"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Pride Month 2022 – Christine de Pizan

Well, I said I was going to share some notes for Pride Month, didn’t I? Here they are.

I’d like to start with an amazing author and intellectual: Christine de Pizan, an Italian poet who worked in France at the beginning of the XV Century, is considered one of the first female professional writers and have us one of the most important accounts of a transgender character in Medieval fiction.
She indirectly features in my novel because one of the main characters was reading her Livre de la Mutation de Fortune and was forced to leave it behind while fleeing the French court.

Why did I pick her? Easy enough: her Livre de la Mutation de Fortune, authored in 1403, is considered one of the earlier texts featuring gender transition and my novel features a reading on shapeshifting that has a lot to do with self-affirmation.

You can read the whole story on my Patreon profile: it’s free.
Spooktober

Spooktober 25 – The Phantom Farm House (2)

Continues from yesterday… ATORRENT of rain held us marooned the next day. Miss Leahy was confined to her room, with a nurse in constant attendance and the house doctor making hourly calls. She was on the verge of a nervous collapse, he told me, crying

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October 25, 2026 6:00 am
books and literature

Alix Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches

I wouldn’t have started this book on my own, and for many reasons. One of them is that in Italy it’s marketed as Young Adult Fiction, and I hate most of that stuff, and the other is its imposing length: 600 pages. I was distracted,

Read More »
October 24, 2026 9:00 am
Spooktober

Spooktober 24 – The Phantom Farm House (1)

“The Phantom Farmhouse” is a short story written by Seabury Quinn, first published in the October 1923 issue of Weird Tales. It is one of Quinn’s most famous standalone works outside of his popular Jules de Grandin detective series. I had been at the new

Read More »
October 24, 2026 6:00 am
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