Hey folks,
This week’s post is back to my ‘Behind the Scenes’ series, where I have a look back to the things that inspired the story. This week I’m taking a look back to my Wolf of the North series, which was first published way back in 2016. It really doesn’t seem that long ago!
I had the original idea for this story not long after I finished The Tattered Banner. I thought of using some of the ideas in the Society of the Sword trilogy, but decided pretty early on that it had enough to it to warrant an entire trilogy of its own.
Because of this, the first half of the first draft was set in Auracia, the country to the south of the Ostia setting for Society of the Sword. That would have placed it in a pretty familiar Renaissance Italy style setting, and I decided about half way in that it would be more interesting for the reader, and more fun for me to set it somewhere different within the story world I’d created, so I went back to the start and reworked the story to a new setting related to the area of history I was interested in at the time.
The ending was the part that came to me first, and creating the story was all about building the events that led to that moment. It’s because of that, more than anything I think, that I chose to end this after three books. I usually don’t like endings to a series I’m writing, but that was the scene I wrote first, and the part I really wanted to get to. In retrospect, I think I’d like to have written five or six books in the series, as I really loved the dynamic between the characters I had created. It’s something I’d perhaps like to revisit at some point, but I’m not really sure how I could make that work, considering that the ending to that particular tale has already been written!
Although this trilogy has a very Norse/Viking vibe, the inspiration for much of the setting came from the Great Migration era of Northern Germany and Scandinavia, rather than specifically the Vikings. I’ve always been interested in the power vacuum that was left behind by the Roman empire, and how the cultures and nations of Europe came to be, so I was reading a lot of books on this period.
The story follows Wulfric, an unlikely young lad, as he develops into the most famed warrior of his age, along with all the tragedies and triumphs he encounters along the way (along with the three supporting characters who are my absolute favourite to have written so far!).
If you haven’t read it already, you can check the books out here:
