Inspiration and other ideas for novels

Another few thousand words and I will have finished a first draft of book number 10. It quite often feels a bit unreal that I’ve written 10 books this year. Or rather, 9 books this year, and I spent almost a year finishing the first one.

As I have mentioned earlier, I sometimes miss having time to do more research. I want to spend more time reading books about the Viking Age, and the sagas of that time. But, the little time I do get to read teach me something new all the time. Some of it I can use in the books I’m writing now, but I also now that what I’m learning now will really be helpful the day I get back to writing full time on my “Dreamland” novel. This is a novel that I’ve been working on for quite a few years now. I haven’t actually written that many pages on it so far, but it’s been in my head for more than ten years. It is a fantasy novel that partly takes place in our world, as we know it today, and partly in another world that some people have the ability to travel to when they sleep. And this dream land is loosely based on how I envision that Norway was in the Viking Age, and also on Norse mythology and creatures of Norwegian traditional folk stories. The first time I thought of this idea I was completely taken with it, and since then it just won’t let go. These days unfortunately I haven’t got much time to work on it. I throw a few thoughts in its’ direction from time to time, but mostly this, and other ideas for novels, will have to wait, for now anyway. 

I do though find inspiration in many places, often in the media. I found an article in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten interesting. It tells about how they’ve found Islamic coins from around the year 800 in the Eastern parts of Norway.