h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

is the writing going?

I know one must never ever ask a writer this question.
It's just the monday mood, which is bloody.

hi greta9 was just surfing and the name tag attracted me so u like your beats and weekends out hit me back. bassliner

oh wewh, i thought this was already my well deserved rebuff!

Hey Delicia - it's going well... about the only thing in my life that is. Got one novel finished and another well under way. Can't complain, really.

Now, if I could only get a publisher...

Hello Mrs Pink... What's your anthem of the week? I'm all hooked on DJ Tom Craft's "Loneliness".

Thanks for dropping in!!! Do come again!

Finished? My, i take off my head...er...hat...i keep typing similar sounding words for what i actually mean...
You got a novel actually finished? It looks to me that the first 9/10th go fine, and then the last 10th, the finishing up, is the worst drag of all. Do drop some pearls of advice when you feel like it...

They say you gotta have agent to get publisher...

Not in Italy you don't... you need a friend who works for a publisher, or similar. Agents are all but a dying breed in this nepotism-afflicted country.

As for tips on how to finish: just decide when it's going to end, and take your time getting there. Then leave for a couple of months before you revise the whole thing.

Voila.

the "leave for a couple of month" part begins to appeal to me...

Are you writing in Italian then?
I try to write in English, as i don't feel like facing the German publishing machinery at some stage. I have before my eyes the fate of the book of a Polish fantasy writer, who is brilliant, but writes in Polish, his work is translated only into German, and doesn't seem to go anywhere for now.

I'd be quite happy to be reasonably popular in Italy. I've had one book published on a very small scale and it gave no end of happiness to be able to talk to people who'd read it and liked it. If my book were published all over the world, I would never get to know a lot of the people who'd read it.

I would be ecstatic if I could manage a publishing deal in my country. I'm a translator anyway, so producing an English version of anything wouldn't be a problem.

oh, then you'll be in the position to translate exactly as it needs to be done. Many German translations are very wincemaking. And then there are those where i feel the translator should have her/his name right on the cover. Translators are vital, and underappreciated, in my opinion.

Is it contemporary fiction that you write? I know you said somewhere one mustn't ask what a writer is writing, but it really does interest me.

greta9 check out my home page my name is bass_line_junkie. the mrs pink bit is a tag because my girlfriend is called mrs pink.

Yup. People often ask me what "genre" I write, often assuming that, because I'm a young woman, it's either all autobiography or all romance, or both.

I just happen to like people and be interested in their stories, so I like telling stories from basic, human premises, and explore the situations that occur from the starting point. The novel I put out was about two teenage friends, Benni and Denise, and their relationship, starting with the death of Denise's brother. The one I've just finished is about four friends and a virtual woman, and the one I'm working on is about a young writer who finds herself single, childless and careerless at the age of thirty, and about her existential crisis, her failed relationship with a sex-god drummer, her friendship with a supercool, freshly separated female guitarist with blue hair, and her delicate, strange relationship with another writer.

The latter is loosely autobiographical, actually. I really had to use the pain I went through last year (and I am going through now) or it just felt useless. I won't tell the exact story, though. Confessional bores me. Eventually, even when I'm drawing from my experience, I always end up making a lot of stuff up just to entertain myself. I've lived my life already, I don't need to go through it all over again....

"greta9 check out my home page my name is bass_line_junkie. the mrs pink bit is a tag because my girlfriend is called mrs pink."

Ooops bit of a blunder there, sorry!

could off fooled me too

That's what i wanted to know, thanks, not "gengre" little box label, but what it's actually ABOUT.
I think i agree with you about "autobiographic" writing, it becomes selfindulgent all too easy, not to mention limited, is how i see it.
Did you always write? Many, if not most, writers seem to have started very early.

I was fourteen when I wrote my first novel. It was incoherent, rambling and largely escapist, but it kept me company. My teenage years were so miserable it's not ing wonder I'd rather spend time with my characters than with other people.

Many stories seem to come out of that tension between an individual and the world it lives in.

A lot more come from the desire to be somebody else... writing is a good way to be somebody else without actually having to overhaul your life.

taking up writing should account for a good bit of overhauling one's life, though, or so i have found, anyway.

I see you are writter what type of nvels do you write.
I do enjoy reading when I can I have not done much for sometime now.
I would be interested in yours if it's the type of novel I would where would I be able to buy a copy???