There’s a comet in the sky, and it will be at its brightest next week, which is fitting, considering Christmas is approaching and all that. A good opportunity to carry outside my telescope and some hot chocolate, and spend a few hours watching. The comet is called 46P/Wirtanen, and it is not visible in the naked eye except in really clear sky/no lights areas; but otherwise can actually be spotted with a good pair of binoculars.
I am currently about 5000 words into the new BUSCAFUSCO novella, called Fun & Games. The ideas for the new cases had been laying in the back of my mind for months, and I needed a vacation. I plan to have the story finished soon-ish, other engagements permitting.
Writing to calls from publishers is fun and it’s – hopefully – profitable, but sometimes the constraints are too tight. It’s good to open a file and just let the ideas and dialogues pour out, let well-established characters do their thing, take life and run away with the story. And BUSCAFUSCO’s is one of my favorite in this sense. There is a simple formula, there is a cast of characters I am familiar with and I like to write about, there is the Belbo Valley as a venue, an inexhaustible source of strange ideas and weird crimes.
Continue readingA TV series canceled by Fox after a brief first season of ten episodes. Hadn’t we just left this party?
I have come to discover Houdini & Doyle, the 2016 series killed by Fox after ten episodes, through a circuitous way: I am currently watching, and enjoying, the 1920s whodonnit series Frankie Drake Mysteries, and I was trawling the web in search of details about the series leads.
I am particularly fond of the Mary Shaw character, as portrayed by Rebecca Liddiard, and through her IMDB profile I found a few series that looked promising.
Because after all, an intriguing premise and a star I like are enough for me to give a series a try.
Continue readingFairy tales again, but not in a noir/hardboiled style – this time it is science fiction: I’ve just got a call for a collection of SF takes on classic fairy tales, and here I am trying to figure out a viable plot. The pay is good, the limit is 15.000 words but I’m aiming for 5000.
The deadline is damn close – the 15th of December – but I have good hopes: I can write a story in two evenings.
So here I am juggling options – Sleeping Beauty is sort of obvious, you just change stasis fields for sleep spells, and it’s done. But it’s so obvious that it’s not such an original idea. And yes, originality is overrated, but sometimes it’s a good thing.
Otherwise, what?
A robotic version of Nutcracker?
Transhuman Three Little Pigs?
Jack and the Beanstalk set on top of a space elevator?
Back when I was in high school I wrote a story about a team-up of Odysseus, Loki and Sun Wukong, that looked like De Camp style fantasy, but was in fact science fiction.
The story was not very good (hey, I was 15!), and it’s been lost now for almost 35 years, but it might provide me with some neat ideas.
In the meantime, I have two further stories done halfway through, and in need of a serious shakedown – a straight fantasy with a sort of Dumas-esque setting, called Goblins by Candlelight (basically, a fantasy take on the home invasion genre), and an occult detective piece set – hypothetically – in Paris during the Belle Epoque. I want to have one of the two finished in the next 36 hours.
Insomnia rules.
Karavansara 