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an Interview with Greg van Eekhout, author of Norse Code

Filed Under: Novel, Recommended Media

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 pantheon.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?

TAGS: fantasy, Greg van eekhout, interview, My Writing, Norse Code, norse mythology, Novel

POSTED: 9:00 am Wed June 03 2009 |