Will Ariel

 Been growing and changing very quickly, so quickly that I can hardly keep up.  I had a pile of unfinished stories from past years. Some of them are very short, only a page or two. Some of them are thousands of words long. I've accumulated these stories since I was a teenager, the way that an artist will have pages and pages of unfinished drawings, doodles, sketches, and other visual ideas expressed onto paper. For a long time I have felt like I had to go back and finish certain pieces from this pile. And there are a few pieces I tried to go back and finish repeatedly. Two in particular come to mind: one is a post-apocalyptic story about a mermaid, and the other is a story about a girl who can transform into birds. These stories are both really good, I think. Or they would be, if I could finish them. But, you see, I can't. Because I'm not the person who began those stories any more.  One of the results of growing as fast as I have, and doing the healing work that I've b...

  Ancient Norse culture is really interesting to me. Setting pop culture perceptions aside, there's this (to me) bizarre mix of honor and brutality in what we frequently call 'Viking' culture that is completely alien to my way of thinking. The values are different from mine. The perception of fairness, of justice, and of proper living are all different, so different as to be alien.  I've been working on a fantasy story inspired by the flavor of Norse mythology. I can't really call it a Viking story though, or even a Norse or ancient Scandinavian story, because I've made up quite a bit. There is a god that one of the characters referenced on the first page who, as far as I know, does not appear in Norse mythology. This god is a god of passage, a psychopomp, like Charon of Hades. She carries the dead into the afterlife in her shallow-hulled, misty ship that can traverse river and ocean and the black waters of death, through to the after life.  She's only menti...