I wish I’d started getting up early to write years ago. This discipline, which I adopted last year, has borne genuine fruit in steady, consistent progress on the book I’m working on, to be called The Baldur Game. This, in case you’re new here, will be the seventh and final (in six volumes) entry of my Saga of Erling Skjalgsson.

Of course, up until a few years ago, I got up at about that same time (6:30 a.m., if you must know) to get ready for my paying job. So I’d have had to rise around 4:00 a.m. to write in the early mornings, and I’m bloody well not going to do that.

So never mind.

I’ve said this before, but I really like this book. If it’s my nunc dimittis, my Simeon song, the final work of my life, I’d be just fine with that. Looking ahead, I have no idea what I’ll write next. I took a cooling off break from revising a few weeks back, and tinkered with a book I started long ago, and got stuck on. I still made no progress at all. I’ve got a character I like and a setting that intrigues me. But I can’t think of a problem to set for the guy. I just seem to send in one rabbit after another, to see if he’ll chase one, but he’s not interested. Raymond Chandler had a formula from which I’ve profited many times – “When in doubt, send in a couple guys with guns.” But in this story I’ll soon have a room full of (metaphorical) guys with guns, and none of them seems to have any idea what to do with them. I think some of them might be ATF.

But I’m happy with The Baldur Game. Last year, when I was lecturing to a group, somebody asked if I could bring back a character they liked from an earlier book. I had assumed that character dead, but on examination of the story I discovered that no body was ever actually found (you think I remember everything I ever wrote? At my age?). So I did bring that character back, and they turned out to serve an excellent purpose in the plot.

I also decided to do something I’d vowed not to do from the beginning, because it just rounds the saga out, and I figured a way to use it thematically, and I just think I owe it to my fans.

Am I teasing you now? Trying to raise expectations?

I guess I probably am.