As I think I mentioned – or I should have mentioned – I’ll devote this autumn to the development and growth of my Patreon. I want more patrons, and I want happier patrons.
So I am announcing a number of new perks for those brave souls that decide to gamble a few bucks on me and my writing, and show small glimpses of things to come.
The World of Tomorrow, if you will…
For instance,
The next thirty days (give or take a handful of days) are going to be the hardest for me in the last three years. I say this without any particular emotion – if there’s one thing I’ve learned in these three years as I managed to make a living writing, it’s how not to succumb to fear and anxiety.
The panic attacks are a thing of the past.
It’s gonna be hard, and I’ll get out of it at the other end, one way or another.
And I’ll be working a lot – I’ve stories to finish and deliver, a new book to get going, I’ve started writing the sequel to The Ministry of Thunder (more about that later), I need to take care of my health and I’ve decided to make my Patreon page grow. I’m also starting an experiment about which I’ll be writing here and elsewhere in the next days. I’m keeping busy – because that’s a good way to weather the hard times.
So I’ve spent a while today brushing up on the skills I’ll need to add a podcast to my Patreon page.
Well, two podcasts, actually – one in Italian and one in English, because my Patreon page is bilingual, and it’s good to be my patron, independently of what language you speak.
Double the work, but also double the fun.
The first in this new series of Podcasts (because the Karavancast is currently sleeping) will be online on the 30th of September because it happens to be the International Podcast Day, and it will be accessible to all my supporters.
I’m planning a guerrilla podcast, recorded on the go and in the open, with no scripts, minimal post-production and a length under 15 minutes.
I still need to find a suitable title, and a list of topics.
Suggestions are welcome.
I was checking my archives today, and realized that in the last six months I have put together about 22.000 words of ramblings, ideas and what-not about writing and making a living of it (or at least trying), in the form of 1000-words post I do periodically for my Patrons and that go under the title of Nuts & Bolts.
The series started in February, and this being September, it looks like a good idea to collect all those pieces under a cover, add another few thousand words of extra stuffing and secret sauce, and then see what happens should I release it as, say Nuts & Bolts, Season 1.
Both in ebook and paperback, and free for my supporters .
The fun thing is, I’ll be able to release the book simultaneously in Italian and English, because my patrons get the articles both in English and Italian.
And then I’ll keep going and start Season 2 on Patreon – after all, my Patrons seem to like it.
But watch this space, because there’s more things happening on my Patreon page, and I’ll post the news here.
When I was young and foolish, I used to write short stories based on a picture, a photograph or a song, as a form of exercise. I would hammer the story out on my mother’s Olivetti typewriter, and see what I was able to put together. I had read somewhere that pulp writers in the days of the magazines often wrote stories to the cover (typical example, Fritz Leiber’s Schylla’s Daughter), and I thought it would help me develop my writer skills.
The first story I actually finished was based on an illustration by Boris Vallejo (hey, it was the 80s! I was 16! Give me some slack!)
This one, to be precise…
Sometimes I still do, in a way: I use photo references and a soundtrack for my stories. But a story directly inspired by a painting or a song? That’s a thing I have not done for a long time.
But then…
My Patrons – lucky guys! – have just received their copy of Shadow of the Ephemeral, a short story in the ongoing Tales from the Frontier, my somewhat Talbot Mundi-esque loose series of short tales set on the border between not-exactly-India and China-but-yet-again-not.
In the story, we meet the exalted Rakhshan Hortonho Bakkar, warrior-poet of Mangtani, Lord of the Spice Islands, Most Favored by the Heavens, as he leaves the Court of the Rani behind and travels to the mountain to pursue the Ephemeral that is the true meaning of life.
You can imagine the rest.
Or maybe not.
The story is available to all my supporters in the Five Bucks Brigade (or above), because you know what they say, it is good to be my Patrons.
The Old Timers were a loose bunch of aged superheroes that I contributed to my friend’s Alex Girola’s shared universe 2 Minutes to Midnight. In a setting in which superheroes were members of government-sponsored teams or worked as part of corporations, the Old Timers were masked avengers hailing from an older, pulpier era. They remained in the sidelines and stepped in only when it was time to set the more traditional and modern superheroes straight.
I watched the Amazon Prime series The Boys, this last weekend, and then I got to talk with Alex and a few others of our old accomplices in the 2MM series. The original comic of The Boys had been one of the inspirations of our shared universe, together with The Authority, Watchmen and other revisionist comic series.
And we had lots of fun as long as it lasted.
It would be good to go back, we said.
And it turned out that each one of us had at least a story there waiting, and more stories to write.
Continue readingThis is a weird post (maybe the title could have forewarned you) and it is a part of something larger I’ve been trying to put into words these last few months. It has to do with marketing, platforms and brands, and writing for a living – indeed, it is the sort of post I usually write once or twice a month for my Patrons, under the header of Nuts & Bolts.
But I’m doing it open because… well, because.
We were discussing nostalgia and exploitation, yesterday, with some friends that have been binge-watching the third season of Stranger Things. The series has been called exploitative and manipulative by some. It ticks all the right boxes, and it settles in a general trend that builds commercial success on the nostalgia for the ’80s by people that are too young to actually remember them.
And as we were talking, a song started playing in my mind…
Continue reading
Karavansara 