Because we love women.
Have a good Women’s Day!
International Women’s Day, 2021
Something I hated for over thirty years
Last night, chatting with my players online in a lull of our weekly game, I mentioned the fact that right now I am not able to sit down and read a good book. Or even a not-so-good book.
Fact is, I am working on the double to fulfill a number of writing contracts.
And this is good.
But at the end of the day, my brain is so spent, I can’t read anymore – I can’t focus on what’s on the page.
I am writing on the double – almost literally – a story I’ve sold to a very high profile anthology, and a story I hope to sell to another very high profile anthology. And in the meantime, I am working on a ghostwriting gig.
And here’s the rub – to write my client’s book, I need to transcribe a few hours of interviews. The sort of work that Erle Stanley Garnder handed out to an army of typists. But alas, I am no Erle Stanley Gardner, and I must do my own typing.
I always hated it.
Back when I was in university, the Petrography course was one of the great watersheds in the Geology curriculum – you followed the course, and then you failed the exam. Repeatedly.
And so you took the course again the following year. And you failed the exam again. And again.
The course was four months of lessons. Three days a week, eight hours of lecturing per day. Even while you were doing the practical on the microscope, the teacher was lecturing you.
So people started bringing recorders to class – and then, to type down the recorded lessons.
And I hated it.
Because it’s not true, what they say, that by listening to the tapes while you transcribe the text, you memorize it better.
It’s a long, boring, soul-crushing chore.
And that’s what I am doing now.
But hey, it’s a well paid job, so no complaining.
Only, I’d like to be clear-headed enough, after dinner, to enjoy a good book.
Or even a not-too-good book.
In the end, I passed that exam.
Petrography was my last exam, and I prepared it while working by night in a phone switch station – ironically, taping calls to ensure quality control.
How I did it?
I ditched the suggested book the teacher told us to use, and found a good book instead.
Bang, done. And no tapes involved.
Space Patrol, in German
I was always pretty wary of nostalgia, and I’ve become even more so in the last few years, after seeing nostalgia weaponized and used to sell cartloads of rubbish to people that, basically, were reacting to a manufactured nostalgia for something they had not, in fact, experienced first hand.
And yet.
Yesterday I read in Variety a Bavarian production company is set to launch a new series of Raumpatrouille – that’s Space Patrol in German – a 1966 series that was probably the first proper SF show I ever saw on television, in the early ’70s, when I was in primary school.
Boy, we loved that show – all seven episodes of it.
The complete title was quite a mothful, in original: Raumpatrouille – Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffes Orion.
The plot: in a future in which humanity has become a single people as is exploring space, major Clif Allister McLane and the crew of the starship Orion face menaces both natural and not, including the expansionist plans of an alien race known as the Frogs.
The series was shot in black and white, and REALLY on the cheap – and yet it turned out to be too expensive for the production company, that had to pull the plug after barely seven 1-hour episodes because they had run out of money.
Continue readingNot a country for writers
Last night my fried Hell (yes, they really call him like tat) got royally pissed off at Lavie Tidhar, the multi-award winning author of Central Station and many other great books.
Hell is an excellent writer and an equally excellent editor – indeed, he served as co-editor on a few of my projects. He’s got a fun series of SF novels set in the fictional desert town of Perfection, in a future world in which everything’s slowly unwinding, and humans co-exist with sexy robots and mutant desert foxes. He’s self-publishing his work in Italian.
Hell’s work’s been often compared to Tidhar’s in terms of complexity, irony and energy, and the two authors were born one month apart from each other.
Only, you all know who Lavie Tidhar is, and none of you ever heard about Germano Hell Greco. How come?
School of hard knocks: Monster Hunter (2020)
I did not have great expectations when I started watching Monster Hunter, the 2020 movie based on a popular videogame property by Capcom. I never played the videogames, and I had a very sketchy idea of the setup. All I knew was there is Milla Jovovich in it – and I quite like her – and that it was written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, a man that should be hanged and quartered for what he did to the Three Musketeers.
So, you get an idea of what I was expecting.
Windy day
The weather is breaking. It’s not so cold anymore, and the days are windy and the sun bright. The grey cat is back, and he wants food, when he’s not laying in the sun, an eye out for intruders. And as it usually happens when there’s a wind, my bones ache and my muscles are cramped.
After the deep winter lethargy, I am moving on to spring crankiness.
Then it will be summer heat fatigue, and crankiness again with autumn.
The only way to feel all right is probably move to a tropical island, but that’s not going to happen any time soon.
In the first 60 days of 2021, I submitted a total of 24 stories, articles and pitches – and managed to sell six against four rejections so far. A great start, if a lot of hard work.
And this morning I signed a contract for a ghostwriting gig – which means an advance is coming, and if it’s true I’ll have to spend six weeks working hard, it also means we’ll be able to get our bills covered to the summer.
So, yes, things are going the right way.
And really, if there is a problem right now – apart from the aching bones due to the windy weather – is the fact that I need to write faster, or decide what projects will have to wait for a better time.
And there’s just too many great opportunities right now on my plate.
A nice change – while we are back in the Orange Zone, and we cannot leave our village.
But this is also a positive thing – the overwork does not give me time to feel the stress of the general seesaw of small-scale lockdowns, quarantine and continued precautions.
So yes – if you don’t see me around too often, it’s basically because I am writing.
But there’s other stuff coming, for the blog too.
Like that guy said, running is after all just keeping falling forward.
I’m getting good at it.
Spies, monsters, musketeers and podcasts
These are confusing days – I’m working of fifteen things at the same time, and the time never seems enough. Which means the blog updates are becoming erratic, and I am sorry for that.
So, here’s a brief rundown of what I am doing, just to keep you in the loop.
Karavansara 