Let’s amp the hype – or something.
In the very end I found a good title for the new Aculeo & Amunet story – which is currently being lovingly dissected by my editors.
They cut it with their steely knives
but they just can’t kill the beast
And here’s a cover preview. Continue reading
Today I’ll mix nostalgia with hype, if you don’t mind.
When I was a kid, say 15 years old, I discovered Robert E. Howard and Conan the Barbarian through the Italian editions of the Lancer Books collections edited by Lyon Sprague de Camp.
My first was Conan the Adventurer, and I was hooked.
Also, I decided this was the sort of stuff I wanted to read, and possibly to write.
The little hardback book had a wonderful dust jacket (by Dutch artist Karel Thole), and it came with a gorgeous map of the Hyborian world.
Then there was a fun introduction by Italian critic and translator Riccardo Valla, and then the stories.
And each story was introduced by a snippet of text by L. Sprague de Camp, providing some sort of continuity to the series.
Stuff like…
After escaping from Xapur, Conan builds his Kozaki and pirate raiders into such a formidable threat that King Yezdigerd devotes all his forces to their destruction. After a devastating defeat, the kozaki scatter, and Conan retreats southward to take service in the light cavalry of Kobad Shah, King of Iranistan.
It was fun, it gave me a sense of history. Continue reading
There’s an unwritten truth which I often repeat myself – a man’s computer-based disasters are another man’s jokes.
Our digital disasters, which cause us stress and waste of time, not to mention the loss of data, are one-click, quickly-fixed problems to those who know what to click.
This said…
An Italian reader was reading Bride of the Swamp God – and quite enjoying it, he said! – when he needed to check a word and the default dictionary did not work.
Or rather, it worked, but it was the wrong one.
English text – Italian dictionary.
He mailed me.
What gives?
Now, it took some work, but finally I found out what was wrong with my ebook.
Probably. Continue reading
This week’s Creative Task for the Future of Storytelling course requires me to write about my favorite video game.
Now, I used to play more on video in the past – both on my PC or on my old Playstation 2; these days, I stick to tabletop roleplaying games.
But in terms of fascination, involvement, sheer fun, I’m still very much a fan of the old Tex Murphy games created by Chris Jones in the ’90s – the trilogy Under a Killing Moon, Pandora Directive and Tex Murphy: Overseer.
The series started as standard point and click games with two early entries called Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum.
Both the games pushed the boudaries of gaming by being multi genre (Mean Streets was part side-scrolling game, part flight simulator, part point-and-click adventure) and by adopting high quality video cut scenes and dialogues.
But it was in the later titles of the series I mentioned that thing really got interesting. Continue reading
The creative task for my Future of Storytelling course this week was quite interesting – doing a video presentation about my three favorite inspirational books, films or what.
Pity I’m technologically impaired at the moment – a power surge cooked my USB mike and all that.
And so, back to basics – a PowerPoint presentation, shared through SlideShare.
Here it goes.
Enjoy!
I’m keeping busy.
While I put the finishing touches on my PhD and on the second ebook in the series of pulp history essays started with Avventurieri sul Crocevia del Mondo, I’ve finally taken the first step towards making an old dream of mine reality.
Last week I published my Italian translation of Frank R. Stockton‘s The Lady or the Tiger?, and its sequel, The Discourager of Hesitancy.
Short ebook, great cover, cheap price tag.
I hope this will be a first in a series of translations of old classics in the field of imaginative fiction, of adventure and of fantasy.
There’s a lot of public domain stories, out there, that were never translated in my language – or that have not been reprinted in the last sixty or seventy years.
So I’ve a dream-list of public domain stories – shorts, novelettes and short novels, mostly – which I dreamed of reading as a kid, but were not available in my language… and are still unavailable.
I’ll work slowly, I’ll translate them, and put them forth as cheap ebooks.
I’ll call them I Dimenticati – The Forgotten Ones.
Let’s give the kids something different from Twilight clones and other soul-less narratives.
Wish me luck.
November is NaNoWriMo month, and this year I am doing my own version of NaNoWriMo – I’m writing my doctorate thesis in one month.
Less than one month, actually.
It was not planned in advance – but real world engagements (such as, paying the bills and finding paying jobs thereof), caused the actual, sit-down-and-write work to slide further and further as the deadline loomed larger.
Then, in a final twist of fate, the email confirming the deadline was misplaced and popped up on my mail client with a delay of twenty days.
I don’t think this is going to count as a NaNoWriMo exercise (my thesis is not, after all, a novel), but actually I have to get 40.000 words – with images, bibliography and a few maps, ready for the 25th at the latest – and with ready I mean printed and sent to the Urbino University offices.
As most NaNoWriMo participants, I collected my material and coordinated my ideas well before the first of November – I have tons of notes, preliminary reports, articles, the works. The story… ehm, I mean, the dissertation paper is written in my head, illustrated with cool graphics, and accompanied by a solid map.
But I have to turn that ideal work into actual words on paper.
And ironically, this is going to engage all my pulp hack skills and tricks, this will be the final challenge, the ultimate workout.
If I come out of it alive, I will feel in the same league with the greats.
Pity I can’t use the Lester Dent formula on my thesis.
Now I’m toying with the idea of putting up a word counter, and enroll in the challenge itself.
But maybe not – after all, the judging commission might not appreciate the fact that I turned the sacred duty of writing down the results of my research in a challenge set to the standards of some weird Canadian thing.
But let’s see how it works out.
Any way it goes, it will be fun.
Karavansara 