Feeling Better and Back At It Plus, Opening Sentences

I think my bad habits almost caught up with me . . .

open.substack.com/pub/soden/p/...

Remembering a Friend I just found out, last night, that my writer-friend W.

While I was down with food poisoning, a friend of mine passed away . . .

open.substack.com/pub/soden/p/...

I wonder how much of this is motivated by the same ideology traditional publishing has been dealing with since the mergers began -- the "let's just publish bestsellers!" line of corporate thinking?

Sure! Shoot me a DM and I'll get you sorted ;)

Thwarted! Don't Eat the Fuzzy Green Egg

I swear that egg had it out for me . . .

open.substack.com/pub/soden/p/...

Buy ScottOden a Coffee Become a supporter of ScottOden today!

Been down with a horrible bout of food poisoning -- which means lost work, etc. Any tips* would be greatly appreciated!

ko-fi.com/K3K72OC14

*"Don't eat the fuzzy green egg!" notwithstanding

With a title and internal structure, the universe is yours for the taking! ⚔️🪶📚

open.substack.com/pub/soden/p/...

I just want a little cottage, couple of rooms, 1.5 baths, all of it tucked away somewhere with trees and mushrooms and the hint of gnomes.

That's my American dream.

"Prisoners of Overwhelming Sorrow" An Eyewitness to Acre's Fall

One of the eyewitnesses to the fall of Acre was the Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller, who was wounded in the fighting; also, the book has a title, now, I think . . .

open.substack.com/pub/soden/p/...

🥹

I feel seen . . .

The Grimnir Saga by Scott Oden – Series Review fantasy-faction.com/2026/the-gri...

Grimnir Series | Series | Macmillan About this Series To the Danes, he is skraelingr; to ...

If you're interested in reading these, here's the link to the publisher's page. They have different purchase options. Sadly, sales being what they were, there's only an ebook or a hardcover of the last book -- no audio.

us.macmillan.com/series/grimn...

Released in December of 2023, THE DOOM OF ODIN marked my parting of the ways with St. Martin's. My contract wasn't renewed and I wandered off into the wastelands.

Even so, it received a glowing review from PW, as well:

demands: with violence. Lots of violence. No, more violence than that. Yeah, more. Just take ALL the violence, please.

And for the first time, I gave him a love interest. We also finally get to meet his family. They're in Norse hell, but still . . .

I had fun with this one.

human POV to soften the harshness of Grimnir's personality. The last book was one unfettered, angry Orc front and center.

THE DOOM OF ODIN starts off with Grimnir waking up in the afterlife, and it just gets weirder from there. Grimnir is caught between rival forces and reacts as his nature

Anyway, sales of the second book did not echo those of the first book (no paperback edition, though there is an audiobook), but St. Martin's went ahead and gave the thumb's up for the last book.

And that last book . . . hoo, boy. That last book was where I decided to go all in. No side-kick, no

I'm trying to post this during a Bluesky outage, so if it seems choppy we should blame the machines!

to write; it, too, got a nice review in PW, but had the misfortune of being released in February of 2020 . . . right as the Pandemic shut down the world.

to write; it, too, got a nice review in PW, but had the misfortune of being released in February of 2020 . . . right as the Pandemic shut down the world.

Set almost entirely in a fortified village of pagan Geats, protected by a spirit of the Elder World (Grimnir), this one was more claustrophobic than the first; replete with berserkers, Teutonic Knights, a scrappy side-kick, an old troll woman, and a lurking meance, TWILIGHT OF THE GODS was a blast

I had two more books left in a four-book contract with St. Martin's, and sales were such that I got the green-light to keep going with the Grimnir Saga.

TWILIGHT OF THE GODS is set 200 years later, and it adds to the tapestry of Grimnir by introducing an overarching story: Ragnarok is overdue.

anti-hero. The result was one of my favorite bits of writing, thus far. And readers seemed to like it. It even received a starred review in PW:

reverse-engineered from their origins in the Silmarillion, given agency and free will, and dropped into the history and mythology of the Viking Age.

I'd meant to show an Orc as actually AN ORC, and not just a human wearing an Orc costume. So, he was a bit . . . rough around the edges :) A true ...

During a bout of "woe is me!", a friend double-dog dared me to cut Orcs out of their fantasy milieu and work them into the fabric of history. Who can resist the double-dog dare?

That's how A GATHERING OF RAVENS (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017) came to be. Grimnir is one of Tolkien's Orcs . . .

During a bout of "woe is me!", a friend double-dog dared me to cut Orcs out of their fantasy milieu and work them into the fabric of history. Who can resist the double-dog dare?

That's how A GATHERING OF RAVENS (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017) came to be. Grimnir is one of Tolkien's Orcs . . .

A few years ago, I had an idea about a story involving that fantasy staple: the Orc. But, I thought, an Orc with agency, unfettered by the chains of a Dark Lord. What might that be like?

My first attempts were bog-standard high fantasy -- no different from scores of books that had come before it.

be our own advocate, our own PR department; we're supposed to blitz social media and build our brand. And we do, to an extent. Or we try to.

So it's always nice to see someone post "tell me about your book!" in earnest. "Really? You want to hear about it? Okay!"

Then, let me tell you . . .

So, by increments, I go silent about it.

But there's a particular sadness that comes from reaching the hallowed halls of the Big 5 (4? I can never keep track) only to have the work you sweated over be ignored by everyone, including your own publisher.

I know, I know . . . we're supposed to ...

Most of the time, I feel like I talk about my stuff too much; like I suck the oxygen from the digital room because I blather on about books I've written that few people have ever read.

"We don't want to talk about your crap! Why would we, when we have [insert far more popular work here]?"

Holding the Shape in Your Mind How to See Your Story Before You Write It

Now I have the shape of the story . . .

open.substack.com/pub/soden/p/...

"We are all there, staring at the blank page, trying somehow to distill an evanescent moment into words. We're standing here at the margin between reality and understanding and all we have is language." - Cecelia Holland, novelist

🪶 I shared this quote for the first time 14 years ago over on Facebook, and it still resonates just as powerfully for me today....

#writersky #writingcommunity #authorsofsky #booksky
#WritingBlueSky