Merry Christmas From Germany!

After 9

After 9 is an anthology of short stories about fantasy.

It is a publication of the Fantasy Team of Thermi. For all the friends from abroad and followers of this blog I would like to promise you that very soon I ll translate my short story for anybody willing to spent sometime of reading. Its name is 'The Origin Of Words' and it has to do with the diabolical hobby of solving crosswords. A lot of newcomers and some already published writers helped in order to form this tome of pure fantasy.
I would like to thank Vassilis Gogtzillas-my friend co-worker and amazing artist for his artistic contribution. Please pay a visit to his personal blog. It is a real trip in the world of art. This moment you can check his last work involving scissors, loneliness and a bit of christmas feeling!

Mon Alix Book Trailer

A small Trailer for Mon Alix

Misery City #1 Teaser

Here comes the fisrt teaser for the upcoming Misery City #1!

Do not feed this Clown!

Misery City No.2 very soon on iTunes!

//Byronic or not?//

Last week I was trying to find out the origins of anti-heros, when suddenly Ι tripped over a milestone of literature. Lord Byron, the fairly known poet of the Romanticism. Till the dawn of our complicated era, heroes used to be clean, one-faced, just or unjust, fair or unfair, good or evil, merry or deeply melancholic, pure souls or deviously fabricators. Indeed poetry and literature found the complex anti-heroes very early if compared to the film industries.
Heston-like heroes conquered the big screens for too long. This media had to fall and rise and again fall and again rise more and more complex in terms of character construction and visualisation. From the purely pure character, to the charming but dark main hero-surely it was a long ride till writers invented a person that was full of faults and drawbacks.
I personally find very charming a detective that is empathetic both to his enemies and allies. Somebody that is not a typical anti-hero. Anti-heroes are succesfull in their fatal way. Real heroes are not. Women that surround them aren't monroe like robots.
They are just dangerous because the protagonist cannot even protect himself, while trying to deliver the goods to his girl. A hero that can die even from the first page because of his human behaviour. How entertaining is a person like the one described? Probably a lot. He is just uncommon if compared to the pantheon of anti-heroes that raised the last generations of readers. Max is probably an acrobat of the last kind. He is educated like a byronic hero but not sophisticated at all. He is not magnetic and for sure not amazingly attractive. Nobody knows his deeds. He fights alone, he wins or looses alone, while Misery City sleeps with a pillow full of ignorance. His day starts when the sun sets and ends with a lonely Max trying to understand the patterns of his life. He can die. For sure each day maybe his last. No money to spend for fancy vehicles or gadgets. Maybe there's no need for them. After all when you know that you are not the hero nor the anti-hero but just a struggler that fights every night only to avoid his personall hell, probably nothing matters at all.

Working On //Misery City//

//Max Murray, damned detective of the paranormal, roams the streets of Misery City, where even Hell is just another suburb. Femme fatales, lurking horrors and gloomy nightmares cast their shadows on Max's nightlife.//

All these can be just an infinite blabla if our hero Max couldn't become something like a real personality. It was needed to find for him the proper behaviour, the right psychosis and everyday obsessions. Starting with Max, seemed very easy to let myself sink into the stereotypes that follow the noir-like protagonists. It would be mistaken to create a fearless one sided hero, that solves the one case after the other 'n' bangs every night a different woman.
I think, a small flashback about Max's stories is proper at the moment. Max was born as a character that would fit into those horror-noir-detective stories, where he could be also an observant of the paranormal. Something like a spying eye on stories that happen next to us and stay forever secret. Who could know, if a vampire from outer space was that low profile neighbor that was receiving his newspaper always at night? Could you think that he lost his spaceship and he wanted Max to search for it?
Max's adventures had to be more strange and less predictable. Max would be tortured by femmes fatales but in fact his course would be drawn by a woman that he is in love.
This must have been unfulfilled love and so on. His personality has a touch of sadness and misery, much alike the feeling that Misery City must give to its citizens. So, his love for Pakita isn't easily achievable, but Max, has the will to try and be for her, what other men couldn't be. He wants to be her protector, her guide and lover. On the other hand Pakita doesn't look so much spiritual let's say about her decisions on matters of love. Pakita has also a very earthly appearance, a fact which made it difficult for me to find the right expressions for describing her normal beauty. Poets write hymns about the out-of-this-world appearance of small aphrodites etc. Pakita is something different and Max is absolutely in love with her archetypical, primitive female goddess-like form. Trying to find the right words for expressing Max's thoughts, I had as a helpful companion the works of Marquis de Sade. His way of describing the multiple expressions of the human passions was more than inspiring. To say the truth I feel like a thief, for occasionaly stealing his style and putting it into Max's mouth. So, Max is not uneducated, nor ignorant of the women's sexuality. I wanted for him to be poetic in his way of describing people and sentiments. Sometimes ofcourse dirty and cynical, but for sure a bit more sophisticated in the ways of love.