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’s a saying in the place where I grew up, “When the holy souls get going…”, that’s used to describe an unexpected bout of bad weather, especially when you have planned to go somewhere. This is a play on the fact that saints should be accompanied by bright light and pleasant colors when they manifest – but you decided to go somewhere, and now it’s pouring, or snowing or something.
In the last 36 hours various parts of Piedmont were hit by hailstorms that left the streets choked with ice. And here in the Valley of the Belbo, black clouds have been piling up since early this morning.
“It was for tonight, right?” my brother asked, referring to our planned Microadventure. “Tonight, yeah,” I said. And it started raining like there was no tomorrow.
So, it’s for another night. The plan is to do a circuit among the hills, on foot, leaving somewhere around 7 pm and walk up past the graveyard and the old chapel, and then up to the plateau where my family used to have some land. It’s only vineyards up there, but about six kms from the village is a country-style roadhouse/pub that’s open late into the night. The idea is to get there, have a bite and a drink, and then start down on the other side, finding a nice place to look at the stars and do some night photography, and then be back home by dawn.
But not tonight – it’s raining so much a couple of giraffes stopped by to ask for directions, and the road to the old chapel is a waterfall. When holy souls get going…
The first post in the Turntable series was so consistently ignored, one would be tempted to just close the lid of the record player and forget about the whole thing, but I actually like the idea of talking, here on my blog, of a different form of storytelling… and then I prepared a banner for the series! I can’t use the banner just once, right? I might as well do another post and see if something changes…
The old Ricordi music store in Via Roma/Piazza CLN, Turin, was on three floors – at ground floor they had pop and rock records, downstairs in the basement they had classic and opera, and upstairs they kept jazz and blues. If you happened to visit the store on a Saturday afternoon, you’d get crowded in the pop and rock section, but in the classic and jazz departments there would be precious little people, and air conditioning.
There are a lot of things I learned from my friend Riccardo, who’s been gone now for a few years. He was the one that taught me the one trick you need to know to start reading in English, and he was the one that asked me if I was crazy because I wanted to show my stories to a certain publisher, thus saving me from a fate worse than death. And he taught me that sometimes we need to detox, as readers and – as I would later learn – as writers. He also taught me how to do it.
You come to a point, he used to say, when everything you read feels the same. It’s because you’ve been reading too much of the stuff, be it science fiction or fantasy or horror or any other genre. Or just any fiction. So you need to take a break and clean up your systems.
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.
Did you know you can watch Russian TV shows, subtitled in English, on Youtube? I did not, but yesterday a contact suggested to me a Russian series from 2016, called Detective Anna (or, alternatively, Anna the detective) , and by googling I found it all on Youtube, subtitled, for free. So I watched the first two episodes, and it was quite fun.
As usual during periods of intensive writing I like to watch a TV series or a movie in the evenings (you may have noticed a lot of posts about serials, recently, on Karavansara), and it looks like Anna Mironova will keep me company in the next few years.
Karavansara 