I’m stealing a leaf from Barry Reese here*.
In yesterday’s post on his blog, Mr Reese posted the first two episode of the old 1964 Hanna & Barbera series, Johnny Quest – and he sent me down memory lane, big time.
So I dug around the web, and found out a 2 hours 20 minutes documentary on that old series that enthralled me as a kid.
The thing is available in small installments on YouTube.
And it’s great.
And I’m posting the link here.
It’s been a while since I have been writing regularly, but things are looking if not up, at least relatively level, so I’m slowly getting back on track.
Lots of dead weight to drop, gotta find new horizons, thatsort of stuff…
Right now, apart from working on two non-fiction projects, I’m looking for possible markets, and preparing to contribute to the second season of the collective Italian web-novel 2 Minutes to Midnight.
It’s fun, and it’s a great exercise, working on a round robin.
AND, I’m jotting down notes for a one shot modern horror tale, and for what could turn out as a series.
I was revising my hypothetical series stuff, before I started writing this post.
A series.
Adventuring, swashbuckling, some yog-sothoteries.
In other words, sword & sorcery.
Two main characters, moving from Alexandria (Aegypt) towards the heart of Central Asia, in the 4th century.
HIstory used as a generic backdrop, not as a central issue – so I’ll be playing fast and loose if the need be.
I’d like to set the earlier stories in the Mediterranean area. Continue reading
Ok, short (?) post stimulated by this post by the always stimulating Seth Godin.
And yes, it does have to do with writing.
Now, I like Seth Godin’s piece a lot, I love his suggestions, the post in question gave me a lot of ideas, but it all collides in a rather unpleasant way with my experience.
I tell myself it’s because I’m in Italy, and he’s in the great big world out there, and yet, it is not a completely satisfactory explanation.
The idea is…
If you’re an up-and-coming band building an audience, then yes, free, free, free. It’s always worth it for you to gig, because you get at least as much out of the gig as the organizer and the audience do. But when you’ve upped and come, then no, it’s not clear you ought to bring your light and your soul and your reputation along just because some promoter asked you to.
Great.
I love that.
But, what if up-and-comingdom is the default setting of your environment? 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
They say writers have rituals.
Small quirks connected with the act of writing.
Some people leave the first page of the notebook blank.
Some write only by night.
Or in the morning.
Some need to break a new pen, or a new keyboard. Continue reading
Ok, this is the usual boring “tools I use for writing” post which they tell me is a must on an author’s blog.
But then who knows, someone out there might find it interesting, or useful.
First thing first – the only piece of hardware you need to be able to write anywhere/anytime is a paper notebook (aka “the platform”) and a pen (aka “the input device”).
And please take notice – this is not some form of silly nostalgia thing, but a simple statement of fact: in the middle of the wilderness, with no energy grid and no hi-tech, good old pen-and-paper works.
One has to spend some time to find the right notebooks and the right pen – because writing is also a phisical activity, and the tool must fit the hand.
But given some times, anyone can find his fave low-tech writing environment.
For me, it’s Mead Composition Notebooks and BIC black-ink pens.
But I’m developing a sort of fetish for the sort of rough, blank-pages hardbound notebooks you find at IKEA or other such places.
Incidentally, a notebook can be used for two good writing practices
. keeping a journal
. keeping a commonplace book, to use H.P. Lovecraft’s definition – a book in which you jot down ideas for future reference.
Moving on to computers and software, now… Continue reading
I wrote my first “lost city in the Himalayas” story when I was fourteen or fifteen.
I had not read James Hilton’s Lost Horizon* yet, but I was actually reading a lot of E.R. Burroughs and Rider-Haggard, and quite some Howard at the time.
Their style struck me as easily emulated.
Oh, and I also read a lot of Peter Kolosimo and some Von Daniken and other “mysterious archaeology” books back then.
Food for stories.
So I sat at my mother’s Olivetti Lettera typewriter (hey, it was 1982!) and started hammering away – no outline, no no plan, no nothing.
I was actually writing in the most unpractical way I can imagine, but I had never ever read a writing handbook, so I was winging it.
And I was painfully slow on the keyboard – which helped, actually, as it gave me more time to think the next paragraph.
Anyway, in two months flat I did put together 80 single spaced sheets.
Which strikes me as interesting, as it was very much in the “original novel” pulp format – not only in contents, but also in terms of word count. Continue reading
Karavansara 