The biggest surprise to me was how much a team effort getting a book onto the shelves of a bookshop really is. Ha, publishing still feels like a strange beast to me, and I am constantly surprised by the way things work. Is there anything about the process of publishing a book that still surprises you? I start with some general brainstorming until I’ve come up with a rough list of events and have a good idea of the main characters, and then I start writing, not quite sure how each individual character is going to find their way to the planned events. Are you a plan, plan, plan writer or do you sit down and see where the words take you? All of these things have inspired me to write this series, and my hope is that all of this passion, research and experience will help me to craft a world that seeps Norseness and an underlying, rune-filled dread.ģ. Also, I’m a Viking reenactor along with my three sons, and we enjoy standing shoulder to shoulder in the shield wall. Since then, I have spent a lot of time immersing myself in Norse mythology, Scandinavian folklore and Viking-era history. The first inspiration for The Shadow of the Gods, and the Bloodsworn Saga as a whole (the title of the series), was Beowulf, that fearless monster-hunter and his band of mercenary warriors, and Ragnarök, the end-of-days battle where the gods fought and died. If caught they are enslaved and used in the quest for power.īut now an old power is stirring, and children are disappearing. But these survivors carrying the blood of the old gods are now hunted by bands of mercenary warriors because they are valued for the powers their god-blood gives them. The bones of the dead gods lay scattered across the land, and the bloodlines of those dead gods live on in their offspring. Now, hundreds of years later, humanity is rising from the ashes and forging a new world, ruled by petty jarls and would-be kings and queens. The gods have fought themselves to extinction, and in their fall, they broke the world. It is set in a cold, hard world, framed by ice-blue fjords and shadow-dark forests, where longships sail the seas and creatures of tooth and claw prowl the land, and at its heart, I hope, it is a tale of family and friendship, of love and loss, of betrayal and revenge. The Shadow of the Gods is my love-song to Norse mythology and Viking era-history. Hi Janet, thank you so much for the invite, it’s lovely to be here. Tell us a little about The Shadow of the Gods. John kindly answered a few of my questions.ġ.

His latest novel, The Shadow of the Gods is published on. John Gwynne is the author of The Faithful and the Fallen series, which included the novel Malice and the Of Blood and Bone series which included A Time of Dread.

Malice series john gwynne