Better Late than Never

So, we're humbly abashed for not having updated the blog yesterday. Sincere apologies all around.

Yesterday was a bit dull. I made a few job applications on the web and followed up on some leads. Nothing solid coming out of this yet. We live in hope, don't we?

As regards the book, I have to design a map of the realm that the characters can explore. It's harder to do that I first imagined. It's one thing to create characters out of nothing, but quite another to make up a whole new world - especially one that the ancients had considered to exist already. The realm that I'm talking about is Asgard and the other eight worlds of ancient Norse mythology.

You would think that something as common as this would have already been explored to the limit but this is not the case. After doing thorough searches and the like I only managed to come up with others' ideas of what Asgard looked like. And a lot of these ideas are strangely fanciful. Take a look at this map I found.

I then found this other one for the nine worlds:



It's pathetic, isn't it? This means that I have to really get creative in order to come up with a world that my characters can really explore.

The only real problem with this is that I need it to be a real representation of the actual realm imagined by the vikings and their contemporaries. In order to do this I am going to have to read every single ancient text on the subject.

To this end I have recently completed reading the Prose Edda (written in the 13th century). The next book will be its companion, the Poetic Edda. Unfortunately, in this small town where I live I have not been able to find a decent version of the translation. So, I went to the library and had to get an inter-library loan from one of the libraries in London.

Once this arrives I'm sure that I'll be able to get a better idea of what Asgard looked like, and then be able to come up with a map that will be realist and believable.

Fingers crossed. I'll let you know how it turned out. And if you have any ideas on an easier way to go about this tast, don't hesitate to drop me a line and let me know.

Norse Mythology - and life...

I thought I would start off the day today by adding a few spice-ups to this blog. That shouldn't really be too difficult. Following that I was to do a bit of research and then get down to the business of writing Chapter 3 of my book.

So, I logged on and got to work. And in the end what really got done today?

To be honest, not that much.

Did I do a lot of creation on my writing? No.
Did I get a lot of research done? No.

So what did I do? Where did all those hours in the day go?

The truth of that is that I spent a large amount of time trying to get my head around the subject of Blogging. For those of you who are relative newbies in this field I think that you will be able to appreciate my frustration.
Let it never be said that I am web-wise, for I'm most certainly not. In fact only yesterday I was very proud of myself for learning how to download videos for my iPod!

Pathetic, isn't it?

Well, the one good thing that happened was that, in researching my story, I needed to look up a number of websites having to do with Norse Mythology.
While I didn't find anything that I was looking for I did find the following site.

This guy's an artist of note. Here are some samples of pictures on his site. Aren't they absolutely gorgeous?!

Site address: http://www.howarddavidjohnson.com

Anyway, there you have it. No actual work done, but I'm happy I had the chance to view these pictures.

What do you think?