In the last year, keeping my Patreon up to date has been hard – in part because of the general sense of fatigue that weighed me down, in part because of the need to try and sell everything I was writing, in order to cover the bills and buy food.
So yes, I have been a very bad Patreon Creator – and I have lost a few Patrons because of this, and I am really sorry, because these are people I have let down.

But now things are, if not looking up, at least no longer looking sideways, and I’ve just started a new series of Patrons-only posts, in which I will pick the opening of a novel or short story, and analyze it, to see what the author did, what work the first lines do in the economy of the book.

These are short posts, that I will upload both in English and Italian, and are a fun way to look at writing technique and, maybe, discover new and old books.
Being short, I can manage to put up two per week, for as long as I have novels to examine. Half the posts about the openings will be uploaded in the weekends, and go to all my Patrons, and the other half will be available only to the stalwarts of the Five Bucks Brigade. These I will post during the week.

For starters, I have posted the opening of C.S. Forester’s classic adventure novel, The African Queen, for all my supporters, and the opening of Daniel Kehlmann’s Thirty Years War fantasy Tyll for my Five Bucks Patrons only.