So I was interviewed online, using Facebook, daring the horror of the nested comments and Mr Zuckerberg less than perfect notification system. It was fun, I was dutifully grilled by the attendees, and I hope we will do it again.
And now, for your entertainment, here’s a quick-and-dirty translation of what was asked, and what was answered.
Enjoy!
Today it was a strange day.
It started early this morning, as I delivered the first draft of a 100.000-words novel I wrote as a ghostwriter.
Then I was contacted by a perspective client for a translation – “everybody tells me your translations are terrible, but depending on your price I might give you the job.”
And goodness knows I need the money – summer is always a hard time, and coming just after the lockdown, it is twice so – but there is a limit; my dignity will not pay the mortgage, but neither will accepting this sort of blackmail.
Then I submitted two flash fictions to two different magazines – which brings the total number of submission this year to 27. Not bad. I do not have many hopes for the two flash fictions, but well, if you don’t mail them they won’t reject them, but they can’t buy them either.
And finally, I did an interview on Facebook – on the page of the popular Italian lit blog Liberi di Scrivere, I took all comers, and answered their questions. It was a fun way to spend one hour – and I hope my interviewers were as pleased as I was.
As soon as the interview is out, I’ll ask permission to translate it, and post it here.
And now here I am, doing a bit of research for a short folk horror story I’d love to write and submit before the weekend.
Thank goodness I still find writing an endless source of fun.
I’ve just seen this…
… and said to myself I’d really really like to write an off-beat pirate story.
But first I’ve got other things to finish.
Now, was this fast or what?
I started reading E.C. Tubb’s The Winds of Gath around lunchtime, and by tea time it was over. The novel is pretty slim – 240 pages, in fact, and it’s pretty fast reading, but all in all I’m well pleased, and I’ll go on reading the series as long as it manages to be this fun.
So, what’s this all about?
Continue readingBack when I was starting as a science fiction reader – as to say, in the late ’70s – I chanced upon an article in a magazine that basically quartered and killed E.C. Tubb and his Dumarest series. Cheap, repetitive, boring, bad bad bad. Oh, well, I took note and moved on – it’s not like there wasnt other stuff to read, right?
Fast forward to 2017 and the announcement that a TV series was in the works based on the Dumarest novels. Back then, a friend dropped on me the whole 33-books series, telling me it was a good opportunity for me to brush up on the plot before the series hit our screens.
The series never happened, I never read the books.
Then, this morning, two things happened.
Continue readingLet’s talk about crime, shall we? As those that have chanced to read my BUSCAFUSCO novellas probably know, I’m not that much into homicide. It was Agatha Christie, I believe, that said that a proper whodunnit should feature a homicide, but, really… c’mon, Agatha, there are so many crimes that are a lot more interesting!
And mind you, I like a good murder mystery just like the next guy, but having the possibility, I do prefer softer but trickier crimes.
Continue readingA lot of online reviewers were less than kind with Black Lagoon‘s second season – called The Second Barrage. Most lamented the absence of Dutch and Benny from many episodes, the excessive focus on Rock and Revy’s “relationship”, and the less frantic action. So I was rather curious to see what it would look like.
And to me it looks… quite interesting.
To recap, Black Lagoon is an early 2000s anime/manga series set in the ’90s, and focusing on the day-to-day lives of a team of mercenaries, the Black Lagoon Trading Co., operating in the South China Sea. The first season follows four successive narrative arcs, throwing in a lot of firepower and an ample cast of supporting characters – including an organization of gun-running nuns, a Triad’s boss that is obviously Chow Yun Fat from A better tomorrow II, and a formidable unit of former Soviet special forces, known as Hotel Moscow, now working for the Russian Mafia.
Continue reading
Karavansara 