Pulp TV – Adventure, Inc.

Looking for some diversion in this dead dead dead week of mid-August, when Italy all but shuts down and it feels like a zombie plague is on, I dug up the DVDs of Adventure Inc., an old TV series from 2002 which I missed when it first came out, and shelved after viewing the first three episodes.

The series was apparently inspired by the exploits of real-life adventurer and treasure hunter Barry Clifford – and this is the foremost reason of interest, for me, as I read and liked Clifford’s books quite a bit (we’ll talk about the guy sooner or later).

Then it’s an adventure series, and I’m a sucker for adventure.
And while a cursory perusal of the first three episodes left me cold way back in the days of yore, now boredom has been mightier than that initial disappointment, and I gave the series a second opportunity. Continue reading →

Mark Cousin’s piece in The Observer is recommended reading

Middle-class rules deaden too many arts venues. Let’s fill them with life and noise

11 August 2014
by Davide Mana 6 Comments

Adopting Scrivener

Now, it was Douglas Adams, I think, that used to say that trying new software was an excellent procrastination tool to avoid the actual act of writing.
I must agree.
And so, being finally able to run Scrivener on my Ubuntu-based old pc, I jumped at the opportunity of burning a weekend toying with the new writing tool.

For the uninitiated, Scrivener is a word processing software and a writing environment aimed at creative writers – it comes with presets for authors of fiction and non fiction, for screenwriters etc.
It’s highly popular and comes with rave reviews, and there’s a Linux version – which is fine, because sometimes the “sorry, Win/Mac users only” thing is frustrating.

Continue reading →

Very interesting piece by author Jim C. Hines.
Curiously enough I got into a similar discussion two days back, and was planning apost about it – but this is better than anything I could have written.

Using Asian Cultures as Props

10 August 2014
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

My poor elephants have nowhere to go

Forgotten wonders from the past.
Let’s say you’re a film-maker and you’ve got a great story – about a bunch of eccentrics that decide that working for a living’s a waste of time, it’s much better to live for unspecified kicks, trying to improvise a living.
Good idea for a comedy caper movie.
But there’s a catch – it’s 1944, and there’s a war going on – and the Censorship commission would never approve a movie about people unwilling to be valuable members of society.

What do you do?
Simple – you set your movie in the future, after the war is over.

A bona-fide science fiction film (hey, it’s set in the future, right?) Give us the Moon is a strange movie, with machine-gun witty dialogues and a strange prophetic value – the “White Elephants Society” is an uncanny parody of the existentialist and beat crowds that were, at the time of filming, at least 5 years in the future.

The sparkling lady is gorgeous Margaret Lockwood, the twittering girl is future superstar Jean Simmons.
The movie was directed by legendary director Val Guest, based on a novel by Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon, called The Elephant is White.
For interested parties, getting the movie is a little easier than finding a good copy of the book.

9 August 2014
by Davide Mana 3 Comments

Author events for digital books

Author events and presentations.
I like those a lot.
I was at one, yesterday evening.
Quite instructive experience.

And it got me wondering – I’ve twenty ebooks out now, covering a wide range of genres in fiction and non fiction.
A presentation might be a good way to move a few dozen copies, and also do something completely different.
A change of pace, a chance to connect with the readers.

But the point is – how do I go about it? Continue reading →

8 August 2014
by Davide Mana 2 Comments

Writing Prompt – I Searched on Google…

“Things that chicks dig”

… and here’s what I found.
This was an experiment – commenting on my post from yesterday, my friend Marina suggested that querying Google for “things that chicks dig” is another bad way of gaining inroads into the female psyche.
But you know me: I had to try anyway.
So I tried.
The image above was among the first five results provided by Google.
We’ll leave the discussion and writing assignment as summer homework for the students…