England | Karavansara

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands.
(H.P. Lovecraft)

Selection_897 I’m taking a moment to plug a book that’s been a great resource for my stories and a great read altogether.
I’ve been checking it out again during the Halloween season, because there is an increase in the request for ghost stories and supernatural horror, and before that it provided me with one of the two ideas on which I built my story in the Zappa & Spada anthology.

The book is called The Lore of the Land and it is a massive tone by Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson. Continue reading →

Targets are important.
Important in general, and important when you are writing.
The basic target for a writer is finishing the damn story, of course*.
But there are other targets – word counts, word per day, are classics.
And then, paying the bills is another extremely good target – highly motivational.

Right now, I’m setting myself a new target – an important one, one for which I feel strongly.
I plan to write and publish enough stories (mostly in English) and non-fiction (mostly in Italian), so that I can put together enough money to go to London in August 2014, and meet my friends for the 2014 WorldCon, also known as Loncon 3.
I have less than 12 months, but I will make it.

I was supposed to go to the Worldcon in Japan, in 2009, but the sudden death of my mother forced me to change my plans.
And this year I had planned a trip to Texas for the 2013 Worldcon – but unfinished business with my university, the horrid state of my country’s finance and the worse state of my own finances forced me to drop that idea too.

Now, I want to go to Loncon 3.
And I think it would be just great to pay for the trip with my writing.

It’s a big target, and one that is very dear to my heart.
But I’ll put everything in to make it.
And now it’s public, I can’t back down.

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*There’s two kind of writers: those that finish the story, and those that do not.