RUNES AND EDITORS!

My short-story, “The Last Rune,” is online now on Sorcerous Signals. This tale features Ulf Blood-eye, meeting Starkad the Betrayer yet again in battle. For more on the bloody feud of Ulf and Starkad, check out Mystic Signals 9, for “Vikar’s Doom.”

I have been fascinated with Vikings and Norse legends since I was a kid, reading a book from the 1890s (it must have belonged to my grandmother, I can’t recall its name). But it had re-tellings of the Prose Edda and other Norse myth. My favorite was the story of the giant  Utgarth-Loki and how the Aesir slept in his glove and thought it was a house with five rooms (really long, narrow rooms). Edith Hamilton, Magnus Magnusson, Poul Anderson, and yes, Marvel Comics’ Thor played a big role in keeping me interested in the gritty and violent details of the Viking Age without losing touch with the glorious fantasy that so captured my imagination.

Also, please take a look at this lovely blog post by Alisa Carter. She is an editor with Urania, the spec-fic imprint of Musa Publishing. I worked with her on Crazy Greta, it was a privilege to work with someone who cared as much about my vision for the story as I did. I think she may be better able to explain Crazy Greta than I can, as evidenced below.

I always say, the best books are the ones that answer a question. For example, “What if vampires could actually have sex and form relationships?” How many books can you think of that answer that question? Well, Crazy Greta is the only book you will ever read that answers the question, “What if those paintings that show skeletons fighting humans in the 16th-century Netherlands depict something that really happened?”

Yep, that was a good bit of my thought process.

BTW, I will have another e-book coming from Urania this July, Tales of Phalerus the Achaean, a pair of Sword & Sorcery stories set in the mythic past of Bronze Age Greece.

-Dave Hardy