Around the time I was born, my father hired a talented Swedish muralist named Lambert Guenther to redecorate the cocktail lounge in his restaurant. The end result was the Viking Bar. It was a fabulous place for a kid to sit with his Shirley Temple and dream of bloody adventure. The murals depicted Norse sea-rovers in vivid and colorful detail. I've been working now for twenty years or more on an epic novel about Vikings set at the turn of the first millennium. In spite of all my research, I know the project really began as a childhood fantasy in my father's bar.