It’s the Great Villain Blogathon, an orgy of evil and nefariousness hosted by the blogs Silver Screenings, Shadows & Satin and Speakeasy. So please direct your browser to one of these blogs – or all three of them, why not? – and check out a plethora of posts about the bad guys of the movies – because we know it, right? A good hero is meaningless unless he’s faced with a good villain.
Once you have checked out the other posts, be sure to come back here, because we have a great villain waiting in the wings, and we found him in the 8th dimension nonetheless. So get ready for a close encounter wit Dr. Emilio Lizardo, alias Lord John Whorfin. And no kiddin’.
My birthday fundraiser in favor of The Ocean Cleanup just overshot the target figure of 200 euro, and is currently at 215€ – that’s 240 bucks and 43 cents for you out there in the US. And there’s still two weeks to go. I am impressed and pleased and humbled, all together in a single bundle. So I’m just posting this to say thank you!
And so it’s out, and I can finally post the cover – that I had shown you a while back, I think – and a link to buy my novella Heart of the Lizard, the fist (hopefully) story in a series set in the world of Andrea Sfiligoi’s game Four Against Darkness. The book is published by Ganesha Games, and includes a novella and a big appendix with all the gaming material you need to use in your games the magic, creatures, monsters and treasures you read about. Andrea wrote the appendix, and also illustrated the book. The book is currently available as a pdf, with the paperback coming soon.
It’s the 160th birthday of Arthur Conan Doyle, the man who gave us Sherlock Holmes, then took him away from us, and then gave him back to us. And as a way to celebrate this day, I think I’ll spend the rest of the evening to work on my Sherlock Holmes pastiche. Who knows, maybe ACD’s ghost will come around and inspire me. But I doubt it.
This is a good moment for me. I’ve got work to do, lots of it – 12 hours per day until September if I’m lucky, to cover all the contracts I signed. My stories are selling reasonably well. I even got an invitation to participate in an SF anthology with a number of other Italian writers, all of them much more popular than I am. I’m thinking about it. My Patreon is growing, slowly but steadily (thank you guys!) And there’s money in the bank. Not a fortune, but enough to give me some breathing space, say two months without panic attacks and bill anxieties.
And in exactly one week I’ll be 52. Well beyond the halfway point, sailing uncharted waters, but reasonably happy.
For this reason when the Facebook pop-up … well, popped up and suggested I do a fundraiser for my birthday, I thought, why not? I can’t donate much, but I have a lot of contacts and friends and followers. I can’t ask for money to any one of them – they already buy my books, support me on Patreon… I can’t ask.
But there’s nothing wrong with dropping a rock in the pond, and see if the ripples cause some interesting effect.
I chose this one because I am a failed oceanographer, I love sea stories and undersea mysteries, and I wrote a few stories in the past that deal with the sea. And because the pollution of our oceans is a global concern that touches a global audience – and I have friends and contacts everywhere.
So, in the next two weeks I’ll try and raise 200 euros for The Ocean Cleanup. A pretty small sum, you may say, and I agree. A drop in the ocean. But as that guy said, the ocean is made of drops, isn’t it?
I’ll keep you posted about the results. Meanwhile, if you feel like, spread the word.
My friend Flavia says she re-reads Stephen King’s Joyland every year, usually in June, because she likes how it makes her feel. And I know a lot of people that did not like the book – and it’s because of both Flavia’s opinion and of those people’s opinion that I went and read it. I said I’d write a review when I finished it. Guess what… I finished it.
I’ll start by saying that Joyland plays a dangerous game, because it’s both a crime thriller and a ghost story, and if mixing genres is always dangerous, it is also true that ghost stories often deal with the revelation of some dark secret, the avenging of some old crime. So, it’s a classic mix, and it works fine. Many also point out that Joyland is a coming-of-age story, and this is throwing another genre (or is it a theme?) into the mixer. As I said, a dangerous game, that King pulls so nicely it seems effortless.
Karavansara 