The Turin Horror Film Festival, a long-standing and well-respected showcase for scary movies, will take place in the second week of October.
The big news (for me, at least) is that this year I will be part of the jury, in the Shorts section.
Short films is usually where new talent and raw ideas get tested, and I am very excited at the prospect of spending a week watching some of the best short horror movies around.
I’ll keep you posted!
I
n my search for a workable definition of sword & sorcery (but it’s more complicated than that) I landed in what is, apparently, a pretty far-away place: David N. Meyer’s A Girl and a Gun: the complete guide to Film Noir on Video.
Published in 1998 by Avon Books, Meyer’s delightful book was essential in building my noir movie collection, and in helping me discover a lot of movies I would otherwise have missed.
And sure, books like The Encyclopedia of Film Noir by Alain Silver (and a lot of other books by Silver and his associates) are more in-depth and technical, but as a fast and easy gateway to noir, Meyer’s almost 20-years-old book remains unsurpassed.
Now, I thought of Meyer’s book because Meyer’s book defines noir through example – and that’s what I usually do with my friends and colleagues when we try and define sword & sorcery. We may start with a working definition or a bit of history (just as Meyer does), but then we end up listing movies and books. Continue reading
Last night my subconscious decided to treat me – for the second time in a week – to one of my recurrent bad dreams, and I dreamed about being called up for my compulsory military service, despite having already served my country twenty years ago.
A sad, boring dream – not really a nightmare because it was not scary, but simply exasperating – in which I spent my time running around carrying a thick folder of documents roving that I had already served – to no avail. I ended up in a uniform, surrounded by people much younger than me, in a strange air base somewhere1.
It usually happens when I am under stress – either I get recalled in the armed forces, or I have to take my high school graduation exam once again.
Which is funny, because I don’t dream about my B.Sc. or my Ph.D. exams – but the high school exam gets a rerun at least once a year… in my dreams.
Or maybe it’s because I sleep with my windows open.
And it turns out that doing the military service all over again, or taking the high school finals again are the two most common bad dreams/nightmares for most males in the Western World – only, those countries that have no compulsory military service get more reruns of the high-school finals.
Which I find interesting, because I always thought of my high school graduation exam as a sort of rite of passage – not a true exam, not a true test of my knowledge, but just a final act of bullying to see if I could stand it.
I could.
But still get bad dreams.
Weird, uh?
Andthey are not even good enough to use as inspiration for a story.
Next up on my reading list is Michael Carroll’s On the Shores of Titan’s Farthest Sea.
This science fiction mystery was published by Springer, in their line of science fiction by real scientists books, Carroll is a well respected scientific artist and science popularizer, and I’ve been intrigued by the description ever since I first read it.
Titan is practically a planet in its own right, with a diameter similar to that of Mercury, methane rainstorms, organic soot and ethane seas. All of the most detailed knowledge on the moon’s geology, volcanology, meteorology, marine sciences and chemistry are gathered together here to paint a factually accurate hypothetical future of early human colonization on this strange world.
The views from Titan’s Mayda Outpost are spectacular, but all is not well at the moon’s remote science base. On the shore of a methane sea beneath glowering skies, atmospherics researcher Abigail Marco finds herself in the middle of murder, piracy and colleagues who seem to be seeing sea monsters and dead people from the past. On the Shores of Titan’s Farthest Sea provides thrills, excitement and mystery – couched in the latest science – on one of the Solar System’s most bizarre worlds, Saturn’s huge moon Titan.
Now, curiously enough – or maybe not – two years ago I had pitched a very similar plot for a novel set on Titan to my Italian publisher, Acheron Books.
The pitch was rejected – but do not cry, dear readers: another plot idea I had pitched at the same time was picked up and the resulting novel will be published in 2017.
And yet I still long for the methane seas of old Titan.
And as luck would have it, two days ago another publisher contacted me and offered a slot in their forthcoming anthology.
It would be for the Italian market, but why not jump at the opportunity of finally writing a Titan-based story for them?
I was thinking about something along the lines of Methane Pirate Queen of Titan – or something.
So yes, reading Michael Carroll’s book will be both leisure and research.
I’ll keep you posted.
I am happy to leave the page, today, to my friend Giulia – you can check out her blog Free to Write, Free to Read. She recently conducted an interview with James Grady, the author of Six Days of the Condor – one of my favuorite books and the basis for one of my all-time favourite movies.
What follows is the original text – Giulia’s questions were translated by Fabrizio Fulio Bragoni.
I wish to express my gratitude to Giulia, to Fabrizio and of course to mister Grady.
Here goes – enjoy! Continue reading
I never was very hot about flash fiction – while I still like short stories best, I don’t like too short stories. Six thousand words is my ideal length, followed by ten thousand.
According to Wikipedia
Flash fiction is an umbrella term used to describe any fictional work of extreme brevity, including the Six-Word Story, 140-character stories, also known as twitterature, the dribble (50 words), the drabble (100 words), and sudden fiction (750 words). Some commentators have also suggested that some flash fiction possesses a unique literary quality, e.g. the ability to hint at or imply a larger story.
As I said, not my thing.
But it is important to try new things. Continue reading
Today is the International Talk Like a Pirate Day, so, first and foremost, arrrh!
This said, I was reflecting yesterday that I still haven’t written a story about pirates. Which is a damn shame.
On the other hand, then I think about William Hope Hodgson’s stories of ghostly pirates, or Tim Power’s wonderful On Stranger Tides1, or George MacDonald Fraser’s masterfully silly but historically sound The Pyrates, or Michael Scott Rohan’s Spiral of Worlds stories, and I realise I’d be facing some pretty harsh competition.
And I did not mention the sacred name of Rafael Sabatini.
By the way, is there any good recent pirate-based fantasy story you would suggest?
I need to update my reading list.
But I was saying… Continue reading
Karavansara 