Jeremiah Tolbert

Greg van Eekhout is one of the fun­ni­est con atten­dees I have had the plea­sure of being around. On top of that, he’s a damned good writer with sto­ries like “The Osteomancer’s Son” and “Will You Be An Astronaut?” (appear­ing at EscapePod soon, read by Christiana Ellis).  Greg’s first novel was recently released.  I’ve watched the progress of Greg writ­ing this book on his blog, and so I’ve really been look­ing for­ward to read­ing it.

A Quick Review of Norse Code

Norse Code is Greg’s debut novel, and it’s a fun one. The book focuses on two char­ac­ters pri­mar­ily. The first is Mist, a recently recruited Valkyrie who is work­ing for the Norse Code project. The goal of the Norse Code project is to find and recruit the descen­dants of Odin to pre­pare for the com­ing Ragnarok. The sec­ond is the iten­er­ant Norse god Hermod, the only liv­ing entity to ever travel to Helheim and return.

It’ll come as no sur­prise to you that the paths of these two pro­tag­o­nists cross in the inevitable run-​​up to Ragnarok. Along the way, we meet a cast of char­ac­ters both drawn from Norse mythol­ogy and not, but all are  imbued with a pecu­liar van Eekhout sense of humor. This is not a comedic story exactly, but aspects of it are very funny.

Norse Code does feel at times like a first novel in that you sense the author feels a bit uncer­tain about the plot in places, but van Eekhout’s will­ing­ness to take what you know about Norse mythol­ogy and twist it for his needs makes this a hell of a lot of fun to read. Mist and Hermod are heroes in an older sense, not ter­ri­bly flawed, but sim­ply decent peo­ple with rocky pasts deter­mined to do the right thing despite that.

It’s a short read, one I man­aged to burn through in an after­noon, so you really have no excuse for not pick­ing it up and giv­ing it a try. While the novel didn’t pack the same punch for me as some of Greg’s short sto­ries, it’s a fine first out­ing and demon­strates that he’s an author to keep Odin’s eye on in the future.

The Interview

Can you share with me a lit­tle bit about the day-​​to-​​day nuts-​​and-​​bolts of your writ­ing process? How did you make time to write the book? How long did it take you to write the book from first con­ceiv­ing the idea to fin­ish­ing the book and sub­mit­ting it for publication?

I used to be able to talk about mak­ing time to write with at least some small degree of cred­i­bil­ity, because I had a job that often took up way more than forty hours a week, and I still found time to write sim­ply by mak­ing sure I started each day with an hour of writ­ing. For me, that kind of con­sis­tency was the key. But I don’t have a day job right now and I have the lux­ury of more writ­ing time, and I don’t blame peo­ple if they don’t want to lis­ten to me talk about carv­ing out time and ded­i­ca­tion and all that. That being said, peo­ple who really want to write find the time, some­how. Maybe by giv­ing up TV or games or what­ever. Maybe by devot­ing one hour before work to writ­ing, as I did. Maybe by writ­ing on their lunch break or on the bus. Maybe by just get­ting ten min­utes here, five min­utes there. It adds up. Really, it does.

It took me years and years and years to write Norse Code if you count all the false starts, words that got tossed out (at one point, 30,000 of them in one fell swoop), time squan­dered think­ing about writ­ing the book instead of writ­ing it, and time spent writ­ing short sto­ries and other things because I was stuck on the book. I’m going to say maybe ten years want­ing to write Norse Code, and maybe two years actu­ally work­ing on it. Fortunately, the book I wrote after Norse Code went much more quickly and smoothly.

I noticed quite a few L.A. cof­fee shops men­tioned. Are these all real places that you know from grow­ing up in L.A.? We’ve seen the pho­tos you take for each writ­ing ses­sion of your empty cups. How many cups of cof­fee did you drink in the process of writ­ing Norse Code?

I did grow up in L.A., but there really weren’t many cof­fee joints back then. Instead, we had “spooky houses,” where you were given a pot of a thick, pudding-​​like bev­er­age, an open flame with which to soften it, and sort of a com­bi­na­tion of spoon, fork, and hook, which we called a “spook.” Nonetheless, the cof­fee houses in Norse Code are real places. I think a con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mate for the num­ber of cups of cof­fee con­sumed dur­ing the com­po­si­tion of Norse Code would be 1,000. It takes a mil­lion bad words, 10,000 hours of prac­tice, or 1,000 cups of cof­fee before you can begin to say you’ve passed out of your appren­tice­ship. Really, the point of all those pic­tures of cof­fee cups next to my com­puter weren’t to show how much cof­fee I drink, but just a way of mark­ing the fact that, on the day each photo was posted to my blog, I worked on the book. Just some­thing dif­fer­ent than post­ing a word count.

What kind of research did you do to write the book–it’s clear that you famil­iar­ized your­self with Norse mythol­ogy. Can you talk about your research process and how it led to the plot you came up with for the book?

The pri­mary mate­ri­als that give us most of Norse mythol­ogy are short and finite: The Elder, or poetic, Edda, and the Younger, or prose, Edda. We’re only talk­ing a few hun­dred pages here, and they were my chief research mate­ri­als. H.R. Ellis Davidson also has some good books on Norse mythol­ogy, and I used wikipedia and pan​theon​.org some­times as well. My method was to read the Eddas and just sort of keep track of things that seemed par­tic­u­larly cool, like wolves eat­ing the moon and stuff like that. Sometimes it just led me to think through the impli­ca­tions of the myth, which made the plot obvi­ous to me. For instance, when you’ve got a story about the end of the world, and the myth tells you some gods are des­tined to sur­vive it and pre­side over the world that comes after­wards, you apply a basic what-​​if to that sit­u­a­tion. What if I were a god des­tined to sur­vive the end of the world and take over ruler­ship? Would I just wait for the end of the world to hap­pen? Would I encour­age it along? How would I do that? And so forth.

Some parts of the book seemed a bit trun­cated, like the Norse Code aspect itself. Did the Norse Code project play a larger part in the book in ear­lier drafts, and if so, what led to its role being reduced?

I think when you have a book titled Norse Code, peo­ple are right to expect a big part of the book to be devoted to Norse Code (which in the book is a genomics oper­a­tion run by Valkyries). But I never intended that par­tic­u­lar aspect of the book to play a huge role. What hap­pened was, the book was called “Greg’s Damn Norse Novel” for most of the time I was writ­ing it. When it came time to sub­mit it, it needed a real title. Norse Code is all I could come up with. I sort of expected the pub­lisher to give me a “real” title, but I guess they were happy with it, so it stuck.

What’s next from Greg in terms of books? It seems that Norse Code is a stand-​​alone book, which is sur­pris­ing given all the tril­ogy deals genre writ­ers seem to be get­ting lately.

I actu­ally can’t talk about what’s next! I’m not con­tracted to write any­thing else for the pub­lisher of Norse Code, though they get first look at the next book I write for adults. But the next thing out from me won’t be a book for adults, and when I’m free to talk about it, you can believe I’ll be Mr. Blabby McInterHype wher­ever I can.

Is Norse Code your writ­ten first novel in addi­tion to being your first pub­lished one, or did you write oth­ers before sell­ing Norse Code?

Norse Code is actu­ally the sec­ond book I’ve fin­ished. Somewhere in the mid­dle of that stalled-​​out time I men­tioned ear­lier, I wrote a whole other book. That one’s trunked for now, but you never know. Another whack or two at it, and it could pos­si­bly be decent enough to try to sell. If not, though, that’s okay. My goal with the cur­rently trunked novel was just to fin­ish a book, so I con­sider it a suc­cess even if it never leaves my hard drive. Writing it gave me the con­fi­dence to fin­ish Norse Code, and fin­ish­ing and sell­ing Norse Code gave me the con­fi­dence to write other books, so that first, unsold novel will always be impor­tant to me.

Thanks for answer­ing my ques­tions, Greg!  So have any of you read Norse Code? What did you think?