Karik's First Battle
I am very excited to announce that after several years of hard work, Karik’s First Battle will be available this coming Monday!
For those of you who have read my Blades of Karik series, hopefully you’ll be as excited to learn about this character as I was to write about him. For those of you who haven’t, I’m excited to share him with you for the first time.
I started writing the Legends of Karik back in 2016, though I had the idea for the character long before that. I spent my senior year in college watching the TV show Vikings and studying Anglo Saxon literature, and let me tell you, that was a heady combination. About half of Anglo Saxon lit is them marveling at the magnificent structures left by the romans (and mourning the fact they’ll never build anything so great), and the other half is wailing about the Viking invasions, any of which the TV show depicted.
Through it all, there is a sense that no matter what you do, things are likely to end up poorly, but if you make the wrong choices, things will end up worse.
I wanted to tell a story with a bit of that in it, a realization that perhaps the characters can’t fix everything in the world, but they can fix a piece of it, for a moment.
That was the big picture, but I also wanted to have fun, and what is more fun than a dragon? A lot of things, Karik and his friends might say, but as a reader, dragons are just the best. However, there is a dearth of great dragon fights in modern literature, and even in ancient literature.
When I was little, I was fascinated by ‘Saint George and the Dragon’ by Margaret Hodges. In it, the knight St George does battle with the dragon for several days before he is finally victorious, and I wanted to see something along those lines. Dragons are huge, (or at least they should be), and taking one down in a story should be something of a struggle.
Sure, Sigurd shanks Fafnir when the dragon isn’t looking, but that’s Fafnir’s own fault for taking the same route to the river every single time. Tolkien has a couple good ones, but even his murder machine Turin has to resort to the same underbelly stabbing as Sigurd.
But there aren’t a lot of stories (that I know of) that depict the lengthy, marathon type battle I was looking for. So, I tried to write one. I’ll let you judge how well I did.
I’m in the late stages of the second book in the series, Ylmi’s Saga, and will hopefully have a release date to share with you soon.
In other news, I’m almost finished with A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik, which is absolutely wonderful and has me on the edge of my seat. I love the idea of a rather dark version of Hogwarts, no teachers, just the school assigning you homework and subjects as it pleases.
Finally, I have compiled the three short stories, Dragon of Kveldmir, Black Isles, and The Sons of Karik into one collection: The Blades of Karik, which is available for free below. Some of you have probably read one or more of them in other formats, but now they are all together, along with a fancy new map!
