Jötnar Are Cool (No Pun Intended)

So...I totally have a thing for Icelandic words and all those gorgeous accents. <3 As a result, all of the names in Ninth Twilight got changed from the Anglicized versions (Odin became Oðinn, Thor became Thórr, etc.) to the Old Norse versions. (And technically Thor should be Þórr, but most people won't know how to pronounce the first letter, so I had to Anglicize that. Sigh.) Anyways, been doing a bit of worldbuilding for the jötnar; I'm mapping out some basics so that I can start delving deeper.

Here's a quick overview of my jötnar. :3
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Jötnar (singular, jötunn), are creatures with immense amounts of chaos magic. All full jötnar are shapeshifters, and half-jötnar or less than that are usually shapeshifters as well (though not always). There are five different ‘breeds’ of jötnar: earth, fire, frost, rime, and storm. Earth jötnar live primarily in Miðgarðr, fire jötnar in Múspellsheimr, frost jötnar in Jötunheimr, rime jötnar in Nifelheimr, and storm jötnar in Yggdrasil.

Chaos magic, unlike Kvasiran magic, is largely instinctive and controlled by emotion. It manifests itself in sparks of colored energy around the jötunn, visible only to users of magic. When the jötunn feels extreme emotion or desires something strongly, their magic will lash out or work to obtain that desire without the jötunn’s knowledge. Conscious use of chaos magic involves willing something to happen strongly enough to make the magic bound to the user respond. It’s an unpredictable and dangerous form of magic, as suggested by the name, and while it is the purest and most powerful form of magic in the Nine Worlds, it is also very difficult to control and direct.

Each breed of jötunn is aligned to a particular element, and their magic tends to warp the world around them towards that element. Fire jötnar cause forest fires where they walk, frost jötnar bring snow storms in their wake, storm jötnar fill the air with static electricity, and earth jötnar cause earthquakes and shifts in landscape. The ancient rime jötnar never go anywhere that their magic would have to warp the world to suit them, but if they did, they would bring frost and ice. Jötnar have difficulty shapeshifting into animals not compatible with their element; for instance, fire jötnar cannot become fish and earth jötnar cannot become birds.

Their typical forms are humanoid, ranging from eight to fifteen feet tall. Skin tone is anywhere from absolutely white to nearly black, and color varies between breeds; earth jötnar tend to come in shades of brown, frost jötnar in blue, rime jötnar in shades of slate and gray-blue, fire jötnar in dark red (though fire jötnar are typically covered in magma and rock, so their skin color is usually not discernable), and storm jötnar in shades of gray.

Loki with a cat on his head (Also, Starting Over Nine Worlds)

 Loki and Sloan's daughter, Sloan, seems to have inherited Loki's talent for shapeshifting...
(If you can't read the words it goes as follows:
Sloan: Where's Tessie?
Loki: On my head.
Sloan: O_O
Loki: ...I swear I did nothing.)

Now, you can skip all of this if you're only interested in the art. 'Tis only some stuff about my stories and what may show up on this blog next.

So far for Ninth Twilight (Loki's story) I have...
One completed novel at 47,000 words.
One quarter-finished novel at 25,000 words.
Over 10,000 words of extra scenes and planning.
Over 8,000 words of another novel.
One large three-ring binder stuffed full with worldbuilding and characters.

-sound of things landing in trashbin-
I'm scrapping it all and starting over. =D (I'm also not finishing NaNo because there's no point if my worlds are going to change so much the book would be completely useless by the time I finished it.) (So for those of you reading Dragons of Yggdrasil, if there are any of you out there, I'm not going to be finishing that. v_v)

I love this world, don't get me wrong, but it's not going in the way I want it to. I set out to chronicle Loki's story from Ginungagap to Ragnarok, and make it real. I wanted to bring the trickster to life on the page, and his world along with it. Unfortunately, the worldbuilding I had done so far...just wasn't doing this for me. There were too many inconsistencies and little things that I just didn't want.

So yep, I'm starting over from scratch. ^__^ You can probably expect me to be posting worldbuilding snippets on this blog as well as art and the occasional excerpt from now on. XD

On another note, I won't be writing Loki in novels for a while now, so I must also turn my attention to Rayle and her dark futuristic urban science fantasy with dystopian and steampunk elements. (Can you tell I have absolutely no freakin' idea what genre this story is?) I've got to finish that story before the OYAN Summer Workshop, so you may also catch excerpts/worldbuilding from that as well.