This morning I put together the first proper outline of a book that will supposedly see the light in early 2020: a non fiction book for a small but classy Italian publisher dealing with one of the topics of this blog: travelers and explorers in exotic parts, between 1800 and 1940-something.
The trick will be weaving together the lives of at least twenty historical characters, so that the volume will be a homogeneous narrative and not a series of episodes.
So I spent quite some time trying to decide whether to use time or space to tie the story together.
My friend Lucy is a terrific writer and a wonderful woman, and has the sort of clarity of vision that is one of the fundamental powers of “the Other Half of the Sky”. I was talking with her about my current plight, and she doesn’t see no problem…
Me: I hate this story, I can’t write it, it’s making me waste more time than the money can justify, and it’s making me deeply unhappy. Lucy: Have you been paid an advance for it? Me: No. Lucy: Then drop it.
And that’s the only answer, really, but… let’s start from the beginning.
There is one more work of mine that’s being evaluated for publication, and one I will mention here because it got me thinking about how my life has changed in the last few years. The work is a collaboration, and I am quite proud of being in the team that put it together. It’s called
Benthic foraminiferal proxies of environmental changes during the pre-Messinian salinity crisis of the Sinis Basin (W Sardinia, Mediterranean Sea)
And no, it does not feature swords, sorceries or strange creatures – unless you consider banthic foraminifera as such.
How things have changed, I was saying – up to five years ago the above would have been a good sample of my job – data analysis of environmental data and ecological associations, that’s me. But then things got strange. My father was ill, my contract with my university was dead, and I spent two years nursing my dad, and writing stories and doing translations in my free time. Because that’s the only work you can do when assisting a bedridden parent. No more microscopes, no more field samples. Afterwards, there was debt, and poverty, and no job – hence, my decision to keep writing, just write more, better, and for paying markets. I’m still here, so it sort of worked out.
But the opportunity to work on the data from the Sinis Basin was a happy one – because that’s me. Me. It’s the job I studied for, for which I paid my university taxes. It makes me happy, to be able to flex muscles I have not used in a long time, and prove to myself I can still make it.
Which also gets me thinking: had I started writing stories at 20, instead of becoming a paleontologist and a geologist, where would I be now?
But anyway, now the paper is in the hands of the referees. And believe me, referees are ten thousand times scarier than editors.
Yes, like in the Neil Young song. And this is one of those “funny” posts about living as a writer that should make me look human to potential readers and would-be Patrons. Sure, just look at me… So the big news this morning is we got a call from our internet service provider – they just updated the radio/sat grid we use for connecting to the web, and so we are now able to do stuff our old PCs can’t really do. But we are now in the 21st century as far as web connection is concerned: we’ve got the same transfer rates you get in, I don’t know, Seoul or Tokyo. Which is good news, and only costs us an extra 5 bucks per bimester.
And once again I had to feel grateful for my friends, that two years ago gave me the radio/sat connection as a birthday gift – because when you are lost in Astigianistan, without the web you’re dead.
Seven minutes into the pilot of Blood & Treasure, the new TV series by CBS, I stopped laughing and decided that life’s too short to waste time with such irritatingly cliched writing. And it’s a pity, really, because there’s obviously money backing the series, that was shot on location in a number of places, including my hometown of Turin, but the writing is so abysmal, I really couldn’t make it. I wanted to, because at one point I thought it might be fun to do a post on Karavansara. I went back and restarted it. I stopped watching 11 minutes in.
Let’s see what we are talking about…
An antiquities expert teams up with an art thief to catch a terrorist who funds his attacks using stolen artifacts.
Oh, yes, fair warning: here be SPOILERS. True, I’m gonna spoil only the first ten minutes of the pilot, and a lot of the things you already saw in the trailer, but… S P O I L E R S!!
I will devote part of this weekend to a few small writing projects. Now that the bulk of a big project’s behind me, I find my will to write back in full force. Closing a project is always soul-draining, for a number of reasons, but if nothing else, it looks like I’ve learned to bounce back quick enough. So, what will I be doing?
Karavansara 