That’s me in the header (I’m the adult) trying to get my words in despite a little distraction. That tiny distraction is my son, Uno. Yes, like the card game. No, not named after the card game. It’s an old Nordic name that . . . forget it.
I have two kids: Uno, and his older sister Saga. They are exhausting and wonderful. The other day Saga said she’d had poop for lunch at daycare without so much as a smirk. That’s comedy.
Should I stop going on about my kids? As a recent dad, it’s all I think about. Okay, so about me and my writing . . .
I was born in 1988 in a university town in the south of Sweden. I travelled, stayed abroad, did a year of military service, got a tattoo while drunk, and then another one while sober. Through it all I was writing.
Since I was six years old, I’ve been immersed in fantasy and fantastical worlds — playing Magic the Gathering, Warhammer, Dungeons & Dragons etc. I grew up reading, and obsessing over, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and J.K. Rowling.
Eventually, my fantasy obsession and my writing turned into my debut novel, Alice and the Golden Egg. It’s a mix of Norse mythology, urban fantasy, and the sort of satire that Terry Pratchett did better than anyone before or after. More than that, it’s an attempt to capture the feeling of falling in love with a book as a kid, the summer holiday ahead of you, reading into the night and not wanting it to end. You’ll have to judge if I succeeded.
Still curious? Check out the pictures below for a too personal look into my life. Spoiler alert: I’m silly.
Heading into the fight of my life. Guess which one of us is extinct? That’s right.
It seems everyone has a few tattoos and I’m no exception.
I thought this was a great idea ten years ago and now I’m stuck writing books to make this tattoo make sense. For anyone wondering, this is the sober tattoo.
My girlfriend and I posing for our captor. We have since escaped the tower. I’m not as tall as this picture makes me look. She’s tiny.
Me working on The Fall of Necropolis, a stand-alone fantasy novel that will be done when I’m not chronically exhausted from my baby and toddler. I’m about halfway through the first draft so there’s a lot of work still to do. The work-in-progress blurb goes like this:
"Are you paying attention? Good, because this story, unlike most stories, starts with the death of our hero . . .”
Osmo Igni, a sweet old candymaker, dies and his body ends up in the hold of unscrupulous corpse barge captain Victor Ma’dragona Abasto. But when Osmo is brought back to life – to join the workforce of corpses that power the commerce of Necropolis – he is not a mindless drone like the others.
Osmo wants nothing more than to go home to his village where three orphans depend on his return. But Victor, drowning in debt and always looking for an edge, realizes Osmo is worth five fortunes to the right buyer.
Joined by Victor’s false promise to bring Osmo home, the two men are flung into the underbelly of Necropolis as every powerful person in the city, from factory Lords to the head of the embalmers guild, hunt them.
An unlikely friendship forms, but will it be enough for Victor to give up the payday he's hunted since he was born into the gutter?
The Fall of Necropolis is dark, heartfelt, humorous, and hopeful. A tale of a city where the industrial revolution is powered by corpses instead of coal. A story of grief and greed in a world where the dead are putting the living out of work.
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