Autumn in Riga, Latvia

In the autumn of 2019, I spent an extended weekend in Latvia, one of Sweden’s neighbors across the Baltic Sea. However, when I grew up during the Cold War, we regarded Latvia as “beyond the event horizon”, one of many nearby countries enslaved by communist tyrants and off-limits to people from democratic Europe.

When I walked through Riga’s central park, I spotted memorial stones — listing a name, a date, a profession — at the exact locations where civilian Latvians in early 1991 had been killed by Soviet soldiers that the Kremlin had dispatched to reassert its rule. Next to the the city’s grocery market, I encountered a museum dedicated to the sufferings in the Riga Jewish ghetto during the Nazi occupation.

In many places in Europe, such memorials and museums are a part of everyday life. Here in Sweden, they are not. Is Sweden therefore an abnormal European country? Probably. Our ability to dodge out of the way of 20th-century tyrants spared us much misery, but it also made us partially incapable of sensing the price of liberty and the horrors coming from losing it.

September Was a Busy Month

From a creative-writing perspective, the month of September can be summarized as Swedish Call of Cthulhu. I edited several adventures, translated as well as new ones, putting my long experience as a technical writer to work by: 

• replacing anglicisms with proper Swedish words
• turning clumsy sentences into polished Swedish
• “translating” handouts written in contemporary Swedish into the stilted language and  archaic grammar used by officials in 1920s.
• chasing typos and missing words  

I also wrote a small CoC adventure (pamflettäventyret Charons lur / Charon’s [Musical] Horn) located to Hultsby, a tiny village south of Gothenburg where I grew up in the 1960s.  Hundred years ago, this was farmlands connected to Gothenburg by a steam train. Nowadays, place is a densely populated part of the Gothenburg metropolitan area.

I also made some progress on my SF novella Dusk and Dawn by developing its  approaching finale and finding a reasonable way. Two chapters remaining.