To my great surprise, I am working on my second story that contains trolls. I have nothing against trolls, I just didn’t plan on writing about any – but here they are nonetheless.
My first troll story came about thanks to an assignment in the week-long fantasy workshop I went to in Oregon last month. We were given a list of potential characters which included trolls, and part of the assignment was to set our story in the town we live in. I live in Boulder, Colorado, and kept being drawn to the idea of writing about trolls because being right by the foothills we have a lot of rocks around town, and part of the traditional Scandinavian mythology is that trolls turn to stone in the sunlight. I ended up modifying that premise for the story I wrote in class, and came up with an even different variation for the story I’m working on right now. Both stories have been very fun to write. And really, who can say for sure that some of the rocks I’ve walked by aren’t really trolls in disguise? 🙂
It was also really fun to write about the dinosaur itself. I wanted to write about a very intelligent dinosaur, and after doing some research read about Latenivenatrix, which is currently considered to be one of the most intelligent dinosaurs. Not being a paleontologist, I am far from an expert, of course… But it seemed reasonable to go with this particular subfamily/genus. The dinosaur in my story has both feathers and fur, which I obviously can’t prove it had, but I like the idea – and based on the research I did, it seems likely that at least one variety of dinosaur had both. Chuck and Jim, the editors of this anthology, put together a really fun video trailer for A Fistful of Dinosaurs. 🙂
