All posts in category the Human being

Random Friday

Sharing as suggested… I’ll be there! 🙂 And I do LOVE their logo!

Dear Barbara,

I want to thank you for your membership of Dublin 2019, An Irish Worldcon. We are working very hard to prepare an exciting convention for you, and are glad you are sharing it with us.

Although you are already an attending member of the convention, we wanted to keep you informed of our latest plans and upcoming prices. Perhaps you have friends or family who might be interested? Use this email to spread the word!

As you may have seen already, our prices increase on the 3rd of April at 00h01 Irish time, but acting now will lock in the current rates.

If you are thinking of coming to Dublin 2019 with family, we now have family plans that you might be interested in. More details and the application form are available at https://dublin2019.com/family-plan/
We have also launched a installment plan, which will allow you to spread the cost over several payment periods. See more and apply at https://dublin2019.com/instalment-plan/
These plans are able to be combined, too, so visit our pages now and see how! https://dublin2019.com/join-us/

Finally, and applicable to everyone, we are an opt-in convention when it comes to public listings. For us to list you on our website or in our publications, you must ensure that you have filled in at least the Public First Name field. If you haven’t given us a public name, you won’t be listed. NB: Your public name can be your badge name. You can also use this process if we have your name wrong in our records and need to correct it.

You’ve supported Dublin 2019 by becoming an Attending Member of the convention. We can’t thank you enough for this, and are very much looking forward to welcoming you to Dublin in August 2019.

Have a lovely day, and wishing you the very best,
James
Chair
Dublin 2019, An Irish Worldcon

Writer Wednesday

So I’m all set with New Netbook that has Office 365 installed… and suddenly I understand why in the past a beta-reader told me there were missing words/sentences in my manuscripts. Apparently Office 365 hates Open Office by Oracle and doesn’t show the last line of something written originally to be saved as ODT (I always save as Word.doc, but I guess there’s something underneath that I don’t see)!

Thus I need to be careful when I write something on Laptop, since Netbook won’t show me everything. But since it’s low on memory, I guess I can uninstall Office 365 and download Open Office instead – problem solved! 🙂 As soon as either Techie Bro or a Techie Friend helps me, I’ll get rid of the problem…

EDIT – SINCE THIS ONE WAS UNFINISHED, I’M PASTING THE SECOND ONE BELOW AND WILL DELETE IT…

So I had the creative weekend, and I managed to do 2 covers for upcoming projects, plus I got the cover for Fall of the Southern Kingdoms, so Easter Weekend I will put on the publisher’s hat again. I’m quite happy with one of the covers, but you’ll see it soon enough.

Plus I finished editing another project (the one I made the cover for) and sent out a short story I wrote in the middle of the current project (it was a prequel/backstory for a character in the series anyway), so I didn’t write as much as expected, but it’s fine.

Now I must finish the current project before April 22nd when I hope to get to London for a couple of days of research (so I won’t have time to meet my British friends – again. Sorry…) before coming back and hopefully doing some prep work for this summer’s publishing.

I’m thinking of doing another online workshop, but at the same time I feel I have too many projects this year and won’t be able to write them all – if I do, I’ll hit that wordcount, though! 😉 So maybe I’ll postpone more workshops to next year. Both the craft and business things.

What else? Well, if you crave vampire stories, both Nightly Bites are now available in paperback and ebook, so go get them! And if you want longer works, Vampires of the World is still out there.

I will also start putting together a new bundle on another topic next month, so stay tuned. Here’s the list of the currently available bundles I’m in – for all tastes, really, take your pick! Have a great week! 🙂

2 Comments

by Barb on 28/03/2018 • Permalink

Posted in struggles to get through, the Human being, writing projects

Tagged anthologies, book covers, bundles, sofware, writing

Posted by Barb on 28/03/2018

https://creativebarbwire.wordpress.com/2018/03/28/writer-wednesday-310/

Random Friday

So, last week I was off Day Job and after a few days at home to work on Nightly Bites Volume 2 (by the way, it’s up for pre-order, yay!) I hopped on a train to Milan with my friend and cover artist Cristina Fabris. We arrived around 3pm and spent the afternoon chilling out in our hotel room – she had work to finish and I had a novel to check, LOL!

Friday we met with her friend and fan Michel at the central train station and headed for Cartoomics, where I was supposed to meet two more of my cover artists, Lawrence Wendigo and Rossana Beretta, to give them proofs of the book with their covers…

I also had a list of comics I wanted to buy since I hadn’t gone to a comicon in a few years, so I ended up with a very heavy bag. And since I flew back from Linate (I had to use my Alitalia miles, LOL!), I decided to send some of that stuff back by mail.

Saturday morning I went to the post office and sent to my parents 4,1kg of comics. Then we went to the bookstores around Duomo, where I lost my hat (in the Mondadori flagship store – and they got rid of the Espresso Book Machine, IMHO…), then we met with Franco Giambalvo of an Italian SFF site.

We had lunch with him then spent an hour at Tempo di Libri, meeting Francesco Verso, then, being wrecked, we went back to the hotel. Sunday morning, we got home separated, since I flew and she took the train again…

And yesterday I retrieved the box of comics from my parents… destroyed, but the interior was fine, yay! Now battling a spring cold, but wishing you a wonderful weekend! 🙂

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2 Comments

by Barb on 16/03/2018 • Permalink

Posted in reading, the Human being

Tagged books, comic books, comic conventions, travel

Posted by Barb on 16/03/2018

https://creativebarbwire.wordpress.com/2018/03/16/random-friday-298/

Writer Wednesday

Aaand another bundle is out! Spring Surprise which includes Quests Volume 1 and other awesome books, curated by A.L. Butcher! 🙂 Go check it!

I’m formatting and preparing Nightly Bites Volume 2, so last week I wasn’t supposed to write with that and some traveling… except I wasn’t happy with the story I wrote for the anthology, so I wrote a new one! 🙂 A special thanks to Alex Butcher for checking the typo faeries on that one!

Hopefully I’ve caught all the typo faeries in this anthology, but if I didn’t… well, you know those pesky thingies, don’t you? Have mercy on a poor curator! 😉 Soon I’ll be able to share at least the ebook links, in the meantime you can see a preview on the anthology page…

I also checked that historical novel… not as bad as I remember it, so we’ll see. Now I’m off into the new writing project, but since this year I’m experimenting also with publishing… you’ll probably see them all at the same time!

This summer I celebrate 40 years of writing, so it might be good timing to publish a few new titles all at the same time. We’ll see what I have ready then! Probably some Silvery Earth, some Star Minds and then we’ll see. I made some kind of writing schedule, but I also want to curate more bundles and anthologies, so it’s still not set in stone.

Writerly links! I told you about my week at the anthology workshop last year, right? Well, here’s an even deeper insight on what you do. I am not an editor (and probably won’t be, just a curator for those collaboration anthologies), but I was a writer with Ron and his daughter last year (and yes, they sold, I didn’t, LOL!), so I can confirm everything he says! 🙂

I’m facing some self-doubt these days, especially since I’m reading those bundles and find so many fine writers I sometimes wonder why I keep bothering (publishing, not writing, of course!), so here’s Joanna Penn’s advice for those days.

And that’s all for today! Have a great week! 🙂

5 Comments

by Barb on 14/03/2018 • Permalink

Posted in struggles to get through, the Human being

Tagged curated anthologies, ebook bundles, indie publishing, writing

Posted by Barb on 14/03/2018

https://creativebarbwire.wordpress.com/2018/03/14/writer-wednesday-308/

Random Friday

Social media rant – I’ll try to keep it short. But I probably suffer from Social Media Fatigue, and I’m only on Facebook. I keep it because it’s a good way to keep in touch with friends all over the world, but sometimes it’s really annoying.

Like when it does those stupid videos to celebrate a friendship – as if we didn’t have a life or friends before Facebook. Not to mention the fact that not all Facebook friends are equal and I refuse to categorize mine. I’m annoyed enough already when they do those stupid videos with “Your posts of the past month” or “Looky look, your friends liked/loved your posts XX times” or any other silliness like that. I mean, do you really enjoy those?

Oh, and the weather forecast warnings. Who do they think they are? Now they’ve become a news channel too – with the Italian elections. Besides telling me to “Tell your friends you voted!” (uh, no, why should I, it’s none of anyone’s business!) they tell me “results are coming in” – who cares? If I really wanted to know, I’d go to Repubblica or other newspapers webpages – or any Italian newspage, why should I care about international Facebook? Besides, I’m sure I’ll see comments about that from my friends, so…

No wonder I’m not on Twitter, Instagram and any other trinket that is or will become the next fad of social media. Maybe I’m just a grumpy old woman, but really, enough.

Goodreads won’t let me sign in from Firefox unless it’s an anonymous window, so I access it from Internet Explorer’s successor, Microsoft Edge, on Netbook (although there might be something wrong in my Firefox, since even for DepositPhoto I had to open an anonymous window to log in).

Maybe I should join an interest network, instead. Find topics that interest me and follow those discussions. I like finding answers and discussions on Quora or Reddit. Maybe I’m just on the wrong platforms!

Or maybe, like I said, I’m just a grumpy old woman overwhelmed by those technological novelties! 😉 Have a great weekend! 😀

5 Comments

by Barb on 09/03/2018 • Permalink

Posted in the Human being

Tagged interest networks, rant, social media

Posted by Barb on 09/03/2018

https://creativebarbwire.wordpress.com/2018/03/09/random-friday-297/

Random Friday

Erm… forgot to post the link to the trailer of Celebrating Male Lovers… but it’s been a weird week! We got snow! Again! Like in 2012! That’s a little too often for my tastes – in a city that isn’t equipped to deal with it, I mean. I love snow. I love crunching it under my feet. But Rome just can’t handle it.

Sunday night they decided to close schools… and since buses aren’t equipped to drive in the snow, most of the lines were canceled as well. And Rome is a hilly city – and not just the original seven hills but plenty more. In 2012 they had left the buses that didn’t go up and down hills, this time the stopped almost all of them.

So, Monday morning I wake up to a white day. Fine. I grab my Icelandic trekking shoes and go out. Everything is closed, so I walk 3km/35minutes to get to Laurentina station where I found an open coffee shop. I also had to stop to check the messages from colleagues and friends who couldn’t get out of the house or were wondering if there were buses.

I took the metro and went to work – 7 out of 15 were present. One line was supposed to be there, so I took the metro back to Laurentina and went to wait for it… its terminus is next to the bus that takes to Ciampino airport (one of the canceled lines) so I told the people waiting there with their luggage that they better find another way to get to the airport (if it was even open, I have no idea of what happened at the two international airports with snow!).

I ate half of my “focaccia” and since no bus was in sight I walked to another stop where there was a bench. I sat and ate some more, and still no bus coming, so I kept going on foot. That’s 6km in one day. I thought I’d be wrecked the next day, but actually I felt great. No back pains, no leg muscles pain, nothing. Good way to save on gym expenses, I guess!

Tuesday there was still some snow but buses were back. Same on Wednesday, when school reopened… to close down again this weekend for the elections. I’m sure Dear Nephew is very happy! 😉

Anyhow, hope next week temperatures go up a little, although I’m on vacation, so I don’t have to go to work. But it’s March, when the hell did we have snow in MARCH?! 1985/1986 it was January. 2012 (yes, how many years later?) it was February. Now only six year later we’re getting to March.

Who says there’s no climate change? 45°C during summer and snow in winter in Rome? That’s not what it used to be, trust me! Anyway, it was good to inspire me the last chapter (that I had skipped in Draft Zero) of Heroines 2! 😉 Have a great weekend! 😀

6 Comments

by Barb on 02/03/2018 • Permalink

Posted in real world inspiration, the Human being

Tagged Rome, snow, weather

Posted by Barb on 02/03/2018

https://creativebarbwire.wordpress.com/2018/03/02/random-friday-296/

Random Friday

… is still a movie Friday. But it’s probably the last, LOL! I rewatched bits and pieces of Zeffirelli’s Romeo&Juliet to get inspiration for the novel (the costumes, mostly). And while I was at it, since it’s an almost 50 (FIFTY! OMG, where did time go!) year old movie, I decided also to check what happened to the gorgeous actors in that movie (namely Leonard Whiting and Michael York)… And I found this post, yay! Although it’s from 2005, so… where are they NOW? I know Michael York is still out there even though the last thing I saw him in was almost 30 years ago… 😉

Mmm, one should play with those numbers… 1968 – 1988 – 2018! 😀

Let’s now jump to 2003. It’s the year of Untold Scandal, another version of Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos with a South Korean Valmont (and I can tell you that the only things I could read were Dangerous Liaisons and Chordelos de Laclos, since I don’t read Korean, Chinese or Thai – and the English subtitles, of course). You can get the plot here, it’s another variation after Dangerous Liasons and Valmont (and I saw also the highly forgettable Cruel Intentions – I hate when they put in the present stories of the past).

So, I noticed the same kind of Korean costumes as in The King and The Clown and I’m so crazy that I had to switch audio because it didn’t lip-synch. There was the Thai and the Korean version. I set up the English subtitles and left the audio as it was, but still the lips movement didn’t match until I switched to Korean. Note that I don’t speak either, but I enjoy reading the actors’ lips (AND reading the subtitles AND watching the movie! Yes, I can multi-task like that!)…

Now no more movies until I get the DVDs of The Invisible Boy 2, a sequel to the young adult superhero drama directed by Gabriele Salvatores, and the two Bahubali , The Beginning and The Conclusion, but currently I have spent enough on Amazon, so I’ll wait a month or three.

Besides the Invisible Boy 2 is still in theaters at the moment, if only I dragged my ass there instead of going home and write, LOL! Have a great weekend!

Random Friday

One more Movie Friday… and there might be a third, since I got the last DVD. Hopefully I’ll watch it sometime this weekend (tonight if I manage to finish Current Novel Part 2). So, in order of watching them…

I’ll have to rewatch the sequel with the first one, but I think the second is okay too. Mostly because they put back in my favorite songs of the first, LOL! Anyhow, I’m talking about Rock On 2, with the dead guy in the dream sequence only and the guitar player with the worst haircut evah! Moustache in the first, bad haircut in the second… my my, Arjun, can’t you do better? Not your fault, I know! 😀

Farhan is always Farhan, and I was glad to see Shraddha Kapoor again (after ABCD2 – she must be subscribed to #2 in series). And now I’m singing Rock On and Sinbad the Sailor in a loop. Heh. I liked the first song of the final mega-show in Rock On 2, so there you go:

Now, Exposed… kinda lacks a closure for both characters, but whatever… Did I mention last time that I hate the Italian title? I wish IMBD stopped showing me the translations. Or I should stick to Bollywood that almost never gets dubbed (at least not the Greek God, mwhahahahahaha). Anyway, it was okay. Not going to rewatch it until I learn it by heart like I did with other movies, but okay.

Now getting ready for the weekend… have a nice one! 🙂

Random Friday

attempt, not the final one… It wouldn’t save the JPG, so I took a screenshot of this one!

And the publisher page has a new header! Took some working since I have an old version of Photoshop and Elements “doesn’t support layer groups and displays them in their collapsed state. You must simplify them to create an editable image” except the editable image had no layers, so I had to ask Mighty Silvano to please pull them out of the folder.

Now I should renew this blog’s header, but… maybe during the weekend, LOL!

About reading! I started a historical novel that has been on my table for almost ten years, but I’m afraid I won’t finish it. Printed books tend to have small fonts (i.e. hard to read, I stopped buying magazines for that reason) and I’d rather keep all the novels on my Kindle (which I didn’t have ten years ago or whenever I bought that book, LOL!).

Besides, it was written in the 1950s and head-hopping is really jarring (they don’t “ejaculate” anymore, but they “cried” a lot… maybe “he said, she said” isn’t so bad after all!). And I’d rather go back to the bundles I’ve been in and the ones still to come. My TBR pile will never go down… unless I do not finish the books that don’t catch me with the first chapters! 😀

On a different topic, last weekend I brainstormed while drawing – Da Muse, who else – and watched one of the DVDs I got from Amazon, with Da Other Muse (whom Americans might have admired during the Super Bowl, hopefully seeing the most dignified, manly tear, LOL!).

Anyhow, I enjoyed the Whole Truth and it’s final twist (ouch, just read the Italian titles of the latest movies. I wish IMDB didn’t read my server location). I’m not a big fan of courtroom drama, so I didn’t see hundreds of them. I could only compare it to Devil’s Advocate which was shot 20 years before that. So it was okay.

This weekend I hope to see the mess that changed title because the director refused to be part of it and is now called Exposed – we’ll see if it’s really a mess! 😉 And I got the short stories back from Mighty Editor, so I have some editing to do before starting the submission process. And if there’s time, I’ll work on the publisher’s page that still needs some tweaking (do a new header for this blog?)… Have a great weekend! 😀

4 Comments

by Barb on 09/02/2018 • Permalink

Posted in reading, the Human being

Tagged bundles, DVD, ebook, Hollywood, indie publishing, paperback

Posted by Barb on 09/02/2018

https://creativebarbwire.wordpress.com/2018/02/09/random-friday-293/

Random Friday

Last weekend I took Dear Nephew to London with Techie Bro. It was his wish to see it, especially the Big Ben (invisible behind its restauration coat, but he got to see the Lego version and had a painting of it in his room) and the London Eye. The Big Ben is actually better at night these days, as you can see above! 😉

So we arrived on Friday around lunch time and dropped our bags at the hotel. They had a travelcard, I had my Oyster card so we felt confident we could wander around. I had in mind of showing him a couple of things, so we got off at Piccadilly Circus, but he was too taken by the Lego shop to notice much else. Besides, it started raining and he was tired and Waterstones didn’t have the books we were looking for and and and… we got back after about three hours and dined in their room (it was bigger).

The next day we had all day, so morning we went around the Tower of London, took the DLR and the Emirates cabins to the O2 where we had lunch. We took the Jubilee line back to Waterloo but when we got off it started raining, so… back to the hotel around 2pm (just like in Paris). We relaxed in my room, since theirs wasn’t done, then went out again. Techie Bro took him on the London Eye as per his wish, and when he came down he said it was one of the best days of his life.

Happy nephew, happy adults. We even had a group hug at some point! 😉 Sunday morning, we went at the Natural History Museum, then headed back for Victoria Station where we had lunch at McDonald and then headed back for Gatwick Airport. We were more or less on time, but the customs proved Italy is a third world country: EU and Italians with under 14 had only one policeman checking documents (and I think he was being slow on purpose) until the other one came back.

We ended up at 10pm eating pizza by my house, since of course we didn’t eat on EastyJet! Next time British Airways, I don’t care if it costs more! Or Alitalia. Or whatever. No more low-cost. Have a great weekend! 🙂