Chapter Four

Chapter four is more fun that I anticipated – the mock courtly Italian shifts easily into mock-Elizabethan, without the need for weird spellings or stuff.
If there’s one thing I learned, it’s you do not go and try to duplicate accents and regional slurs in writing.
Reading (or trying to read) Dorothy Sayers’ Five Red Herrings, with all that mock-Scottish, was cure enough.

Chapter four is also the one in which Guenda della Crocicchia gets her debut and begins preparations to “do a Joan of Arc”.

Most readers seem to think I based Guenda on Masamune Shirow’s Deunan Knute – and the fact that Masamune Shirow’s work was mentioned as inspiration in the original afterword sort of settled things like that.
In fact it is not so.
Mr Shirow’s work on mechanical armor was certainly an inspiration – you can say my black-powder-and-steam mecha are paleo-Landmates.
But on theother hand, Guenda has little to do with Mr Shirow’s work, being based as she is on my original high-school heartthrob – so sue me.
If possible, I’d say Masamune Shirow copied my memories when he put together Deunan.
It certainly felt that way the first time I laid eyes on Appleseed!!

As a fun note, the place in which the chapter is set, La Crocicchia by Urbino, is the seat of the Science Campus of the University of Urbino – where I spend a few weeks every year teaching environmental statistics.
Wonderful place, great people.
Seemed like a good place for a new richman’s estate…

Clad in Steel and Thunder – Chapter Four

I’m reaching midway point.
Translating the fight/not fight scenes in chapter three taxed my English, forced me to go back to the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and demonstrated the uselessness of on-line dictionaries (most of hich have a capacity of 1600 words).
Chapter three I’ll have to revise, extensively.

Interestingly enough, descriptions become longer (in terms of word-count) as I translate them, dialogues become drastically shorter.
This will be interesting as I come to Chapter four, as this is one of the two dialogue-heavy chapters and relies a lot on polite, archaic Italian structures.
I’ll have to brush up my Shakespeare.

Chapter four shifts the action back to Italy, brings back Alun Brock – now older and wiser – and introduces Guenda della Crocicchia.
About Guenda, I’ll write tomorrow, while polishing her speech patterns.
Alun now is a weird sort, as he’s a survivor not only within the story, but in my writing history, too.
He first appeared in a cycle of three stories I wrote while in University.
They were greeted with irony and distaste from my too-sophisticated colleagues in Turin U., who were particularly leery of my action scenes.
Brock was a good character, and slept for fifteen years at the bottom of a 5.1/4 diskette, only to resurface when I started this story.
His name as a harsh northern sound, and suits the story and the character just fine.

Brock’s old partner in crime – Valerie – was recycled much earlier, becoming the female lead in my stories about the Professional Dreamers, becoming the punkish partner of the chandleresque Dreamer With No Name. One of their stories was published in Italy in Fata Morgana n° 10, the rest was distributed through mailing list.
An adaptation of the Professional Dreamers background for the use of roleplayers was published in the fanzine Whispers in the late ’90s.

Pathetic?

This project is running the serious risk of turning into something pathetic – or so tongue-in cheekly suggests Massimo Citi on his blog.
Now Massimo is one of the editors of teh Italian version of the anthology, and will be one of the featured authors.
And he’s a publisher and bookstore owner – so he knows what’s he’s talking about.

And indeed, we might crash and burn well before take-off.
But in the meantime, we keep going as usual.

As the translation goes on – slowly. today’s saturday and I’ve still a tiny slice of personal life to nurture – more issues pop up about the English version of Alia.

What will we call it?

• Alia Selection
• Alia Export
• Alia Global
  
• ….
  

Or should we drop the “Alia” label altogether, as it does have little stopping power in the English-speaking world?
And then what?

And what about a subtitle?

• Voices from the Italian New Weird
• Contemporary Italian Imaginative Fiction
• Italians Do It Better
• ….
  

And then, ok, a title.
And what about the cover on which the title will be printed?
Should we contact artists?
Who?

And what should the cover represent?
Something lurid and eye-catching?
Or something stylish and refined?
How much will it cost? How much time will it take?

Problems, problems.
Or, should we say, growing pains?

Garbed in Steel and Thunder, Chapter 3

Good action chapter.
The story momentarily moves to China (!!) and the Green Count and his men get center stage.
Readers in Turin were particularly pleased, from the feedback I got at readings and social gatherings, finding a descendant of Count Amadeus (whose statue graces the square in front of Turin’s Town Hall) in the pages of my story.

In fact, I’m playing fast and loose with history here.
In this fictional timeline, Amadeus VI never got to create a state of Savoy, and his descendants fight as mercenaries for the French – the head of the family still holding the title of Green Count and displaying a green flag for his units.

I was pretty surprised at the positive reaction of my fellow citizens, ad my Green Count is a scoundrel and a turncoat – good withhis troops but highly pragmatic.
Not really the stuff that heroes are made of.
But there you have it – the guys really liked it, and I get requests for more stories centering on the Green Count and his ironclad Free Company, and their globetrotting campaigns (there’s a hint at a campaign in India, and more).
Who knows, maybe one of these nights…

Now we have a genre label

One of the problem we have been facing all these years with the Italian public lays in the fact that Alia does not have a monolithic genre label.
Between the covers of our anthology, we have published stories that could be labeled as fantasy (historical, urban and dark), science fiction (in all its permutations), horror, fairy tale, surrealism, satire.
This causes a certain headache to Johnny Reader, that normally likes his genres straight and well defined – if he reads, say, military SF, he stays well clear of sword& sorcery… etc.
At the same time, Johnny Critic has more problems, as he can’t pigeonhole the book and color-code it.
And Johnnt Bookseller, not knowing on which frigging shelf to place the book, drops it in the “magazines” section of his bookstore and hopes to forget about it.

But now, at least for the English speaking market we do have a straight genre label, which comes with the added bonus of being new, cool and supported by serious critical debate.

We did not know – hey, we live at the margins of the Empire! – but all these years we have been publishing honest to goodness New Weird.

Thankfully, old friend and accomplice David Farnell does a good job at reviewing the anthology that is set to define the genre.

So going into that core section, readers have been prepared with the knowledge that the New Weird has drunk deep from the well of fantasy, but not the half-elves-and-heroes epic fantasy that crowds the bookstore shelves.

Instead, it is a more urban fantasy, featuring modern problems, fresh perspectives, and a less-heroic, more-realistic appraisal of its characters.

It has also sucked at the teat of horror, but refuses to deal with it as the typical horror story does, that is, keeping the horror at a distance, something alien to the characters, until they come together in cathartic climax. Instead, the worlds and characters of the New Weird unflinchingly embrace the horror from beginning to end, seeing it as the norm, sometimes unpleasant or grotesque, but often at the same time beautiful or at least necessary.

Much of the New Weird is thus strongly reminiscent of Lovecraft’s dark-fairy-tale stories of the Dreamlands, rather than his more well-known tales of cosmic horror.

In the latter, the horror is often born of a sort of culture shock on encountering the alien; in the former, as in the New Weird, culture shock is a part of living in a world where the alien is something to be understood and even loved, and where being shocked out of complacency is both necessary and welcome.

Yep, that’s us.

Now on to translating the book!

Garbed in Steel and Thunder

Thunder variations seem to be off-limits…

Rolling Thunder is a 1977 Tommy Lee Jones movie.
Thunder and Lightning is the last Thin Lizzy album.
Riding the Thunder is a romance published by a publisher called Love Spell
Thunder Knight is a character created by Mark. J. Orr

And let’s forget about Riders on the Storm….

And yet – I need a title for a story that has… armors, knights, politics, clockwork contraptions, rabble in arms, steam and black powder, European history remixed…

Garbed in Steel and Thunder

Now this is not half bad, if I say so myself.

Might give it a go, as a working title.

[once again, translating myself I can spare myself a mail about the new proposed title, the wait for the opinions of the author and all the rest... I better not get used to it.]

(title pending) 4/20

I’m well into the second chapter of my story (Henry Tudor gets a fair share of the action), and still thinking about a feasible title.

It is strange looking this way at something I wrote.
I normally pay a lot of attention (too much attention some say) at technique and structure, but now – disassembling and building back the story, so to speak, I’m finding things about my way of writing, that will come handy in future stories.
Like, the fact that I unknowingly stick to two or three word games, tried-and-tested structures that add emphasis to what I write.
Or my choice of verbs and phrase construction.
Weird.

It is also a good opportunity to go back to my sources.
“The Academy of Ares” first of all, the Mathew Rossi article (in his thoroughly enjoyable book Things That Never Were), which started me thinking about this whole cross between Renaissance politics and Japanese-style battle-suits.
My story was designed like a collision between Ludovico Ariosto and Yoshiyuki Tomino.
Brancaleone Da Norcia does Gundam.

Other books that helped.
John Keegan, The Face of the Battle.
James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed.

And a nice picture-book about the small town of Witten, in Germany, that a friend living there sent me as a gift a few years back.
I hope he’ll be happy to know that, thanks to his gift, the town of Witten is laid waste on page two.
I’m only sorry I don’t have such an intimate knowledge of Witten’s geography to be able and specifically blast away and set fire to his very house.

(title pending) 2/20 done

First two pages of my story translated.
No big deal.
It appears obvious that I’ll have to go and refresh my vocabulary where combat maneuvers are concerned, but apart from that, no big deal.

I’ll have to find another title for the story.
Gli Anni del Tuono translates as The Years of Thunder – which sounds like a bad Tom Cruise movie.
Alas, Robert E. Howard already optioned the best thunder variation out there, with his The Sowers of Thunder.
Finding something equally striking is hard going.
I’ll have to find something completely new.

Apart from that, looks like – barring incidents and extra engagements – I’ll be able to do a story in one week/ten days.

I have already secured the services of a few swell friends as proofreaders (hi, kids!), and all in all, the future looks bright.

First Story

I’ll cheat, and start with my own entry for the forthcoming book.
Translating my own stuff should be easier – no doubts about meanings and hidden purposes, wordplays and double-entendres.
No need to mail the author for clarifications.
No stupid comments from the author thinking he knows best.

Translating one’s own stuff is certainly easy.
And I could have made it easier.
Two stories, A Whisp of Smoke, Rising (from the very first Alia anthology) and Electric Shadows (from the second volume) already exist in English.
Both are excellent, solid stories – if I say so myself.
You could label both of them “New Weird” and be pretty close to the mark.
But alas, according to both formal and informal polls among readers, authors and editors, neither is among my best-remembered outings.
Oh, great stuff, they say, but…
But.

So, in the end, I’ll translate Gli Anni del Tuono, an 11.000 words novella which was published in last year’s Alia4, wonderfully illustrated by my friend Dalmazio Frau.
It is a good story, an alternate history yarn.
I got a lot of great feedback on this one, and requests for sequels, or at least for more stories set in the same milieu.
To which I normally reply, We’ll see.

Hell!
It’s long.
It’s full of outlandish words, Latin and technical expression related to Medieval warfare.
It’s got lots of historical references and geographical names.
Translating this one will be hard.

I’ll start with my own entry for the forthcoming book.
If I survive this one, the rest will be mostly downhill.

Growing (up) in public

First post.
Better explain what’s happening here.

It is now five years that Turin-based small-press publisher CoopStudi publishes Alia, an international anthology of imaginative fiction – collecting Italian, English-American and Japanese authors between the same covers.
It has been a slow burn, but now the anthology is well established and respected.
Low sales figures, but great press and a dedicated audience.

In the past five years, we often discussed the opportunity of doing a book in English, translating the best Italian authors in our catalog, for all those readers that can’t just pick up the Italian books.

This is the time.
We have a set of ten writers, each represented by a story – his best story, according to readers polls and his or her own opinion.
Wide-ranging in theme and genre, each of them represents a new way of approaching the imaginative tale in Italy.

From this small pool of stories and ideas, we’ll try to build a book.
We still need a cover, and a title.
We need notes and introduction.
We need a preface.
And the actual translations of the stories are still long in the coming.

I’ll translate the stories, and in the meantime will jot down my impressions here.
To keep up to date anyone out there interested in the project.
To force myself to keep a certain pace and rhythm.
To force the book into being.