Illustration by Andrea D’Angelo – All Rights Reserved
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13 December 2025
I’ ve rekindled an old habit: regularly journaling about my writing journey. This practice serves as a form of reflection, compelling me to slow down, analyze, and organize my myriad thoughts.
I have a grand ambition: to translate my novels into English and explore the English-speaking markets.
As an adult, every dream carries a responsibility: pragmatism. For me, this involves establishing myself as a writer. I’ve been writing for thirty years, but only in Italian. To English readers, I’m virtually unknown.
With my first novel in translation and a new one in draft, I can’t think of a better way to introduce myself than through my novelist’s journal.
Let’s begin!
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Here is a brief introduction in two points:
- This novelist’s journal is a translation of the Italian version, which I publish on my website.
- It starts as I am working on the first draft of the fourth novel in my fantasy series, which I wrote about here on Substack not long ago: A Grand Fantasy Series: “The Silences.”
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Now, I’m struggling with The War of the Winds (Italian original title, La Guerra dei Venti), the fourth book in The Silences series. It’s a complex novel. Possibly, only the first installment — The Stronghold of the Silences — was “easy to write” among all the previous ones. The writing process was quite swift.
The War of the Winds, on the other hand, is complex.
First, I need to address the legacy of the series, which consists of standalone novels. I must consider what has come before.
The complexity lies in the fact that I can’t refer to past events due to the series’ structure. The standalone novels can be read in any order, even though they are all intertwined. This is far more challenging than revisiting previously expressed concepts and simply focusing on tying everything together – hopefully in an elegant manner. It’s like navigating an obstacle course!
Additionally, the story I need to tell presents inherent challenges, primarily the task of animating unpleasant characters.
In fiction, anything is possible, but certain things are difficult to achieve on your own. When characters are inherently unpleasant, it becomes challenging to empathize with them. Without that connection, you risk misrepresenting their character and creating incoherence.
I’ll get there!
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Since I plan to update this diary frequently, I’ll aim to keep it brief. Here are a few figures to wrap things up.
So far, I’ve completed the first and second chapters and am halfway through the third. Based on my usual calculations, the total number of pages is 63 (I’ve written 19,000 words, averaging 300 words per page).
At this point in the story, it seems this novel will be much longer than my last one, Sideralema, which was 300 pages. Ideally, I’d like it to be under 500 pages, but keeping it to 400 would be even better!
Of course, that’s not something I can predict. Whatever unfolds during the writing process will happen. However, maintaining density is always an option.
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