Wednesday, September 28, 2011

NaNoWriMo 2011 - The Teaser

Since I always write the back cover blurb before I start writing the book, here's the teaser for The Big Red Ragnarok:

On a sojourn to Midgard, Odin is cut down by assassins' bullets and all signs point to the giants of Jotunheim.  As Odin drifts in and out of a coma in the halls of Asgard, Thor plans the war of all wars against the giants and begins marshalling his forces.  Sensing that all is not what it seems, Heimdall releases Loki from his eternal prison to ferret out the masterminds behind the attack on the Allfather.  Can Loki find the culprit in time to avert the bloodiest conflict in history or will loosing the Trickster God from his bonds trigger The Big Red Ragnarok?

The text will likely change before November but the core ideas are all there.  Loki seems like a good detective lead since he's a slippery one and most of the rest of the Aesir seem like straight-ahead warriors to me.

I made several decisions regarding The Big Red Ragnarok yesterday.
  1. I'm using Encyclopedia Mythica as my primary source.
  2. To give myself a bit more freedom, my characters aren't the actual Norse Gods but the nigh-immortal beings that inspired the Norse legends.
  3. I figured out who the mastermind is but I need to work on his motivation.  Revenge will naturally be part of it but revenge alone doesn't make a very compelling villian, in my opinion
  4. While it is the least magical of the nine worlds, Earth is important.  Earth's populace's belief in magic controls the level of background magic (for lack of a better term) in the other eight worlds.  That's going to factor in to the story somehow.

2 comments:

  1. I'm impressed that you are ready for November! Sounds like a good idea!

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  2. My preparation is only an illusion. All I have so far is the true mastermind, a few lines for Loki, and an hour or so on Wikipedia and Pantheon.org. Oh, an a post-it with some semi-coherent notes.

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