In his book About Writing, British novelist Gareth L Powell devotes a chapter to THE FEAR, a ghost that haunts the life of many – if not all – writers, the Beastie on the back (to quote Jethro Tull) of those that do creative work.
Powell describes it thus…
We’ve all been there.
I was there, actually, no more than half an hour ago, as I reviewed the first part of Shadow of the Rat God, and concluded it’s the most worthless, useless pile of wasted words I ever put together.
The title of this post is what my brother told me this morning as he wrapped himself in a bunch of blankets and went back to sleep. We’re still waiting for the delivery of the LAN cable, so he’s been revising some work, but really can’t do anything. So he’s catching up on lost sleep.
We have a mouse in our house. So far he’s ignored the traps we’ve set, and he’s raiding our pantry during the night, and in general making a lot of weird noises. But last night, feeling like he wanted something special, he bit through one of the LAN cables of our home network, cutting through it and isolating my brother’s PC from the web.
Now we’ll have to buy a new one, and the closest computer store in the area is 20 miles away, and we don’t have a car. So it’s an order via Amazon, which means – because we are in a very special place – waiting for a week.
And the fracking mouse is still at large, and tonight it will be showtime again – and let’s hope he has not developed a taste for LAN cables.
Next step – invite in one of the feral cats that have made our courtyard their favorite spot for sunbathing and having a bite. It would be of mutual utility – we grant the cat a warm place for the winter, he takes care of the damn mice.
One thing that usually makes me laugh – or depresses me, depending on my mood – is when one of my esteemed Italian colleagues points out that I am too classy and complicated, in my stories, too off-putting and not ready enough to go down to the level of my readers. In a market that’s requiring increasingly simplistic and adolescent stories, being told by a colleague (or a publisher!) “you’re too classy” is the kiss of death, the professional equivalent of a 2-star review on Amazon.
Game over, man. Game. Over.
Right now I am writing a new Aculeo & Amunet story, and I have been looking for a title. To start on the right foot, I ran through the previous stories of the series…
Continue readingAt the end of last week I took part in the Nizza Monferrato book fair, Libri in Nizza, to meet a few old friends and talk about books and stuff. The event took place in the Foro Boario, a vast public hall that was created refurbishing the old cattle market. Due to causes independent of the organization’s decisions, the temperature inside was probably 35°, with a humidity fit to growing orchids. As a result, I am now here with a fever, and a sore throat I am treating with honey drops and hot tea.
My head is killing me, and I am wracked by cough.
Aren’t these cultural events a wonder?
But it was generally fun, and afterwards we had a pizza at Casablanca’s, and talked shop, and projects, and stuff.
Then I came home and woke up next morning without a voice, but with a fever.
Now I am taking a few days off, laying in bed and reading.
Thanks to a special promotion on Amazon.it, I finally got myself the first three books in the Foreigner series by C.J. Cherryh, and I am enjoying them a lot.
After more than forty years as a science fiction reader, Cherryh is still one of my favorite authors, and the first Foreigner book I am currently reading is everything I have come to expect from this superb writer.
It makes it worth while being down with a sore throat and a fever.
I am experiencing some technical issues (and a bout of bad health), so I’m not doing much these days. I’m falling behind with my writing and with my post, and everything else. But I was browsing some old paperback art and I happened to spot this picture…
… and I thought, wow, that’s a story I’d like to write.
Turns out this is a Robert Maguire cover for a novel called The Deadly Lady of Madagascar, bt Frank G. Slaughter (nice name for someone writing about deadly ladies) that I will try and find somehow.
If I can’t write it, I can certainly read it.
Back when I was young and I was trying to read all the fantasy and science fiction I was able to lay my hands on, a holy grail of sorts was the books of the series Thieves’ World, edited by Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey. It was one of the earlier shared universes in the genre, and it featured the works of an incredible selection of writers.
The volumes were published in Italy by Fanucci, in a series of hardback volumes that were very expensive if you were a teenager, that featured mismatched covers, sometimes iffy translations, and normally included extra stories by Italian authors that were a little more than iffy.
I think I have two volumes, bought at a discount from a second-hand bookstall by my old high school.
Karavansara 