…and when I am looking for a scene-stealing, show-stopping, elegantly evil and subtly deranged bad guy, my first stop is the late, lamented Klaus Kinski.
Photo references are important, for my writing, and they are also fun to share. So here he is, the ruthless head of an evil corporation…
Sometimes writing takes us to some pretty unusual places… sometimes it takes us to old familiar places we have not visited in a long time.
I’m past the 5000 words mark as I stop and go invent something for dinner.
And once again I spent about one hour of today’s first writing session doing extra research for flavor.
The big surprise of the day – research-wise – was discovering the contents of the French RCIR, military-issued rations, called the “Ration de Combat Individuelle Rechauffable” (Combat Ration Individual Reheatable).
My only personal experience with military rations was during my service in the Italian Air Farce, on the single occasion in which we were taken to the field.
To call the experience underwhelming would be an understatement.
And Italians are supposed to be good with food, but the general wisdom was that some predatory NCO was reselling the rations and feeding the troops the leftovers. Continue reading
No, I don’t mean the study of entomology.
I said I’d keep you posted, so here I am.
I love what I am writing – it’s an espionage thriller, so I’m not completely out of my depths.
I’m currently taking a pause after two hours and some.
I have 2000 words – prologue, first chapter introducing two of the three main characters, and a bit of the second chapter.
Much of the “bit of the second chapter” will have to go – because I’ve just seen a way to write it more dynamically.
But it’s all right, and I am about to award myself a small ice cream.
I could have written more, but I had to do research on the fly.
And so I thought I’d do a short post on the way I handled it.
Maybe someone’s interested. Continue reading
Uh, WOW!
The big news is, a pitch was accepted for a story, and I have to deliver the first draft by September the 1st.
That’s 20.000 words tops, in six days.
Roughly 3500 good words per day.
I know I can make it – the pitch was accepted based on a pretty solid outline, so I know what’s going to happen, where, how, to whom.
It’s basically just a matter of sticking to schedule and do the mechanical work of pouring the story out of my somewhat overexcited brain, and onto Scrivener.
But I am happy as a child, because this is a HUGE opportunity, and it’s going to be lots of fun.
And hard work.
If you see my blog activity slack in the next days, you know the reason why.
But I’ll try and keep you posted.
Wish.
Me.
Luck.
It went like this: first my friend Hell (yes, they really call him like that) did a blog post about the city he writes about, the city he was born in, Taranto. Then my friend Alex did a piece about the city he was born in, and about which he writes about, Milan.
And so I did a piece on the city where I was born, and about which I sometimes write about, Turin.
The piece that came out is weird and melancholy, and I even forgot to give it a title, and you can find it here translated through some web gizmo that I’m sure will make it even more surreal.
But the fact is, I have written a lot more about London, Paris and Shanghai that I ever did about Turin.
And so, why not do an alternate universe sort of piece, about the towns I write about in my fiction?
My cities of the imagination, if it does not sound too pretentious, and with all due respect for both Italo Calvino and Schuiten & Peeters. Continue reading
Karavansara 