I’m stealing the idea for this post from Mike Brooks, and his podcast about his five biggest failures of 2014.
Mike notes that…
Of course I don’t see failures as a negative. To me failure is simply a necessary part of success.
It’s my sort of thing – I’m good at failure.
So – where and how have I failed in 2014?1 Continue reading
There’s something I noticed – I’m getting fast.
At writing, I mean.
Not the mechanical act – I’m still a lousy typist.
The writing, getting the ideas on paper, has become easier.
In the last 24 hours I did the main research and put down the core 5000 words for a short pulpy historical essay I hope I’ll publish by the end of the month, I hammered out 750 words of a story I’d like to pitch to a very hard market overseas, and wrote the detailed synopsis and outline for two novels I’m trying to place with another publisher.
Plus this post – that is very short – and another, longer one for my Italian blog. Continue reading
This post makes a pair with yesterday’s detox post.
I started Karavansara as an experiment, as a way to improve my English and as a reason to start and look outside of my country – but also as a safety valve.
Should everything else fail, I’d be able to kill strategie evolutive (my Italian blog) and go on doing my things here.
I guess anyone who’s keeping a blog or leading some kind of on-line writing activity feels like getting away from it all once in a while. Continue reading
Today (well, ok, yesterday) the postman delivered a second-hand copy of Robert Byron‘s The Road to Oxiana, the 1980s Picador paperback edition, the one with the Bruce Chatwin intro.
I paid it about one euro.
It goes to replace my old Picador Edition, bought in a fancy Turin bookstore in the late 80s, and later… ehm, misplaced, by a friend who borrowed it.
It also replaces my rather expensive Italian translation, Adelphi edition, which a former girlfriend decided to keep when we parted company (together with a lot of other stuff, now that I think about it).
And the used Oxiana book goes to re-form the pair with Byron’s other book – First Russia, Then Tibet – the Penguin books edition which I bought all those years ago together with the misplaced book. Continue reading
Karavansara 