If you’re here you probably know in a perfect world I should be out there chasing dinosaurs (if, admittedly, very small dinosaurs – I am a micropaleontologist) but due to a number of events, I am currently paying my bills by writing. And it’s working out fine. True, right now they have cut my electricity, but it’s their error, not mine – the bills have been paid.

Has I have said often in the past, if you want to make a living writing, you need to write a lot, and you need to sell on the English-language market: more opportunities, more readers, better payments (or, compared to what often happens in Italy, even just plain payments).

Now, when I send a cover letter with one of my submission, I usually go

My name is Davide Mana, and I am an Italian writer, working mostly in English.

And now something interesting happened, and it went more or less this way…

“I’m an Italian writer…”
“You don’t publish in Italy, and your English work’s not in translation, so no, technically you’re not.”
“But I am not an English or American writer either…”
“Of course not. You’re Italian.”
“But I am not an Italian WRITER.”
“Exactly. Not a writer, no. But your English is very good.”

Bilingualism sucks, sometimes, what?
Also, pigeonholing and over-categorization sucks too.
Harlan Ellison said he was a writer, no need for any further definition beyond that, and I always tried to stick to that principle.
I write.
I can write fantasy, science fiction, horror, noir, thrillers, straightforward adventure, non-fiction of a variety of colors and flavors, gaming material…
I am a writer.

And now I’ll drop the detail about being Italian, probably, because it apparently causes no end of problems, and closes doors that I’d rather leave open.
The impression of having fallen through the cracks already, somehow, is strong.
I start feeling like one of those country-less men in Casablanca.
I’ll have to go and see il Signor Ferrari for papers…

See you at Rick’s.