With my science background (I’m a biologist
specialised in ecology), one would think that a career at university would be a
likely choice for me. Instead, I’ve
become a writer.
Actually I
worked at university for six years after my graduation. I was the assistant of a professor and the head of a research team.
We used to make researches in the field of estuarine and marine ecology.
Unfortunately,
various circumstances forced me to let it go. My professor retired and our
laboratory was dismissed. I could have kept on pursuing that career, of course,
but I had lost the momentum. I didn’t like so much the academic world, at least
not the one where I should have tried to continue my career.
So I decided to change. I had already started my business
as web designer when I was still working at university, so when I left it, I
just continued and I added scientific translations and some music management.
But writing was something different. I discovered my love for writing
when I was a teenager. I was never particularly encouraged as a writer at
school. I must say I didn’t like Italian literature. It was mostly due to the
way it was taught to me, I guess. In fact, I did like English literature
instead. Anyway I liked writing, I liked
the way I wrote. My professors didn’t particularly like my style, so I
wasn’t encouraged by them. What I liked most were the weird ideas I had about
stories. I loved to invent stories. I do love it.
Inventing
stories, and then writing them, is a way
to live your life in a different way. To experience different kinds of
lives.
As I was a
cinema addict, I started writing screenplays. I wanted to be a screenwriter, but it’s quite complicated to become
a screenwriter, I mean, to have your script transformed into a movie. Then I
changed to fiction. Initially it was fan
fiction. I am a huge Star Wars
fan, so my first fan faction was in the Star Wars expanded universe. Then in
1999 I fell in love with a silly movie called “The Mummy” and in 2000 I started writing a book inspired by it.
Then I just
stopped with fiction for a while, well, years. I’ve tried poetry and song lyrics.
In 2006 I
had a dream; a lot of what I write comes
from dreams. It was about a story set in the future, where people lived in
an isolated island. From that dream came the first idea for a novel, titled in
Italian “L’isola di Gaia”, which
means “The Isle of Gaia”. I actually wrote it between 2009 and 2011, before “Red Desert”. I had completed the first draft on the
30th of December 2011 and five days later I started writing “Red Desert - Point of No Return”.
In 2013 I
made a first revision of “The Isle of Gaia” and in 2014 I re-wrote it completely and edited it, then I published it in November, of course in Italian.
“The
Isle of Gaia” is set in the same universe of “Red Desert”, but 35 years
after the end of my Mars series, and this quite long novel together with “Red
Desert” and three more novels, I will be writing in the next few years, are
part of a bigger saga, whose name is
Aurora.
So I’m still going to write science fiction for
a while.
But I don’t
forget my love for science and
especially biology. Inspired by Anna
Persson, the main character of “Red Desert”, who is an exobiologist, I started widening my knowledge on astrobiology.
There’s a lot of affinity between it and ecology, and I have always been
interested in space science, so I think I will continue on this path.
And this
scientific background is one of the reasons I decided to write hard science
fiction, but I’m now exploring more
subgenres. “The Isle of Gaia” is
a cyberpunk technothriller and the
next science fiction novel I’m going to start writing in April (not connected
to the Aurora saga) is a space opera.
Anyway I’m
pretty sure that my scientific mind will
somehow guide me in this new writing adventure, as much as it does even
when I write thrillers or I do everything else in my life.
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