An unwritten rule of writing… well, it works for me, at least, is that in the moment you see deadlines looming massively on the horizon, and you have lots of stuff to write and deliver…
a . a number of other projects suddenly catch your interest
b . you get a ton of great ideas worth developing
c . you get buried in great books to read
As I said, I don’t know if it’s only me, but the problem seems to be widespread. Continue reading
August is crawling nearer – and with August, the dead calm that signals that the whole country has stopped, and it will be in a state of half-life up to the first decade of September.
A relic of another time, when the whole nation stopped for the vacations at the same time, the Italian August sargasso is to me, this year, a true nightmare.
Work on translations and such has dried up in the last few days… useless to start a job in July, when then in August everything will be frozen in the leaden ennui of a dead country.
Better to postpone all contracts and discussions.
We’ll talk about it in September.
It’s always been like this. Continue reading
On Tor.com, fifteen books in translation worth waiting for – including Macchina Zer0, the speculative fiction collection I designed and I am editing!
One of the problems of reading (mainly) English-language books is that a certain section of the world remains under-represented.
Events and characters are somewhat edited out of history if they did not directly intersect the history of the English-speaking people.
This becomes painfully true when we focus on the Victorian era, or more generally on the time in which the red was widespread on the map, and Britain ruled an empire.
Case in point: Pierre Gabriel Édouard Bonvalot.
An explorer and geographer, Bonvalot explored cCentral Asia in 1880-1882, his expedition financed by the French Ministry of Education. A second expedition in 1886-1887 saw him move east from Russian Central Asia to Sinkiang.
Now, I did not know anything about Bonvalot – which is mighty embarassing, considering I wrote a non-fiction book about explorers in Central Asia. I can plead non-guilty pointing out that my book covers only the first half of the 20th century.. but let’s face it, it’s embarrassing anyway. Continue reading
Karavansara 