There’s this story I heard a few days ago, that goes like this:
Q: How do you know that a stand-up comedian is being too successful?
A: All of their new jokes suddenly are about hotel rooms, airports and comedy venues.
The risk of success is, you start working on your successful routine and you lose touch with everything else. Staying in touch with what’s out there, with everyday life, with people and events and ideas is absolutely indispensable to keep having fresh ideas.
Continue readingYesterday, the crowdfunding for the Italian-language edition of my game Hope & Glory was funded, with still over a week to go for some little extra – we’ve got a brace of stretch goals to unlock. Considering I had been told less than two weeks ago that it would be a disaster and we’d never make it, this is a great moment for me, for my partners in crime in developing the game, and for the team that worked on the crowdfunding.
And less than one hour ago I learned that my science fiction short story Sapiens has been accepted for publication in a magazine. This is a professional sale – the first this year, and the third in the batch of stories I have submitted between October the 1st and December the 31st. There are still eight stories in the loop being evaluated, and I have three more slated for submission by the end of the month.
Let’s hope this is not a flash in the pan, and that 2019 will see more of my stuff reaching the public.
No need to make a fuss about it: my favorite Stephen King book is Danse Macabre, with On Writing coming second. I’ve read also a nice share of King’s fiction, but I always found his essays a lot more interesting.
On the other hand, I was quite curious to read The Colorado Kid, for two main reasons:
With such credentials, I said to myself, it had to be good.
And so, having received a copy as a gift for Christmas, I spent two evenings reading it. And here’s a few thoughts.
I’m currently taking an online sketching course. It’s quite good, and while I’m going mighty slow, I can see a certain improvement. Nothing to write home about, but small steps away from stick figures.
My lack of graphical skills was always a problem to me – in part, because as a geologist and paleontologist, you are required to be able to sketch, in part because it crippled some of my very earliest projects.
What is Christmas without a good mystery? Or even better, a ghost story… because what I have here right now does feel a lot like a ghost story, a haunting, in its own way.
I mentioned a while back how my periodic mail from Amazon with suggestions and offers had suddenly become filled with books (and DVDs!) about Mussolini and the Fascist Regime.
I am happy to report that the problem has no longer presented itself, and in the last weeks Amazon’s suggestions have been happily free of Fascist stuff, and limited to my own books (Amazon is always sure to let me know that I “might be interested” in something I actually friggin’ wrote) and books by Italian authors I detest.
But something new came up, and it is intriguing indeed.
There’s basically three categories into which the stories I am writing these days fall. This is something I was considering this morning, while I divided my time between a short that doesn’t want to work, and checking how my latest ebook is doing on KDP.
My brother is an amateur criminologist with a thing for Jack the Ripper – maybe I have already mentioned in the past his blog, Red Jack – and yesterday he mentioned to me two interesting facts:
And today a friend, a widely published British writer, mentioned on Facebook the fact that he once sought immortality through his art – or, if not sought, he sort of gave it a thought – but nowadays he’s sceptical. He observed, and I agree, that our books are not a reliable portrait, as they represent a snapshot of what we were in a certain moment in time.
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Karavansara 