An Icelandic guy told me this story once:

His name was B, and he loved a girl called G so very much, that he baked her some bread so she would love him back. To cook the bread he stole a hair from her head and he pick up a plant from the mountains whose name he wouldn’t tell me so I wouldn't attempt to do this myself. Then he baked the bread with the hair and the herb and offered it to G. G ate it and fell in love with him. And they would have lived happily ever after if B had never told her about his bread trick. When she knew, she went mad and left, and B never saw her again. Just like when in the Pyrenees you tell a gorja (aka. woman of water) that she is a woman of water, and then she leaves and you never see her again.

When I lived in Iceland I draw a map and I marked in it everything I saw, and all the legends and ghost stories I was told. Then I sent it to my loved one and then he loved me back, just as if I had sent him some warm bread. One day O said he wanted to go to all the places marked in the map, and we bought plane tickets to Iceland and I paid 300€ to rent a car.

And then I thought I would write a novel. A novel about the bread, and the magic map, and the trip we would do, and the stories I was told the first time and the stories we would be told the second time.

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It would have been a great novel. It would have received grants to write it, and prizes to publish it, and then more prizes to already published novels.

But you know how ideas are like seeds. You plant them and some grow tall and green and some just never do. I don’t want to write that novel anymore because I have better ideas for novels now. This website gathers the preparatory notes that I am going to sketch for a novel that I have no longer the intention to write.

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