I haven’t fallen off the face of the planet, or into a black hole. In a way, it’s even worse than that. I’ve been in medical limbo on multiple fronts. I’ve got fewer teeth and more tattoos than when I last poked my head out of my hole in the ground. I’ve also been catching up with past loves and as a result have become obsessed with a certain genre of trash telly in period dress. I’ve watched three of them this week alone, and they’ve all been identical. And I don’t care. I want 20 more. It’s exactly like reading every single AU for your ship and trope of choice. It doesn’t matter that they’re all the same, because your brain thinks you’ve become a master at working out what a story will do next. It’s the same reason I’ve watched every episode of every panel show ever about 20 times each. I get the same joy watching Preston get fired out of the ejector seat every single time I watch that Buzzcocks episode, the same way I am always baffled that ‘they say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is’ was buried in an outtake compilation. I love trash. I would watch the feature length version of those Waitrose ads with Joe Wilkinson and Keira Knightley.
I have also been reading quite a lot. I tried to go back to university to finish my degree last year, and discovered two things about myself: I am fundamentally incompatible with structured education, and I quite enjoy reading a good textbook. I made it through a few anthropology and ancient history courses, but I could either get the reading done, or bullshit my way through the work. I couldn’t really do both. My grades were still good, but that wound up not being what I wanted at all. Anything I would have done with the degree, at this point I can do it without anyway. So why not focus on the areas I’m especially interested in to begin with.
Now I’m currently making my way through The Viking Way by Neil Price, and I’ve got a few of his other books amongst a monster stack of others. Because for the past few years, I’ve been playing with a story that just wasn’t developing. What had happened was I had read House of the Dragon. If you’ve not read it, it’s basically a textbook history of Westeros, focusing on the Targaryen dynasty. It cites sources, calls out dodgy ones, and talks about academic feuds. I love that shit. There’s a lot of it in the book I’m reading now. When I plan a story, that’s kind of how I write my first drafts anyway, where I just word vomit out the broad strokes and then go back and fill in the details. So I word vomited out about 200k of story that kept fighting me on which direction to go. I was trying to write something new, but I’d already used up all my good ideas elsewhere.
Then I saw that the Reylo fic was a film now, and wondered why I wasn’t just writing the thing I actually want to write? My subconscious obviously wants to write about that little twink in Asgard, so fuck it. Let’s write about him.
I’ve since been spending a lot of time rolling this new thing into everything I’d already done with God of Outcasts, while also removing all the Marvel. I’d already gone so far off-piste that there was barely any left in there to begin with. There is one element that I’m keeping, only because Marvel accidentally made it a trope anyway, and it’s kind of one of the key elements to the whole damn thing.
Loki is one of the main characters still, while also putting more focus on other characters. Those other 200,000 words will also turn up in one form or another, so there’s all that to look forward to.
I’ll mention one thing right now: I don’t know how Midgard Legends fits in now. If at all. It was a lot of fun to write, but it’s also inherently Marvel in every way. But that’s a bridge to burn when I get to it, because I’ll need to do something with that part of the story.
This is all going up on my Patreon. I’m looking at a bi-weekly post schedule for now, because I have so many other things on. The first few bits are up now.
Otherwise, I’m not doing much writing. Mainly because I’ve been treating pulling everything apart and stitching it back together like a full time job. I need to finally get this story finished and out of my head, so that is what I am going to do.
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