And so it’s finished.
Clocking in at close to 68.000 words, my pulp/fantasy novel of high adventure set in Shanghai and parts east in the year 1936 is done.
Well, actually I’m doing the final revision – or the post-revision revision, if you will.
I did my writing in Scrivener, and it was a really pleasant experience.
But now I’m exporting it and I’m making a LibreOffice .odt file for my editors to be able to go through it at their leisure. Continue reading
The next thing I’ll have to buy is a calendar – one of those big, square calendars with great artwork and a square box for each day of the month.
The reason is my writing is turning into a full time activity – after all, nothing else moves, writing and selling my stories is better than starving and sleeping under a bridge.
For 2015 I have four long projects slated – two are finalized and ready to go, one is in its drafting phase, and the fourth is awaiting confirmation.
And I’m keeping a certain amount of “free time” for extra activities.
Should they all come to fruition, this will mean writing full time, eight hours a day, five days a week – leaving weekends for leisure activities like… ouch, writing. Continue reading
This gentleman is an artist’s reconstruction of one of the Early Eurasians from the archaeological site of Kostenki-Borshchevo, in southern Russia. The remains were found in 1954.
Genome data seem to indicate that this people had a higher percentage of Neanderthal DNA than we have today – make what you will of that.
I was quite surprised, when I saw this image, because this guy is very very similar to a character in my novel – a character that appears in the final chapters, the ones I’m redrafting right now.
I already explained how important it is, for me, to have visual references – well, this visual reference appeared serendipitously on my PC on Sunday, and unlocked a scene I was having a hard time writing.
So I just set up my account on Smashwords.
It’s now 18 months I’ve been a self-publisher through Amazon Kindle, and now I’d like to widen my horizon.
So far I’ve been quite intimidated by the Smashwords formatting rules – they have a fame for being complicated and not exactly user-friendly. That, and the fact that the Smashwords system requires me to upload a .doc file – being a Linux user, I don’t use MS Word, and that could lead to formatting troubles.
But now it turns out I can upload an .epub file too – and that’s much easier for me, as the epub is often a by-product of my own coding of my books for Amazon. Continue reading
I just got back from Lucca, a nice Renaissance town in central Italy where I attended the first two days of Lucca Comics & Games, Europe’s largest comics and games convention/fair (and the second largest in the world, or so they told me).
I was there to present my own work – I did a Savage Worlds/Deadlands campaign book called Messico e Nuvole. A little book that allows SW and Deadlands players add some more spaghetti to their western.
And just as Italian directors took a skewed perspective on traditional westerns, I did take a skewed perspective on traditional Deadlands (a game I love).
The end result will not be, probably, everybody’s cup of tea – but it’s all right like that.
Anyway, the first two reviews have been spectacular, so maybe there’s more estimators of old Italian Westerns out there playing Deadlands than I thought. Continue reading
I was reading this interesting post on Percival Constantine’s blog, the other day.
Now, I’m always thinking in serials, when I write.
Granted, I wrote a few one shots, but – probably due to my preferences in reading – I tend to prefer short fiction that goes in series.
Right now I’m working on my first English-language novel (I know, I know, I told you so already, ad nauseam), and I’m thinking of it in terms of the first episode in a serial.
I’ve two other stories featuring the same character – both currently in the form of a logline, but promising.
Then, of course, we’ll see what the publisher and the readers have to say about that.
As soon as I deliver the finished novel, I’ll start on my next project – once again, a serial. Continue reading
It sometimes happens that I fall in love with my support characters.
Now, every series should have a handful of characters the hero can call upon when he gets in trouble – as heroes will.
Not properly a sidekick, more like a recurring character.
Think Marcus Brody and Sallah in the Indiana Jones movies.
Such characters provide support, continuity, and quite often an element of comedy that the hero can’t bring himself (being heroic AND funny is hard work indeed, for both hero and author).
More generally, they can voice the feelings and the thoughts the hero, for a number of reasons, can’t.
They can act as conscience, provide wise suggestions, or quite simply hand the hero the tool he needs, when he needs it.
Karavansara 