more importantly, heart. I wrote a book about gnomes, family, dinosaurs, and Bigfoot. I wrote a book that mirrors history, where multiculturalism is the key to defeating evil, as it was and is in real life. I wrote a book about a place called Ascham that now lives in my heart, that has perhaps, always lived there.

I want so badly to share it with the world.

In the misted haze and chill of October here in Washington, I began a project. For the first time in five years, the words returned to me. Characters demanded my attention, my will, and my effort. From this was born Pumpkin the Badger, poor Whissen Foss, and the rest of the Chickenshits.

From this humble beginning on the Pacific Coast, more words joined. Stories and pieces began to fit together. Plots and names. Places and people. At this time, this work, this novel, was set in Edinburgh.

In November and December, Michelle and I (oh yeah, I got married in 2018) journeyed to the Emerald Isle. Winter storms roared across the Wild Atlantic Way, but beside a turf fire, beneath a thatched roof, more came. From 1,000 words, came 10,000 more. Pumpkin the Badger made her deal and sought freedom with the help of Aunt Mary-Go-Lightly. In this way, the words trickled in, the plot meandering along with Pumpkin en route to an uncertain future and her childhood home.

Work intervened, demanded my focus, my skills, and my wits. The trickle slowed. The creekbed ran dry, rolled stones thirsty with dust. At the end of March, as the pandemic consumed the world, I was laid off by the Pinkertons. Devastated, I cast about for meaning, for purpose, and for the future. All seemed bleak.

Pumpkin told me to shut the fuck up, put my big boy pants on, and get cracking. Instead of being the guy who reminded his friends that he was working on a novel, I decided to be the guy who finished the damn thing. Starting the day after I was cast out into the world, thrown onto the whims of an uncaring administration, and for each day thereafter unto the end of a tenday, I wrote 3,000 words per day. I finished my novel at a pace that a not-so-younger me believed utterly impossible.

This fantasy novel, tentatively titled eponymously to give my weird website’s name true meaning, was flung into the aether, seeking publication and a home. The Great Work waits, slumbering with promise. The culmination of my varied interests, it is, what I hope to be, a unique take on the fantasy genre. Elves and dwarves and orcs feature therein, but twisted and made my own. No Pseudo-European setting here, no pastiche of Scotland, I decided to write what I know, what I’ve spent a lifetime learning and observing. I can never be Scottish, or British, or a European. I am American, for good and ill and so is my book. Under the watching eyes of the Neighbors and with the full throat of my voice, my ridiculous sense of humor, Captain of Chickens will live.

Pumpkin the Badger waits to take her place on the stage of published characters. Her family saga will march with her in time with the nation she loves. The people of the Free Territory of Ascham pray for hope.

As do I.

A constellation of future stories awaits.

Something has been nagging at me, gnawing away at my soul. I have neglected something. That something is this blog. People, too, have been nagging. I’ve had requests. They were easy to ignore for a while. But people are persistent.

‘Why?’ they cried out. ‘Why hast thou forsaken us?’

Ok, that may be a bit of an exaggeration.

I’d apologize,but I am fairly certain it would fall on deaf ears. I’d also write something clever, but I’ll save that for a coming blog post which I will endeavor to write soon.

In the meantime, I have news. Lots of it. I’ve been a busy Captain of Chickens.

Let’s kick things off. In September this little thing came out. It’s called ‘No Worse Sin’ and it was published by the Black Library. I’m pretty proud of the story and it may be leading to more awesomeness in the future.

I wrote a few more things that, hopefully, I will be allowed to talk about soon. There’s an image to go with one of them that I would dearly like to show, but I shall resist (for now).

So here’s me holding a baked potato instead.

As you can see from the picture, I’ve been working. Holding down a proper job, wearing a proper suit and being a proper, upstanding member of society.

Let that tide you over until I write a real, fancy blog post.

I am tired. Bone-weary, I sit and stare at the computer screen. My fingers move sluggishly across the keyboard in a slow dance. Words flow like treacle.

But my brain, it jumps and capers, jibbers and howls. It keeps focusing on other things to write, on other ideas. I corral it into shape but soon it flitters away to focus on something new. I have ideas. So many that flow past like leaves upon a river’s rapids. Some are pulled, sodden and messy, from the water. Others are allowed to float past.

Each is soon put back into the water as interest wanes.

This state of mind is not good. It is not productive. And yet…

And yet it persists.

I know why it is here. I am caught in the midst of a great personal undertaking. But I would rather, in my selfishness and naivety, that it were not so. My mind longs for the heady pleasure of creative writing. Even that is corrupted. Riven by guilt. Riven by doubt. Riven and gnawed through by notions of duty.

I try to save creative writing as the reward for work accomplished but my mind tries to drive me in this direction regardless. Even then, even still, it will not focus on these new ideas. Self-questioning, self-doubt, these worms have dug deep. Each new idea seems cliché or trite. What is the purpose? What is the relevance? Where is the deeper meaning? These questions pierce even the greatest armour.

My mind longs for a time without questions of relevance, of purpose. Why? Why? Why? The same questions over and over again.

I am dogged by this refrain. I come to peace with it, give it answers. For a time it is pacified, but then it comes shuffling back, resurrected by my subconscious.

For the moment the questions are silent, but the restlessness remains.

One hundred words before reward. This is all that remains.

Those one hundred words seem like one hundred miles of waterless wastes to my thirst-addled mind.

Hello, friends. It has been a while. I could make excuses for my absence. I could make excuses for my silence. But I am lazy and therefore will not.

I decided to do something a little different with the blog today. A quote danced in my head while I took a short break from the library earlier. I explored that quote and this little piece of flash fiction was born as a means of escape from dusty research.

The story is set in an original universe that has surfaced a time or two on the blog before.

Without further ado, here you are treated to ‘Thunder at Seasbury Moor’.

He was alone. The air was humid, rife with clogging warmth. The gentle drone of ambitious midges flitted through the still air of the tent. Seasbury Moor. The name made the place sound pleasant. It conjured images of a pleasant bit of flat land near to the sea. The reality was anything but. It was a blasted heath, coated in gently waving heather, thick thorny spinegorse. The ground was split by boulders and by defiles. Now it played host to a few thousand soldiery of the Glorious Union.

His last thoughts were of thunder.

I’ve been mulling over this blog post for a while, letting the thoughts and ideas crystalise. It has sat, words clamouring for attention, in my head, waiting.

I also wanted to give people some time to read ‘Witness’ in case I spoil anything. If you’ve not read it yet, then this post may not be for you. Also, go and read it and come back. I’ll wait. Maybe.

I wanted to do something different with this blog post and delve into my writing process, into the generation of characters, in the subconscious stew that prompts my words.

But first, let me set the scene.

I am on a train. There is a big grin plastered across my face, reflected in the windows, reflected in my iPad’s screen. The source of the smile is an email, received a year ago, come to fruition, and the fruits of that email sit in my hands. It is a short story, crafted, lovingly, by my hands, by my thoughts. I never thought I’d be writing this, but here I am and here is the final result.

The story is called ‘Witness’ and the author’s name is Joe Parrino, my name. It follows an officer of the Imperial Guard, fresh-faced, hungry for glory, scared of war. His name is Danel Prestoff and he is me.

A strange way for me to phrase it, but let me explain.

As I read my story again, I realised something.

Danel Prestoff’s fears are my own, reflected in fiction.

His uncertainties, his naivete, these are mine also. I wrote this story in a strange, unfamiliar place. The story was written back in September, started on one side of the globe and finished in another. My experiences, my feelings shaped those of my main character in ‘Witness.’

I was alone at the time, recently relocated to the United Kingdom. I’d crossed the pond, left family and friends behind, to attempt graduate school. I felt trepidation, uncertainty, all those things that Prestoff feels when he first descends on Margentum.

In the beginning of the story, in the true beginning, he is brusque, full of boasting, full of comfort. He is on his troopship, surrounded by his wife and daughters, by friends and familiar faces. War (graduate school) these are far away, in the distance; a problem for future Prestoff, for future Joe. These were my reactions before leaving for Scotland. I was home, with friends and family, leaving was a few days distant. I was full of nervous energy, ready for anything graduate school could throw at me. I was brave, brazen, bold. I could handle this.

Flash forward a few days and I was on a plane. The unknown started to buffet me, the first gnawing sense of doubt. This became Prestoff on his dropship, still prepared, but the doubt eats away at him. He panics.

The first few days in Edinburgh were filled with me keeping myself occupied, wandering around the city, gawking at all the sights. In the same way, Prestoff’s experience of war is one from behind Brindleweld shields, kept at a distance. The fear is still there, but it is hidden.

School begins and the true doubt sets in. I am ill-prepared for this. The readings, the coursework, all unfamiliar. The accents. The languages. So different from what I was used to in the US. Now I was truly down the rabbit hole.

This too is Prestoff’s story. As the Margentine War turns into a thing of horror, as they begin to lose, driven back by things they cannot fight. The essays, the readings are the xenos (*cough* daemons) in the story. They begin to overwhelm.

Then defiance sets in. This is something I can handle. This is something Prestoff can handle.

As the story goes on, of course, Prestoff and I separate. Our journeys differ. His ends in a dark place.

Hopefully mine ends in glory.