The Aesir noir book starts, "I don't much like the gods," so far. That one might actually stick around. But look -- I can't even tell you the first line of Sampo, because I rewrote that bit longhand, and it's downstairs in my paper journal. The thing is drafted, and I've even done my standard "rewriting the beginning" schtick, and I still don't know the first line. 40K on Midnight Sun Rising, and do you think I know the first line? I do not.
I've been poking the tech levels of the Aesir noir book in my head. No gunpowder, and I'm resisting bad jokes like having "heaters" that actually heat things. It's a fascinating thing -- at least internally fascinating, can't speak for you folks and your reaction -- to look at things like the shoeshine boy/newsie who has the word on the street for Our Hero: what social structures made him? What would alternate social structures make instead? Who in this society is supposed to take care of stray kids like that, and how effective are they at doing it, and has it changed recently? It's good fun. Especially since it's roughly 400 years after Dwarf's Blood Mead, so I have two points with which to draw my curve: the DBM stuff and the Chandlery stuff, inasmuch as I choose to use it. "Noir" means a gajillion different things to people, some of it more "Blade Runner" than "Maltese Falcon." Mine is the older kind. A past tech, not a future -- but a future of one of my other books, and no past we've ever had, so. So. The little wheels turn.
As I said over on