Axe-Age, Cat-Age

Most writers and creators, I guess, have one or two of those 'pet' projects which they continue to nourish and dabble with over years or even decades of development, adding bits here and there until they either give up on it or finally see it through to fruition. Chaz is no exception, with this Dark Age/Old Norse fantasy cycle he began exactly 32 years ago! It features a rich world of monsters and myths, epic battles and heroes, informed by original sources such as extant Anglo-Saxon poetry (Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon) as well as the Norse sagas and mythological poetry.

Into this age of axes and wolves steps the most unlikely hero(ine) imaginable - a middle-aged, rather overweight member of Chaz's invented race of wee cat people, who makes her living by healing and reading palms. Womba doesn't even know which end of a sword to wave at a dragon, never mind how to deal with one when a real-life example burns her entire village to a cinder, leaving her as possibly the only survivor... thrown into a world of turmoil and clashing armies, vengeful gods, magic and glorious deeds, our feline heroine has to use all of her wisdom and cunning to even survive, never mind fulfill whatever strange destiny awaits her...

Womba reads a friend's hand Womba portrait sketch Finished lines of Womba in cave-home, holding healing herbsIn the past few weeks Chaz has gotten inspired to dig out all the fragments and scraps again, and knock together some brand new illustrations and sketchesin order to inspire a renaissance of this sometime project. Originally conceived as a mammoth volume prose epic, he's now binned that concept as unworkable and is now redrafting the whole thing in heroic blank verse, cutting the language down to its essentials and using the Old English forms of alliteration to add colour and imagery. Here's an excerpt from one of the early battles, which he rewrote as a bit of an experiment in this new form:

As a huge, klunky project in transition (yet again!) this'll take some time to bring up to scratch, but it'll be exciting to see how it proceeds...