Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Tag Archives: writing


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Finding an alias

secret-identity_designI’m not particularly hot about pen names.
I happen to like the name my father and my mother gave me – and I like to have my achievements marked with my name.

On the other hand, while the vast majority of my colleagues in academia tend to find my activity as a fiction and gaming author perfectly all right, a few sometimes make a face at the idea.

How can you reconcile your work as a scientist and the fact that you write stories about little green men?

Now, disocunting the facts that
a . finding work as a scientist is getting harder by the hour
b . I never wrote a story about little green men
…
Discounting this, I was saying, I normally reply that I like to think about my readers as smart enough to tell scientific papers from fantasies.
If nothing else, scientific papers tend not to have weapons and monsters in them.
Usually.
But anyway, it can get hawkward.

Also, should things get really going, an author might need a number of alternate identities in order to place his or her stories on a variety of different markets at the same time – or on the same market!
Henry Kuttner used at least 21 pseudonyms, often appearing with more than one story in the same magazine, under different names.

name-tagSo, what if I wanted to find me a pen name?
Is it enough to open the phone directory at random two or three times, jotting down and mixing&matching first and last names?
Well, not exactly.

First, the author’s name on the cover influences the voice in which the reader perceives the narrative.
That’s why romance stories are usually presented as written by female authors – the female “voice” ringing in the reader’s head is considered more or less a given.

Which makes me wonder – is there a connection between the default “voice” of science fiction and fantasy and the fact that a lot of authors go by their initials?
H.P. Lovecraft. E.R. Burroughs, C.L. Moore, J.R.R. Tolkien, George R.R. Martin, C.J. Cherry…

Second, the name should fit the genre.
Sometimes it’s clear it’s a pen name, so why not use it to reinforce the product?
P.J. Storm does not write the same genre as Mary Walker.

And as we are at it, and we design our pen name as part of our marketing strategy – let’s check if the name’s already in use on the web.
can we use it as part of our email address, of our website URL, of our Twitter or Facebook account?
Will our alter ego be the first to pop up in a Google search?

All of this, plus the fact that we want our alias to be easy to remember, hard to get wrong (ever thought about what it means to be called J. Michael Straczynski, in terms of typos and bad searches?), and fast to sign (who knows, we may make it big with our stories, and find ourselves at conventions signing huge piles of books for the fans*.)

Finally, we should decide if our pen name will be just that – a name – or if we need to create a full alternate character, with a bio, a photo, the works.
This, again, might be part of our marketing strategy.
We are selling not just the story, but the author.

All of which means, it’s a lot of work.
But – with a little luck – I’ll be doing it soon.
If a certain story sells.

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* As Blondie used to sing, dreaming is free.

 

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Himmler’s Geologists

It all began talking with some friends about pulp gaming and pulp literature.

Q: Great pulp villains?
A: Nazis!

Layout 2In fact the Nazi as bad guy is not sch a given in pulp fiction – Nazis arrived late to be central villains during the Golden Age of pulps.
Sure, there were a lot of quasi-Nazis, of more-or-less thinly disguised Reich references, in the pulps; such as the fascistic and evil (obviously) Black Police which seizes power in New York in the Norvell Page “Black Police” trilogy, featuring The Spider.
The series dates back to 1938 – and indeed, in ’37, brown shirts and other unsavory tipes were making their appearence on pulp mag covers.
But it was only when the USA entered the Second World War that Nazis made it big in the pulps- and in movie matinee serials.
I havethe suspect that in Britain things were different – I’ve got this hunch that Biggles tackled the Reich earlier than his Yankee counterparts.

But anyway, you know how it happens with pulp fans – you start talking Nazis and Indiana Jones, and two hours later you are discussing the Hollow earth and lost tribes of Vikings fighting against dinosaurs.
Or stuff like that.

And, talking about pulp Nazis and the Hollow Earth, I remembered the infamous SS-Wehrgeologen Bataillon 500 – a German unit which was involved in a series of atrocities in northeastern Itali in 1944 and 1945.

My interest for this unit arises from the fact they were actually colleagues of mine – the SS-WGB 500 was a unit composed almost entirely of geologists, with a few archaeologists thrown in for good measure.
Many of them had a splendid CV, and a long list of learned publications.
Then, they joined the SS.

The unit was founded in 1941 by Himmler himself – already a sign of pulp goodness – and featured a multinational membership: there were German, Scandinavian, Dutch and Italian geologists involved.
The geologists were primarily specialist in underground mining and mining engineering.
SS-WGB 500 operated only in Europe, and had strong connections with the Ahnenerbe (the Nazi-sponsored institution dealing with the past and the Aryan heritage). They were in Holland and inNormandy just before the D-Day, and then they were moved east, to the Italian Alps – apparently to design and set up a line of defecnce to hold the Russians from spilling in the plains of Northern Italy.
Or something.

One of the main connections with the Ahnenerbe was the unit leader, Rolf Höhne, an archaeologist.
Before he became the leader of the mysterious Geologist Battalion, he was one of the men responsible for the excavations in search of the body of Heinrich the First (the German king Himmler considered himself a reincarnation of), as part of a huge propaganda campaign that was afterwards strangely silenced.
Höhne’s articles on archaeology (and psaeudo-archaeology) appeared regularly on Schwartze Korps, the SS official magazine.
Höhne was the direct link between the Geologist Battallion and the Ahnenerbe, and was a notorious crackpot and a supporter of a lot of weird fringe theories including, you guessed it, the Hollow Earth Hypothesis.
H̦hne was also in contact with Bruno Beger and Hernst Schafer, the two anthropologists and SS poster boys that led the infamous SS Himalayan expedition Рthey were searching for traces of the Aryan ancestors.
Or maybe of the gate to subterrannean Agartha.
Or they were there to steal the Kanghyur (however that’s spelled) – a supposedly powerful tome of Atlantean knowledge.

Great source material for stories and games.

41j88edMsKL._SL500_AA300_Then, there is the historical detail – whatever their pulp mission could have been, the geologists and archaeologists of SS WGB 500 were involved in two terrible reprisal operations in the Italian Alps – in one case, executing the men in a village, and then shelling the houses from a distance, killing by firebomb women and children.
Luca Valente’s highly detailed I Geologi di Himmler is only available in Italian, but covers the events with precision, and a great documentary apparatus.

And of course, both Bager and Schafer ended up doing human experimentation on prisoners in concentration camps.

Alas, history is a lot crueler than the pulps.


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Words

I was making some calculations, last night.

numbers-721046In the last three years, I’ve been sticking to a very strict schedule of one post per day, at least, on my Italian blog, strategie evolutive – which is in the Top 20 of Italian literary blogs.
I normally post once a day (early in the morning), and my post clock at around 800 words (actually 600-1000, depending on subject, mood etc.)
That makes roughly 5000 words per week.
260.000 words per year.
I’m also doing at least one 500-1000 post per week for the science fiction/fantasy blogzine Il Futuro è Tornato – say another 40.000 words per year.
Starting this year – last month, actually – I’m also filing a review or two per month on the literary review blogzine Liberidiscrivere – nothing fancy, let’s say 1500/2000 words per month.
Before, I used to write roughly the same amounts for L’Indice dei Libri del Mese, and before that, I did something like 25.000 words per bimester for LibriNuovi, which was a paper/analog magazine (and now is making a comeback as a webzine – so maybe I’ll write stuff for them again).
So, make it another 12.000 words a year.
And now, I’m doing 2 or 3 posts per week, 300-600 words each, here on Karavansara.
Let’s say another 20.000 words.

Which gives me a total of about 330.000 per year of original contents, just blogging.
A figure I have no problem rounding up to 350.000, considering that I often do two posts per day on strategie evolutive, plus guest posts and stuff.

350.000 words per year.

And here I can stop and tell myself that my goal should be putting down 350.000 words of fiction and gaming material per year.
Now that would be great – because out of 350K words of fiction and gaming material, I could probably get roughly 150.000 good words, good stories, good gaming supplements.
Stuff worth publishing.

Currently, my fictional output is much lower than that.
I need to work on that.

What I find extremely ridiculous – and annoying – is that according to some Italian web-gurus, I am not a writer.
I do not have a certification, I do not have a badge, I did not kowtow in front of certain idols.
My output of 350.000 words per year, my 250.000/300.000 readers per year (and growing!), are meaningless.
Years spent generating a third of a million words of original content are not even providing me with any kind of qualification, or reference, or recognized skill.

And therefore all of this – the blogs, the webzines, the guest posts, the reviews – is not generating a single eurocent of revenue.
The simple idea of wishing for an honest revenue from blogging is considered vulgar, illegitimate and stupid, by the majority of people in my country.

Not only my status as a writer is denied, but I am not even allowed the simple dignity of a honest busker: even the simple PayPal donation button, or the link to the Amazon wishlist, is considered “begging”, and therefore a clear sign of a terrible lack of class and dignity.

And it is ridiculous – and annoying.


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Keep working

Getting old I’m getting lazy*.
So I need all the help I can to keep on track with my work.

So, right now I’m working on a game-related project, putting together a thing tentatively called The Claws of the Purple Cat.

Writing a game scenario is quite fun, but it is not like writing a story.
It’s more like putting together a construction kit for a story.

I’m writing in blocks – chunks of information that the game keeper will be able (hopefully) to assemble in the way and inthe order that fits his game.

It’s quite interesting, but as I said – I’m lazy.
So, to keep on the straight and narrow, I’m using you – my readers.

There’s a word countere here on the right – courtesy of Writertopia.
It shows my progress.
The-Penguins-of-Madagascar-Season-2-Episode-2-It-s-About-TimeThis way, I can’t let go and waste time napping or watching old Penguins of Madagascar reruns without publicly losing face.
Nice and smooth.
I’m blackmailing myself into working with a serious schedule.

And now, back to work.

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*Not that when I was younger I was any different, but my health was better, and I had more energy.


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On my TV – Sanctuary

Sanctuary - Saison 4I was rather unconvinced, when I first saw the earlier episodes of Sanctuary, the Canadian TV series starring Amanda Tapping.
I think it was the rather clunky (?) CGI sets.
And yet, today – as the fourth series is being aired here in Italy – I’m a fan.
I actually like it a lot better than, say, Eureka (which bores me to death) or Battlestar Galactica.

After all, a series featuring a science team investigating cryptozoology to protect the cryptids, featuring a sasquatch as a character, involving much (computer-generated) globetrotting, an ancient race of Twilight-free vampires, a hollow earth setting, references to ancient mysteries and whatnot…?
With Jack the Ripper as one of the good guys?
And a descendant of Thor Heyerdahl as a member of the cast?
Together with that woman from Stargate SG-1?

C’mon – it’s obvious that my interest for the series should border on the fetish.
Add the slightly steampunkish feel of some episodes and of part of the premises, and I’m sold. Continue reading →


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Keeping busy

It’s a busy season.
My research work is picking up speed again – while my University engagements force me to 36-hours/1000+ Kms trips week in, week out.
I’m learning to work on trains, which is something I was never good at before.

In the meantime, in the extracurricular department, I’m pleased to say I’m working on a scenario for a roleplaying game -something I hope I’ll see published late this year. My brother is also involved in a the project with a work of his own, on which I’ll act as revisor/editor.
The Mana Brothers ride again.

I’m also working on an instant book of sorts – a short’n’sweet non-fiction ebook that could be the first in a series should sales impress the publisher enough.
Let’s call it an experiment.

AND I’m working on two translations – one of which is due for tomorrow morning!

And finally, I shood rebooth my online course in Taoist Culture, which should have restarted last month, but I was forced to put on the afterburner due to bad health and other problems.

overworked-1The mystery remains – how comes I do so much work and still I struggle to make ends meet?
Which boils down to the basic problem with Italy where creative work is concerned – creative work is not considered “serious” work.
It is underpaid, or – if they can get away with it – it’s not paid at all.
I’ll have to make a post on this subject.

In top of all this, I keep reading books and writing stories.

Which explains, I guess, why the updates of Karavansara are so erratic of late.

But I’ll pick up speed again.


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Do It Yourself

Two or three years back I was in the audience at a panel, held during the Turin Book Fair, whan one member of the public asked a well known editor “What would you suggest to a kid that wants to become a writer?”
The editor replied “Don’t!”
And then expanded, explaining there’s already too many writers out there, while readers are getting scarcer by the day.
He came across as an all-around jerk, but they tell me that’s the persona he loves to show to the world, so I guess it’s ok.

Two days ago I was asked the same question.
Which was pretty awkward – I mean, I’m not exactly Stephen King, I can barely hold my own writing, who am I to give suggestions?
Anyway, I tried my best.

Continue reading →