Villi Asgeirsson

Drafting ideas...

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And so the future arrives…

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Happy New Year!

2025 was never meant to be a year of major change in my writing career, but life doesn’t ask what we’re planning. It just happens.

At the beginning of the year, A Sky Without Stars was on ice. It didn’t have a title yet. It didn’t have an ending. Somewhere in early spring, I opened the project and started reading. I couldn’t stop. I realised this was possibly the most coherent work I had ever created. It needed to be completed. It deserved to be published.

As I started writing, something like a dam broke. Creativity flowed, ideas rushed in. Many of them didn’t fit that project.

I saw algorithms, political unrest, digital manipulation. A world drifting toward something unsettling.

While finishing Sky, I started work on Recommended for You, a novella about loneliness in the age of algorithms, AI companions, and increasing social isolation. I imagined a perfectly average man, living roughly five years in the future.

Sky and the new novella were completed around the same time, but I needed to finish the old work first. The Frank and Celestina trilogy had been with me since 2017, and it deserved a proper conclusion. Only once that was done could I turn my attention fully to the modern stories.

That time has come.

Recommended for You will be released in a month. But it won’t be alone. Two more novellas are scheduled for this year. One is a near-future political thriller, involving elections, deepfakes, and assassination. Later in the year, a very dark story set in Iceland follows. Again near-future. Again unsettling.

I hope you’ll join me on this journey.

At some point last year, I said that 2026 would be nothing like 2025. Now you know why.

Once again, happy New Year. May the scary things stay in our fiction.

Peace and love.

Quiet Christmas…

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Christmas has a particular texture.

Not just the lights or the noise, but the quieter things underneath. The pause. The cold air. The sense that the year is folding in on itself. We busy ourselves with preparations, but really, we should use the season to find quiet and bond with loved ones.

It is the season where we celebrate different things. Christmas, Yule, is whatever we want it to be. We have our own reasons, beliefs. We may be celebrating a birth, the light returning, the approaching new year. The season is about the new.

Stories belong to that space.

This year closed an era for me.

A Sky Without Stars marked the end of a trilogy that began years ago. Three books, one long arc, finally complete. Finishing it felt less like celebration and more like release. A permission to move on and explore different ideas.

That is where Moss Garden came from.

It is a small, quiet piece. Observant. Still. A story about place, solitude, and what happens when the world finally stops asking anything of you. Where Sky closes a door, Moss Garden opens another one. Not loudly. Not with intention. Just enough to let something new in.

2026 will be very different from anything that came before. More on that later.

If you are reading over the holidays, I hope you find a book that fits the season. Something unhurried. Something you can hold in your hands. A new truth, or a place or character that will stay with you for years to come.

However you are spending these days, I hope there is room for rest and for stories.

Merry Christmas, and thank you for reading.

Moss Garden is a short story and is available free on Kobo, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Everand, Fable, Smashwords, Thalia and Vivlio.

A New Novel – coming soon

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Today is my birthday and I feel like giving you things. My books. All of them. And a quick update on what’s coming.

As I’m sure you can imagine, I do not live off my writing. I have a job and writing novels and other things is a hobby. As such, my publishing scedule is sporadic. Under the Black Sand came out in 2013, Blood and Rain in 2017 and Mont Noir in 2023.

What I do care about is readers. You.

Summer is for reading. Exclusive to subscribers of this newsletter, I am giving you a 100% discount until the end of August, so make sure you subscribe. This is my thank you to you for being here, reading this and having faith in this project of mine. I cannot express how much I appreciate you being here.

Updates? I was busy with work. New position at the same company but demanded all my attention. Didn’t write anything for a year. In the last few weeks, I have been getting back into writing though. Last time I mentioned a sequel to Mont Noir. I opened that project a few weeks ago and was kind of surprised to see that it was closer to completion than I remembered. I am now hard at work finishing it.

That is coming after the summer. My fourth novel is coming this year. And there are other things. Watch this space. Oh, and if you want to be the first to read it, if you want to give me feedback before it gets exposed to the public, subscribe to the newsletter and let me know. Here is the opening paragraph. It’s Frank, but Celestina will be joining later.
Just for you:

Amsterdam, 10 May 1940
He was too late. The Germans had crossed the border that morning, and now Frank stood before the jeweller’s counter, staring down at the golden rings laid out like a promise already broken. There were rings with stones, sapphire, jade, diamonds. They were expensive, but he had some money. As beautiful as the gems were, he preferred the plain rings. He would have had them inscribed, but there was no time now.

Oh, and the windmill image is relevant to the new novel. :o)

Happy New 2023!

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Dear reader,
2022 is gone and 2023 is here. A year is different for us all. Some may experience it as the best year of their lives, while others are forced to stare into the void.

2022 was another strange year. Covid is still here. I lost a friend to the pandemic. My last grandparent left us and has now found peace. My knee has been acting up, I went fo an MRI scan and was told to get used to it. I walked less than the year before, because of the knee.

On a positive note, I didn’t take up smoking, I kept walking, didn’t gain weight, lost no teeth (one hole was fixed though), I left my full-time job and took up another position with the same employer, giving me more time for the family, myself and writing.

Writing. I have been neglecting writing for too long. My novels are few and far between. Something always seems to get in the way. My new year’s resolution for 2023 is to not let that happen again. No matter how weird things get, I am now on the verge of publishing my third novel. That is an achievement and it is time I start taking this thing seriously.

So, what happened in the past? Under the Black Sand came out in 2014. It could have been much earlier, the short story is from 2006, the screenplay from 2009, I had a novel draft in 2011, but it was my first and I took many detours. I wasn’t sure where I was going with this.

Blood and Rain came in 2017. It was ready at the end of 2015, but as I received feedback from beta readers at the end of the year, my all time musical icon, David Bowie, died. It affected me more than it should have. I didn’t touch my writing for a year, pushing the publishing date to early 2017.

Mont Noir was conceived around the time I took on a full-time management job. I was able to balance work, family and writing at the start, but as the pandemic hit, things got crazy at work and I had no time to look at my writing. Mont Noir was finished in early 2020, but I don’t want to publish novels until I am perfectly satisfied that they are they best they can be, so I shelved it.

In February 2022, I stepped down from the full-time job and this gave me breathing space. Late 2022 saw me opening Scrivener again for the first time in months. I started by looking at my older works. New edits of Under the Black Sand and Blood and Rain were finished. Those “remasters” were published in November. I also ran through my Icelandic translation of the Sand, published that. And then it was time to finish Mont Noir.

I added an opening scene, deleted one or two scenes that added nothing to the story, tidied up the writing, made Mont Noir into the novel it could and should be. It was ready. I created the eBook, paperback and hardcover and set a publishing date. I have since made tiny tweaks, so the thee formats will have to be redone, but they’re tweaks and won’t affect the 16 February publishing date.

New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t really do them, but as I have found the muse – or time – again, I am dedicating myself to this craft. Creating stories, interacting with the Writer Community on Twitter, talking to people with the same passion for literature… it’s priceess. From now on I am an author. I am writing. I am editing. I have started work on a new novel, I’m four chapters in. It’s first draft and nobody gets to see that, but it is promising and I fully expect this project to be ready later this year and be published around the beginning of 2024. And then onwards. I will also be reading much more by indy authors, those heroes that self-publish.

Getting to this point has been a long and winding road, but you’re stuck with me. For as long as I can think, type and come up with worlds and characters, I will create stories.

A newsletter will be launched next month. If you want to be a part of that, please subscribe. Readers will be informed about promotions, new projects and trivia. Fellow writers may be featured if I am passionate about their books.

The future is literature. Let’s explore it together. And be kind. The 21st century was supposed to be a new beginning. Let’s work together and let this century reach its potential.

Is it possible?

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The decision to dedicate 2021 to short fiction wasn’t taken a long time ago. It was two days before Christmas and I was aimlessly browsing the web. Came across a list of 52 short story concepts on Tumblr and it made me think. What if…?

I have written 2-3 shorts in my entire life. 4-5 if you include short film scripts that could potentially be adapted to stories. Writing 52 in as many weeks seems like a challenge destined to fail. So, why not?

I immediately started working on ideas. The concepts the Tumblr list presented me with start with the following.

A story entitled “A New Beginning”.
A story about rising to a challenge.
A retelling of a fairytale.
A story about three siblings.
A story set in London.
A story about finding something that has been lost.
A story about a journey.
A story set during a war.

Fairly vague concepts. I really have to come up with the stories myself. What this list does is give me a starting point. It will prevent me from writing the same story time and time again. So, what do we have so far?

A New Beginning is finished and will be published next Friday. The story about a challenge is written, I just need to edit it a bit. The fairytale? I dabbled in Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, but ultimately settled on Norse Mythology where Mjölnir, Thor’s hammer, is stolen by the Jotnar and must be brought back. I’ve just started that one. Three siblings, I’m thinking about the great flood in the Netherlands in January 1953 but haven’t come up with a concept. That may change, it may become something entirely different. London, lost and journey, I have no idea. A story set during a war, I have an idea of what I want to do there but haven’t written anything yet.

None of this existed prior to 22 December 2020.

So you see, this really is 52 stories in 52 weeks. I don’t have anything laying around that I can use. This year will see my typing a lot, struggling to write more than I’ve ever done. Life is bound to get in the way.

Here is hoping someone will discover this project and cheer me on. I think I’ll need it.

Look out for A New Beginning coming Friday.

52 Moments

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HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2020 was a drag. Many say the worst year ever and that may be true for some, but there have been worse years in history. I have had worse years. 2020 was still a drag and I can’t wait to go out without a facemask, go on holiday, meet the family… heck, just go sit in a café with my laptop and type while enjoying a double espresso.

It’s the simple things in life I miss.

So… simple things. I haven’t written much lately. There was going to be a novel in 2020, but it all seemed so pointless, seeing what was going on. I am still not ready to dedicate myself to a novel, even if I have one almost done. Time to simplify one’s life.

2021 will be a year of great triumph or a massive failure. I have dedicated myself to writing one short story every week. Really short and simple stories, 1000 words or thereabouts. But every week. A new story. No serials, no blog posts, but proper stories. Moments in time of various characters. Every week.

I’m not a betting kind of type but if I was going to put money on this, I’d say it’ll fail. It’s a New Year’s Resolution and we’ll just have to see if it survives January.

So, there we have it. 2020 was a drag, 2021 will hopefully be better for us all. Look out for the first story on the 8th. It’ll be called A New Beginning and it really takes us to the very beginning of time… if you believe in that sort of thing.

Cheerio!