Day 32 – Grand Hotel, Stockholm
Stockholm in mid winter. 4, maybe 4 and a half, hours of sunlight.
It’s definitely more Stieg Larsson than Roger Spoffin (though oddly Roger wears a dragon amulet – not tattoo, however – early on in Book 2. There’s a little teaser for you.)
The Grand Hotel is Stockholm’s most famous. It’s sumptuous and in a beautiful location overlooking the Royal Palace but from an author’s perspective the thrill comes from its links with the Nobel Prize (and of course there’s one of those for literature). Attendees of the famous ceremony have been guests of the hotel since 1901, when the awards began, so if you know someone who’s won the Nobel Prize, odds on they’ve stayed here. A little of all that genius has to rub off, I like to think.
While it might seem the obvious location in which to write, there is another very serious contender in town. The Rival. Never heard of it? It belongs to one Göran Bror Andersson – aka Benny – who founded ABBA. As an Australian (and a bit of a musician too, I like to think) who grew up in the ABBA era and fell in love with all of them, the thought of sitting in Benny’s piano lounge with him pounding out ‘Knowing me, knowing you’, or, ‘Fernando’, or (dare I even entertain the thought) the heart-wrenching ‘Winner takes it all’, almost had me heading to the Rival. However, my Swedish hosts assured me that it would be highly unlikely that Benny would be tinkling the ivories on the day in question (or any day, in fact), so I went instead to the Grand.
In any case, sitting in the same room with Benny playing ‘Winner takes it all’ would have ensured no writing whatsoever was done. One can’t type on a tear-stained iPad.
As it was, Roger’s adventures progressed very satisfactorily.
Today’s word count: 1421
Word count to date: 77,044
