Michael Pogach: Five Things I Learned Writing Valhalla Burning

It’s 9th century Norway and Rúnr Njalson has been gifted supernatural warrior abilities as Odin’s chosen Berserkr. Enemies and allies quake in fear at his approach. But when the unbeatable hero cannot save his own daughter Yrsa during a rival clan’s raid, his only choice is to seek vengeance to gain her entry into Valhalla.

Plagued with horrific visions and grappling with the loss of his precious child, whose ghost torments his nights, Rúnr seeks the direction of a seeress’s prophecy, and is told he must find a mysterious red temple and there face Yrsa’s killer to save her soul from a fate with Hel. He abandons his homeland on a hunt spanning the dark forests of the Slavs and the Rus to the fabled city of Constantinople, along the way throwing in with a motley band of Viking raiders: Captain Garmr’s ferocity fits the namesake of Hel’s hound; the nervous merchant Erasmus hides secrets he’ll never tell; the warrior Ingimar whose quick temper is going to get them all into trouble; and the fierce shieldmaiden Ingirid who may be the only one able to break through Rúnr’s tough exterior.

While Rúnr’s love for Ingirid grows, his Berserkr rage become more volatile, testing the crew’s bonds and leading him to face an impossible sacrifice.

Lift a horn of ale and taste sweat and blood in this rich and brutal dark Viking adventure.

Video games are legit storytelling

There’s always some asshole out there gatekeeping books. Audiobooks aren’t reading, they spout. Or graphic novels don’t count. Or video games. Can we talk about video games a moment?

I grew up with the original NES. I ran home (literally ran—we lived across the street) from elementary school every day to play Super Mario Brothers. A simple game with minimal plot and endless fun that I felt lucky to have. Then I got The Legend of Zelda,with its storyline and bottomless pouch and the ability to save the game! Then Metroid. Hoo boy, the gatekeepers lost their minds when (SPOILER) Samus Aran took off that helmet to reveal that the hero was *gasp* a woman!

Point is, even back then in the 80s (the late 1900s as my daughter enjoys telling me) video games were doing storytelling things. So when I got all growed up and could afford a new gaming console, I shouldn’t have been surprised when I ran face first into something like The Last of Us.

Pause for…feelings. Don’t tell me that’s not legit storytelling.

We play video games because they’re fun, sure, but also because they’re frustrating and infuriating and enlightening and inspiring. Just like books. And movies and the theater and so on. They’re all “real” storytelling. Hard stop. In fact, the whole reason you’re reading this, the whole reason I wrote Valhalla Burning, is because of a video game. I was between novels, directionless, certain I had no stories left to tell, and then Assassin’s Creed Valhalla dropped, and BOOM: inspiration. I started writing again. And here we are.

Bottom line? Lesson? If you want to write, read. A lot. But also feed your creativity in every other way you can. Watch movies, go to museums, paint something, play video games, whatever. Just don’t listen to the gatekeepers. Love what you love.

(side note: check out the reviews on the back cover of Valhalla Burning—the lead writer of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla read it and loved it! Could I be geeking out any harder right now?!!)

A dead language, sort of

Video games are not the only bit of my childhood that helped inspire Valhalla Burning. There was playing D&D and reading every Dragonlance book I could find and all of that. And now as an adult English professor suffering from massive, perpetual imposter syndrome, I count among my favorite works the epic poem Beowulf.  So while writing this novel, I did the dumbest smart thing I’ve ever done: I decided to personally translate some of that poem. For shits and giggles.

My favorites translations of Beowulf are by Edwin Mogran, Seamus Heaney, and Maria Dahvana Headley (holy jumping epics, friends—read Headley’s translation if you have any interest in this poem, or in Vikings, or the Anglo-Saxons, or anything medieval at all!). So I started my translation work with the introductions written by these translators. Three masterpieces, three different approaches to the poem’s content, vocabulary, syntax, meter, and all that technical stuff. Three different takes on the “soul” of the poem.

Was it fun learning and translating Old English? Yes. And no. It was difficult. Frustrating. Recursive. Dull. Sometimes exciting. In the end, I managed to render about 25 lines spanning the three major battles Beowulf fights against Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon.

What’s my point? Well, first, like Chuck Noland in Castaway, I kind of just want to shout, “Look what I’ve created!”

More importantly, I did this thing that had no need to be done. Because I wanted to. Like I wanted to write a Viking novel. Like I wanted to have ice cream for dinner last night. And I don’t regret any of it. So go do the thing you want to do. And then tell all the people about it. Because you can. Because you’re human. Because humans make and create and do all those artsy things.

Also, fuck generative AI.

Listen to the voices in your head

The first title for this book was Of Vengeance and Valhalla. It was an okay title, but every time I typed it out, I knew it wasn’t going be THE title…because a little voice told me.  

I wrote the first draft of this novel in first person point of view. 65k words in, it began falling apart. I tried to soldier on, but it was a mess. I needed to start over in third person, a little voice told me.

I knew the ending from the start. Until I didn’t. I planned a relationship that never panned out. I wrote scenes that got cut. Why? That little voice.

I could go on. Muse. Intuition. Instinct. Jiminy Cricket. Call it what you want, but you know what I’m talking about. That feeling that authors and artists and fabricators and knitters and chefs and architects know all too well. Our creative, narrative voices. Sometimes we think we know better, sometimes we pretend not to hear, but more often than not we should probably just shut up and listen. That’s how we make our best art, by listening.

Being an author takes patience…and I suck at patience

Do you know how long it takes to make a novel?

Not write a novel. That’s only part of the equation. Make a novel. Bring it from first words to published entity out there for random humans to read.

The answer is: I have no idea.

Don’t hate the messenger. My first novel took five years from first word to publication. My second took half that time. My fastest: 22 months. Slowest: seven years.

Want to know how long it took to bring Valhalla Burning to life? If you’ve read this far, I’m guessing you do.

I wrote the first words in late 2020, deep in the COVID times. As mentioned above, there were hiccups. Crippling doubts. Complete start overs. But I finally finished the manuscript in early summer 2023, and I began querying to find an agent. And (holy shit!) I signed with an agent in spring 2024. We revised, heavily and quickly, and then began seeking a publisher in June of 2024.

Now’s a good time to talk about how I suck at patience. Because every day querying made me sad and angry and frustrated and hopeful and even a bit depressed. Every day with the book on sub felt like a decade. I refreshed my email more often than a lovesick teen checking their phone. I lost hope daily. For weeks. Months. Seasons.

My 50^th birthday approached in June 2025. I told myself that if no publisher wanted my book by then, it was time to throw in the creative towel and quit writing. My birthday arrived. Silence. Can I tell you the feelings that were being all feelingly in me that day?

The next day, the (impossibly true) very next day, I got an email from my agent that a publisher was interested. An agonizingly long week later, I had a promising Zoom chat with the publisher. Then: a month of silence and waiting. Pure torment. Then, in July, an email. A contract offer. Negotiation. Wait. Counteroffer, hurry and read it today. Then, wait. A question, hurry and reply. Then, wait. Finally, I signed the contract in August (only August? Impossible, I tell you! It must have been November three years hence!). Then, in September, I got the first edits and a 4 week deadline to complete the work. This pattern, with ever shrinking windows for me to complete my end, continued for the next six months. Revisions, line edits, copyedits, cover design, back cover copy, blurbs. All a blur, the work breakneck, the waiting anguish.

Have I told you how much I suck at patience? I won’t even stand in line for ice cream if there’s more than three people in front of me.

But in the end, we did it. Valhalla Burning is real as of July 21, five years and eight months since I wrote its first words. Feels like twice that. Some days alone felt like years. And my next book might be slower. Or faster. Your experience might be similar or wildly different. Because that’s publishing.

Only thing I know for certain is: I suck as being patient.

Vikings were brutal. But also beautiful

Vikings. Saying that one word conjures all kinds of images and facts. Braided beards. Axes. Tattoos. Longships. Pillaging. Sagas. The assertion that “Vikings weren’t a people, it was a job.”

That last one is mostly semi-true. “Viking,” as we think of it today, is a catch-all term for Dark Age Scandinavians that was popularized during the Victorian era. It has roots in the Old Norse phrase fara í viking, meaning to go raiding, with the noun vikingr meaning the  raider or the pirate. So when people say “the Vikings” today, they can mean just that small percentage of Scandinavians whom we romanticize as those Norse warriors, or they can mean the entirety of that culture.

One thing that’s accurate is the Viking era was absolutely brutal, with violence and disease and invasions and natural disasters that would make the darkest movies blanche. But the farmers and priests and hunters and slaves and settlers and children and shieldmaidens (yep, they probably existed, though maybe were not common) were real people with real lives. They loved and struggled and made art and sang songs and developed such rich tapestries of ideals, beliefs, identities, and culture. Too much, by far, to be reduced to our familiar cliches. The Vikings were diverse and beautiful, arrogant and oppressive, brutal and kind. Just like we are. And we probably shouldn’t romanticize them as much as we do, nor should we diminish them to a singular characteristic or action as we’re so apt to do.

And yet here I am, telling you all about my “Viking” novel.

So maybe we’ll change that label for a moment. Valhalla Burning is about fatherhood and family, about friends and oaths and monsters, about trauma and humanity and faith, all in a time and in places where the Vikings were doing their thing, leaving their mark on a world that had a little more wonder left in it than, perhaps, does ours.

Bonus: 5 things about Vikings you may not know

• Vikings didn’t wear horned helmets as they’re popularly depicted. That’s a Victorian invention.
• Viking funerals with the deceased floating away on a burning ship as we see in movies were likely not common or even a real thing at all.
• Vikings were renowned for their cleanliness, with a dedicated day for bathing each week; in fact, there’s evidence (thought it’s likely little more than a medieval form of clickbait) that some Anglo-Saxons worried their women would find Viking raiders more attractive than their own men.
• The poem Beowulf was largely ignored by readers and scholars until JRR Tolkien gave a speech about its beauty and importance in 1936.
• Berserkers, those Norse warriors who could morph into near-supernatural heroes, almost like Viking era Hulks, may have actually been real (leaving this one here as a final teaser for you to explore in Valhalla Burning)

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Michael Pogachis the author of the Gothic thriller, Slip, a 2023 PenCraft Award runner-up, as well as the Rafael Ward dystopian series beginning with The Spider in the Laurel, a Kindle Book Award finalist. When not working on his next novel, Michael teaches literature and creative writing in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley where he lives with his wife, two kids, and a black cat named Wednesday.

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Michael Pogach: Website | Instagram | Threads

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