Author: Nobody's Home

Loki’s Top 5 Biggest Tricks

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Loki stamp by Anker Eli Petersen

In Norse Mythology Loki is called the Trickster God but what exactly did Loki do to earn that title? Here, in ascending order of impact, are some of his biggest tricks. We won’t call them his best tricks because some of them were more than a little mean.

5. Ruining the feast
One day the sea god Aegir gave a feast. His two servants, Fimafeng and Eldir, welcomed all of the guests. making sure that they heaped tons of praise on every one of them. This annoyed Loki, so he killed Fimafeng. The gods were angry and drove him away. Loki comes back after a bit and brings up an oath he swore with Odin that they would drink together. The gods are forced to let him back in. Loki is grateful and contrite. No, he’s not! He proceeds to start trash-talking almost everyone else at the feast, calling them cowards, whores, unmanly, and everything else he can think of. Loki even goes so far as to insult Odin. The thing that finally gets him to shut up and leave is the sudden appearance of Thor who threatens to knock Loki’s head clean off his shoulders.

4. Loki cuts off Sif’s hair.
One day Loki was walking along when he happened to spy the goddess Sif lying asleep on the ground. Seeing this as the perfect opportunity to make some mischief, he cut off all of her hair. We’re never told any more of his motivation, that’s just apparently the way Loki works. Of course, he was caught. Sif is the wife of Thor, so you can imagine the Thunder god was not happy when he found out what happened. Once again Loki is about to be killed and swears an oath to make everything right. He eventually had the Dwarves make new magical hair for Sif, forged from a piece of gold.

3. Loki transforms himself into a female horse.
A builder was promised the sun, the moon and the goddess Freyja if he could build the walls of Asgard within a specific period of time. With the help of his magic stallion, the builder was dangerously close to completing this job. Loki transformed himself into a beautiful female horse and lured the stallion away. Without the horse’s help the man realized the only way to complete the job was by assuming his true identity – that of a mountain giant. Unfortunately, giants and Thor do not mix. The Thunder God used his hammer to smash in the giant’s skull. As a bonus, Loki then gave birth to Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse.

2. Messing with Mjolnir
This is a bit of a double-whammy since Loki pulled this trick in the process of making up for #4. Loki had the Dwarves create magical hair out of gold to replace the hair he had cut off of Sif’s head. While he was there he had them make some gifts for the other gods as well, including Odin’s spear Gungnir which always hits its target. Then, because he is the Trickster God, he brings these magical items to a different set of Dwarves. He bets them that they can’t make anything better. He is so sure of this that he bets his own head. These Dwarves are working on some wonderful things. Loki starts to worry and turns himself into a fly. He starts biting the Dwarf on the arm to distract him. The first item comes out of the forge and it is fine. While the Dwarf works on the second item fly-Loki bites him on the neck twice as hard. The Dwarf soldiers on and the second item is fine. While working on the third item fly-Loki bites the Dwarf on the eyelid drawing blood and making the Dwarf stop working for a minute. As a result of this the third item, Mjolnir, has a short handle and can only be used with one hand.

1. The death of Baldur
Baldur the Good was having terrible dreams that his life was in danger. His mother Frigga, being a goddess, “exacted an oath from fire and water, from iron, and all other metals, as well as from stones, earths, diseases, beasts, birds, poisons, and creeping things, that none of them would do any harm to Baldur.” Pretty impressive achievement, huh? Loki thought so and it made him mad. He put on a disguise and went to Frigga. There he learned that she had not extracted an oath from Mistletoe, thinking it was too young and feeble to harm her son. Loki runs off and makes a dart out of Mistletoe. He gives the dart to Baldur’s brother Hodur. Since Hodur is blind, Loki is even helpful enough to point him in the right direction. Hodur throws the dart, striking and killing Baldur.

What do you think? Did Loki earn the title of Trickster? Have I left out any tricks that you love? Chime in and let me know.

My Process

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Writing a little about the nuts and bolts of what works for me. Not trying to set this out as the way things should be, just offering up what works for me in case it can help someone else.

I use a program called FocusWriter for creating the original text in my books. It is one of those minimalist programs that blanks out the screen and doesn’t allow you to do anything else but write. I will admit that I need something like that. There are just too many distractions and too many other things that a computer can do. Think of minimalist  word processors as the equivalent of blinders for a horse – something to help you get to where you want to go.

FocusWriter doesn’t have a lot of the bells and whistles of something like MS Word or OpenOffice but you don’t need that when you’re in the initial creation stages. Just write the words! I can style things as much as I need to at this point. FW lets you set up themes (You can see the one I’ve created in the attached image.) that help put you in a nice frame of mind for writing. It’s everything you need from the software.

Yeah, it is nice to be able to tab over to an Internet browser when you have a question about something. I use the net for ideas for names especially. But it also breaks the flow of writing. Writing isn’t always easy for me and when I get into the zone I want to stay there, not go traipsing off somewhere else. So I use a trick I learned about from Cory Doctorow – when I come across a name or a fact I need or something else that I am just not sure about I type XXXX into the manuscript. It is a nice visual cue when I read back over the previous day’s writing. Plus I can use the Find function to sort through the different instances of XXXX to make sure I didn’t miss any of them. Very useful!

I’ve worked a lot as an artist over the years and worked on a number of different computers. Currently I have two PCs. I do early morning writing on the downstairs computer. Once the wife and son wake up I use the upstairs computer for afternoon/evening writing. I’m digging the upstairs computer lately. It is the older one which means it is slower for surfing the net and playing games so those distractions are less tempting. But I also like it because of the setup. We’re using it as something of a media center in the bedroom so it sits on top of a dresser. So I have started to use it as a standing desk. I’d read a lot about the health benefits of standing desks and wanted to give one a try. I do like it a lot. There was no discomfort for me – I don’t usually write for more than two or three hours at a time. I also like being able to pace. I’ve always found movement to be a good stimulus to thoughts. Being able to type a bit, walk back and forth while the next part germinates and then type some more is really refreshing. Give it a try.

HeroesCon in Charlotte

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Spent some very enjoyable time at the local comics convention yesterday with my lovely wife and our young boy. It’s a big show but it was a very nice crowd. We only found out about it on Thursday so we just had Friday to get together some appropriately geeky stuff to wear. I made a couple quick t-shirts for myself and the wife (Avengers for her, Ultraman for me) and worked up a little Thor costume for Taliesin. It was his first con and he had a great time asking all the other cosplayers to pose for a picture with him. (I mentioned how nice the crowd was, right?)

I met Kerry Lyn Thompson in Artist Alley and had her do a quick sketch of the main character from Valda and the Valkyries. It was nice to meet her and I am really happy with the artwork. I think I’m going to have to make it a habit to have different artists do a sketch of our Dwarven Valkyrie.

 

Valda 2nd Edition almost up at Smashwords

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You know, I understand that Smashwords has to set limits on what sort of files they can and can not accept. I get it. But man is it frustrating to go through their Meatgrinder app and end up with something that doesn’t look as good as what I can create myself.

The technology is there but the integration isn’t… yet. I won’t let myself get too worked up over it because we are still in the young days of the digital revolution. It is not unusual for us to be hitting rough spots along the way.

Won’t it be nice when this is behind us? I mean, I have all sorts of ideas for taking advantage of the e-format for books, of trying new things that simply can’t be done with a paper book. I tried to push things a bit by incorporating endnotes into Valda & the Valkyries. I went kind of meta with them, explaining some of the thought processes I went through in writing the book. It is not something I would recommend people check out on their first read through – it would break the flow of the narrative too much, it would smash the heck out of the “fourth wall.” But hyperlinks do give us an interesting way to add what is essentially a “author’s commentary” track to books. I’m excited to see if others start doing this, too, or coming up with even wilder things.

Ray Bradbury passes on

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We lost a really inspiring author this week when Ray passed on. It wasn’t just his fiction that got me fired up – he had great advice on the creative life as can be seen in the excellent Zen in the Art of Writing.  Well worth reading and reading again. I gave my copy to one of my writing friends just a few months ago. Not because I had gotten everything I could out of the book – I’m going to have to get another copy of it soon.