There's Nothing Like Being Kidnapped to Ruin a Good Vacation

I always knew I could tell stories. What I didn't have was a universe for them to live in.

For years I carried that awareness quietly — that someday I might retire, that I'd want something to occupy my mind that wasn't a job, that the stories rattling around in my head deserved somewhere to go. I just hadn't found the right foundation yet.

Then I stumbled across the Norse creation myth. And something clicked.

Most people know Odin. I discovered he had two brothers—and almost nobody had written about them. When I looked for their stories, I found almost nothing. Just names. Just shadows.

So I decided to give them a story.

First decision: they should be twins. Second decision: one of them sleeps with Odin's wife. Although a version of that did happen, I made Odin a little angrier about it. Which means Odin banishes them both to Earth — and across the millennia, one twin spends his time creating heroes to battle the other, because the other one has been busy creating everything that goes bump in the night.

I had my universe.

Now I needed a hook. And I found one:

There's nothing like being kidnapped and trussed up by a homicidal maniac to ruin a good vacation.

I've tweaked it a little since then. Not much.

The story starts in Vegas — because I got married in Vegas, because I know Vegas, and because honestly, how many murders have already happened there? It's practically research. A woman goes to Vegas for a wedding, meets a Norse God, discovers she's his destined mate, and then the rest of the story happens. I wrote the first 10,000 words in a few weeks and never really looked back.

But here's the part I love most: during those first 10,000 words, I wrote a prophecy. Something about an event 25 years in the future — a meteor shower, a spell, a daughter who eventually leaves the planet and breaks everything open.

I didn't know what that meant yet. I just knew it mattered.

Dragon World came later. About three years ago, actually — sparked by a 3D-printed egg, of all things. One thing led to another, the prophecy finally made sense, and suddenly I had a second world connected to the first by a thread I'd planted years earlier without fully understanding why.

That's how universes work, I think. You don't build them all at once. You leave doors in the walls and figure out later where they lead.

And now here I am, telling part of my origin story to a computer — which, as it turns out, is a pretty good listener.