Loki of Midgard: How to get lost and found in one week, a love story received a 4+ star review, making it an IndieReader Approved title.
Following find an interview with author .
What is the name of the book and when was it published?
Loki of Midgard: How to get lost and found in one week, a love story, was published April 12, 2020, and a second edition will have been released on November 1, 2020.
What’s the book’s first line?
“All histories dissolve into fairytales, eventually.”
What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch”.
Loki of Midgard is a fast-paced erotic romance and the first of a trilogy of novels. Meet Loki as you’ve never seen him before; the most important seven days of Loki’s life are the ones in which he runs away to Earth. Keening and in pain, he doesn’t expect to find love. Meet the woman he had given up on finding; Abby is in a holding pattern – a bout of mono delayed her college graduation and she is no longer sold on the practice of kissing frogs to find a prince. Will she be able to keep her focus in the face of extreme temptation?
What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?
I am a prolific writer of fanfiction and Loki of Midgard began that way. It was my answer to the challenge: What if Loki joined the Avengers before Thor? And I thought… What kind of person would Loki have to be, in that case? What about him would need to change? And really, quite a lot did change, from his Marvel Cinematic Universe persona. And because I am me, romance is always part of the main plot, even while heaps of things are also going on. Because life grinds on – it doesn’t usually pause so you can have all the time in the world to have a whirlwind romance.
What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?
It will make you laugh, it will make you cry, and it will heal something inside of you that had been bruised long ago. All good stories do.
What’s the most distinctive thing about the main character? Who-real or fictional-would you say the character reminds you of?
Loki is… an archetype, as is Abby. So saying, he reminds me of quite a lot of different real and fictional people, all who might be versions of this same archetype. I like to think of him as really quite far along on his particular path of enlightenment, and so his version of the archetype is quite ‘healed’. But he is to my mind, very clearly The Destroyer of Worlds. Often pictured as a bad guy, but if that bad guy had a few million years to work off bucketloads of bad karma he might come out as Loki, Crown Prince of Asgard. And Abby? To my mind she is very clearly a wonderfully ‘healed’ version of Nemesis, Bringer of Righteous Retribution, if she likewise had a few million years to work off karma before we chanced to meet her in these pages.
If they made your book into a movie, who would you like to see play the main character(s)?
Whoever they were, Loki would need to be stunningly physically beautiful, muscular but wiry, and at least have an extremely talented stuntman. For him… well, Tom Hiddleston might be too much to hope for, but I will anyway. Abby would need to be a Latina, slightly plain, a bit short, and at least a women’s size sixteen, which might be a very hard sell in Hollywood. Perhaps someone like Dascha Polanco?
When did you first decide to become an author?
The moment I learned to write, roughly at the age of five. There’s photographic evidence, and also all those little yarn-bound books I made for my mother at about that age that she kept until the day she died. I had been telling myself stories before then, of course, and I just never stopped. I still haven’t. I doubt I ever will.
Is this the first book you’ve written?
This is my debut novel, published in the normal way one publishes, yes. I’ve been writing fiction steadily and publishing online for free for the last twenty-seven years, and I’ve several non-fiction projects that were privately commissioned, and one which I finished first but haven’t yet published, because I’m not sure anyone cares about the Theology of Sex but me.
What do you do for work when you’re not writing?
I’m a priest. 🙂
How much time do you generally spend on your writing?
When the migraine abates, it’s a thirty to forty hour a week job. When it doesn’t, I do as much as I can, after the job-that-offers-a-paycheck gets done. But it’s amazing how well I can write while in excruciating pain. Not so with the editing, however.
What’s the best and the hardest part of being an indie?
The best part of publishing independently is having no one to blame. There is an emotional freedom in that.
The hardest part is certainly all the time I have to spend on administration… I’d really rather be writing. Or having dinner with my husband and talking about characters, or the latest scene I’ve just written. Or reading something someone else has written. Or really, anything. I’d rather do anything else.
What’s a great piece of advice that you can share with fellow indie authors?
Write. Always. Every day. Let everything you take in inform your writing. And then when you think you’re done, hand it to twelve people you’d trust with your life and truly listen when they tell you what needs to be fixed.
Would you go traditional if a publisher came calling? If so, why?
I’d really have to think about that, and my answer would probably be yes. It would be very, very tempting, in one way because I would not be primarily responsible for the publishing and promotion and that is very attractive to me. In a smaller but perhaps even more important way, it would be tempting because now I publish through Amazon, due to its ease (relatively speaking), but if I had a choice as to who gets the rest of my royalties, Jeff Bezos or a smaller organization whose methods and morals I can get entirely behind? Morally speaking, it’s not a tough choice, there. I would drop Amazon in a hot second if I had a truly viable alternative. And if it were a small indie publisher? Super cool.
Is there something in particular that motivates you (fame? fortune?)
My stories help people. They heal people. They teach people a way to be, a way to love, a way to be healthy, and they do it through an erotic romance with no annoying and alienating religious ovetones. My stories are far more effective and far reaching than my sermons. I’ve worked for large and small congregations, and I’ve written for online communities that are orders of magnitude larger than the largest group of people I’ve ever stood before to speak with the full authority of God behind me. And I can’t not tell stories. I can barely manage a simple declarative sentence in a non-dramatic fashion without, at least, some kind of preamble. This is what I do; I help people, and this is the primary way I do it.
And if it could also pay off my student loans and add to my pension, I’d be thrilled, because I may be a priest, but money is still a thing.
Which writer, living or dead, do you most admire?
That is such a tough question because there are so many I do admire. I don’t read a lot of Thomas Merton, and I certainly don’t go back and reread him frequently, but his struggle to define himself, ‘am I a monk, or am I a writer?’ and his final conclusion: ‘I am a monk. I am a writer,’ helped me tremendously when I wrestled with my calling to the priesthood. I had been telling myself stories and writing them out since I could remember, and writing erotica starting at the tender age of fifteen. When I was in my mid-twenties and in graduate school I had one of many mystical experiences and knew God wanted me to be a priest. No one who knew me well was remotely surprised, and that kicked off the six-year process to become a priest, all the while I wrestled with God (or if you will, cried, screamed, whinged, begged to understand) about also writing erotica. It took me decades to finally hear the message that had been waiting for me: ‘Sex is no more evil than a bag of potato chips.’ Which is the basis of my unpublished manuscript, Theology of Sex. (I know. It needs a sexier name.) And during those decades of mental and emotional anguish, I had Thomas Merton to fall back on: I am a priest. I am a writer. I can be both.
Which book do you wish you could have written?
That is not really how my brain works. If I read a really excellent story, I think, ‘This is awesome, I need to tell my husband about this.’ If I read some portion of a rather dreadful story, I think, ‘Huh. Not what I had hoped for.’ If I read a story that has something wonderful about it, but something executed quite poorly, that’s when the difficult moment comes because the story sinks into my subconscious, takes up resident alien status and points out all the ways in which it could have been better. And then, sometimes, I start writing a short story that stays short in that sandbox (and more often write a short story that takes on an epic length) and there we have fanfiction. But you know, as much as I still enjoy writing it, and writing it steadily for so many years has made me into the storyteller I am today, I’ve never forgotten that the original story came from the beautiful mind of another author, for whom, despite the lack of perfection in their execution, I have a lot to be grateful. And I remain profoundly grateful for all the storytellers, authors and otherwise, who have crafted the universes that populate the paper dolls of my own mind.