or, what’s the idea behind The Dalarna Ark Manuscripts?
People love to ask writers where they get their ideas.
It’s a fair question. But also a maddening one. The answers that come to mind always feel too simple – everywhere and everything in my whole life – or too obscure to be useful. Sometimes the truth sounds like a deflection. Sometimes it is one.
But here’s what I’ve come to believe: the question isn’t really about where ideas come from. It’s about why they take root. Why a particular image, question, or whisper of something strange stays lodged in the mind until it demands a story. Why a half-seen reflection in a window, a misheard phrase, a marginal note in a book sparks not just curiosity but compulsion.
The compulsion to create.
For me, the answer lies in a fascination with what doesn’t quite belong in what we believe to be the Real World, but insists on being seen anyway.
That’s why I’m writing a series of literary fantasy novels where the boundary between this world and others is thin. Sometimes dangerously so. Where beautiful, haunting, often unpredictable magic seeps into ordinary lives. Where strange manuscripts are sent to a boy and change his life. Where translations unlock doors to places you didn’t mean to open. Where mystery and romance walk hand in hand with the unknowable.
In many ways, this series is my answer to that impossible question, “Where do you get your ideas?” It’s both elusive and yet so essential, you could just as easily ask, “What is a soul?”
The stories are what happen when you live long enough with questions you can’t shake: What if the world we live in isn’t the only one? What if other realities brush against ours in quiet, eerie ways? What if certain people, certain minds, are attuned to those moments of contact? And what if that attunement is both gift and curse?
Writing, for me, is a kind of translation. Not from one language to another, but from imagination into language. From silence into narrative. From dream into story. The ideas are already there, humming just beneath the surface.
So where do I get my ideas?
From that in-between space. From the moment when something familiar turns just slightly strange. From the feeling that you’ve forgotten something important, and it’s waiting for you to remember.
This blog, and the books that will follow, are my attempts to do just that.
These stories, The Dalarna Ark Manuscripts, aren’t just novels. They’re framed as a discovery. The translator, my framing protagonist, is trying to make sense of a series of strange manuscripts, written by an enigmatic scribe whose fantastical, sometimes harrowing, sometimes tender stories seem to defy the laws of physics, history, and even memory. Are they fictions? Hallucinations? Or are they dispatches from a parallel world bleeding slowly into our own?
Each volume will begin and end with the translator’s unfolding journey, a mystery in itself. But at the heart of each book lies a collection of stories, dreamlike, uncanny, and deeply human, seemingly autobiographical accounts from the scribe. But how can they be true?
It’s a structure that mirrors how I experience inspiration: as fragments, echoes, scattered threads that only reveal a larger picture when you step back far enough – and then, dive in deeply enough. Way, way, way down into the deep.
The Dalarna Ark Manuscripts, as an in-depth series project, is my attempt to listen – and translate.
