Esports fan here! Mainly Dota and League, but I watch the occasional CSGO tournament here and there. Which part of Finland are you going to be in with your program?

Solidarity, unemployed sibling! The day will come where our struggle will be rewarded 🙏

Volunteering for some brainstorming if you need to get the ending right! I’ve done it many times for people in our (Italian) writing group 😁

Bit of a topsy-turvy month for me. What I’ve done:

• Wrote (and sent) the short story for the solarpunk contest
• Sent three short stories to the anarchist zine that was mentioned around here
• Joined the Solarpunk Game Jam as a writer; I’ll be tasked with writing characters and dialogues for a videogame prototype

What I will try to do in May:

• Finish the goddamn Words of Tomorrow revision… 🥲
• Revise the lore and structure for Kanteletar, so I can start writing it this summer

…and that’s it, basically. Now onto checking out what you all have done while I was slumping! 😂

I’m going to submit mine this week!

Jon Kalman Stefansson, an Icelandic writer, once said: “Writers are machines that turn grief into words”. I personally don’t get inspired by grief, but getting words down (to a diary, to a page that you will burn, etc) is definitely therapeutic!

VERY late post, but here we go.

What I’ve done this month (not much):

• Ehh… halfway through editing Words of Tomorrow
• Racked up a couple rejections from Italian spefi magazines
• Planned another short story (fifth part of Meteorina) for a solarpunk contest in April
• Read the newly published anthology by Lino Aldani, an Italian scifi writer from the 60s

Plans for April:

• Finish that goddamn editing
• Write the short story
• Maybe send Simulacra Navigans to some Finnish publishers? Unlikely they will print it in English, but who knows…

#2 has a very human-like android and it explores the meaning of passing away from a different point of view.

#5 has a fantastic use of drones, and despite not being American myself I enjoyed the many descriptions that tied back to First Nations’ cultures.

I wrote more extensively about each here (beware of spoilers!)

Update: I added EPUB formats for both Meteorina and all other short stories; I have been postponing that QoL fix for a LONG time but you finally gave me a reason to go and do it 😁

Great tip, I’ll definitely check it out!

That’s so flattering, thank you! 🥹

Your prejudice was half-right actually: tech and systems are what I really want to explore, but I use shorter stories as “experiment” to practice other aspect of storytelling too. After all, characters are the most powerful illusion spell on the reader!

What’s going to be next:

• More Meteorina adventures (surely one on Elba, maybe one on Albanian shores considering the shitshow going on with the Italian govt nowadays? Some good old satire, why not)
• Kanteletar, the stories of a public digital library founded in 2067 across four centuries of climate, geopolitical and cultural upheavals

Thank you! Let me know what you think 😋

I have other formats for the novels, but now that the Meteorina project is becoming bigger I should provide epub files too. I’ll work on adding more buttons and get back to you in a couple days!

Di fianco a ogni storia ci sono le bandierine che indicano in che lingua sono! La maggior parte sono bilingui; alcune sono solo in italiano. Simulacra Navigans, l’unica storia che avevo in inglese, è quasi a fine traduzione.

EDIT: Ho finito di tradurre Simulacra; mi ero dimenticato che anche Snowstorm e Lady Firefly erano English-only, prossimamente tradurrò anche quelle!