I started writing this at the beginning of March, then I stopped and put it aside because I was overwhelmed by work. Then it turned into a long rant and I thought it didn’t have the right tone. So, after basically rewriting it from scratch, I’m finally publishing it. It’s still a bit of a rant, but I had to get some things out of my system, so to speak.
March 5, 2011, was a personal anniversary: ten years of online writing. The overall feeling is that of having experienced a bittersweet ride so far, with the percentages of bitter and sweet being roughly 65 and 35 respectively. So yes, after ten years the taste in my mouth is definitely more bitter than anything, although that 35% of sweet has been really, really sweet and I’m not belittling it at all.
2001: A little personal Odyssey
The year 2001 was somewhat important for me. It was a year of many changes, starting from the first big move: my parents went to live somewhere else, in a little house they bought in Tuscany, while I remained alone in what had been my grandparents’ flat for 20 years, from 1981 to 2001. It was a time of personal growth, which meant a mixture of excitement (for finally having a flat all for myself) and fear, worry and stress (I did not have a proper job, I was starting to freelance for real, my parents went away in July and paid my rent until September).
The previous ten years, from 1991 to 2001, are what I still consider my literary formative years — they are, by far, the period in my life in which I read and wrote most. I wanted to be a Writer, and since I was studying the liberal arts at the university, I had plenty of inspiration — and, more importantly, time — to write. So I wrote: plenty of short stories, a short novel and a long one, and plenty, plenty of poems. Poetry was extremely important for me: it was both of a confessional nature and of a more experimental one. Certain poems were my true, naked voice that only talked to me; others were descriptions, musings, explorations using the language of poetry, which I still think it’s the most powerful of all. Those who frequented me at the time know I was truly madly deeply serious about it, and I loved to talk about it, to read my poetry aloud (there were also live performances, accompanied by some friends of mine who are professional musicians). I like to remember those years as my personal ‘Beatnik’ era.
I’ve always been quite proficient in English, having studied it since I was 4. So, after some personal projects involving literary translations in 1994–1996, in late 2000/early 2001 I began doing translations professionally (mostly technical stuff). Soon enough I realised the main downside of my job: it messed up my daily schedule and ‘personal rhythm’ pretty badly. But most of all, it made me suffer a long, painful, creativity drought.
The big change in writing, at the beginning of 2001, wasn’t that I stopped writing. On the contrary, I began writing more. However, 90% of it was not creating, but translating. The other 10% was a mix of reporting and creating. Yes, reporting: my first example of online writing was, in fact, a journal. A journal that I kept updating on a fairly regular basis until 2006, though it began overlapping with a proper blog I had started in 2005 (Autoritratto con mele, in Italian), and so updates to the old journal became more and more intermittent, and now I post there very rarely.
So, to summarise, my writing timeline looks something like this:
- • 1984–1989 — The Early Years: first attempts at poetry after writing some lyrics for a band when I was in high school. Most of what I wrote in this 5‑year period was in English.
- • 1990–1992 — Discovering prose; first short stories in Italian, then more serious poetry, both in English and Italian. First project for a novel, Richard Martyn started in 1992. Most of the work produced at this time was designed, printed and distributed by myself, and that led to the idea of starting a microscopic ‘publishing project’ called Laboratorio Quillink which, in more recent years, has become Quillink Press.
- • 1992–2000 — My most writing-intense years, and I really mean intense: dozens of short stories, mainly in Italian but also in English, lots of projects and attempts at finding different ways to make my work known, including jazz readings and theatre (I began writing a play, but the project was abandoned).
- • 2001–2009 — Years of crisis, creative drought, writer’s block, general impasse. Most notable work was a small collection of poems in English written between 2003 and 2005, called Collapsars. At the same time, these are the years in which another kind of writing started growing and maturing, mainly thanks to all the translation work I’ve been doing since 2001: technical writing. From 2005–2006 I’ve been more and more active online, mostly writing tech- and Mac-related blogs: the aforementioned Autoritratto con mele (Italian), started in 2005; then The Rizland Observer (English), started in 2007 — both blogs were then merged in 2010 to form The Quillink Observer [officially closed in July 2011 after starting this website]. In 2008 came System Folder, a blog about vintage Macs and the classic Mac OS. While more creative efforts were made first in 2007, when I started Crosslines, an idea for a sort of ‘interactive webfiction’ (the project is currently in the freezer, waiting to be re-engineered and properly relaunched). Then, in 2010 I started a couple of small tumblelogs, Neoglossary (just a fun thing about neologisms and invented words) and Type Happens (a photoblog on found type).
- • 2009-present — Creative writing and inspiration slowly returning; abandoned novels and projects are being dealt with, either by revivification or by leaving the past behind and starting afresh. My latest production is in English for the most part.
