We’re celebrating here at Red Canyon Ranch. On Saturday the 11th we finally shipped PEOPLE OF THE SONGTRAIL off to our editor Melissa Singer and the good folks at Tor\/Forge Books! As always we will keep you appraised as SONGTRAIL goes through the editing and production process. We don’t have a pub date yet, but will post that as soon as we hear.<\/p>\n
PEOPLE OF THE SONGTRAIL is our novel about Norse\/Viking explorations of North America. The discovery of Native American mitochondrial DNA that goes back a thousand years in several Icelandic families triggered our interest in the book. What we didn’t anticipate was the amount of research we’d have to do on Vikings, or the snarls it would lead us into. It’s a simple story, right? Eric the Red is tossed out of Iceland for murder, finds Greenland. His son Leif wonders what’s beyond the horizon and goes to look–and bingo! He’s found Vinland.<\/p>\n
Um, wrong. England, Norway, and Denmark, the major players, are embroiled in a brutal civil war, religious persecution is rampant between the Christians and the traditionalists, and the politics make GAME OF THRONES look mild, with everyone cutting everyone else’s throat.<\/p>\n
And then we had the problem of Seidur magic. This is what the Odin worshippers believed, and it has become the vibrant core of modern literary fantasy: wizards, magical swords and staffs, spells, glowing orbs, shape-shifting and magic animals. So how do we portray that in a historical novel without sounding clich\u00e9 to the fantasy audience?<\/p>\n
Hopefully you’ll find as fascinating to read as we did to write. In the meantime, read in health!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We’re celebrating here at Red Canyon Ranch. On Saturday the 11th we finally shipped PEOPLE OF THE SONGTRAIL off to our editor Melissa Singer and the good folks at Tor\/Forge Books! As always we will keep you appraised as SONGTRAIL goes through the editing and production process. We don’t have a pub date yet, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":489,"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488\/revisions\/489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}