Hi.
You haven't heard from me in a long time. Life, after all, is that thing that puts itself between your plans and the chance of realizing them. Before we start, as usual, sorry for my shitty English.
So. Strange times. I go to newsstands and bookstores and find things of mine there. I open Audible and I find things of mine in there too, played by actors I’ve been a fan of for a long time, and I find it weird to see my name next to theirs.
For example, this team up between Martin Mystère and Nathan Never (for my very few non-Italian readers: it may not seem like a big deal, but these are 94-page albums: the whole saga has 360 pages -454 with the prologue- so about the equivalent of one year and a half/almost two years of a monthly American comic book, if you want a point of comparison; first three issues covers following).
Or ECHO EFFECT, and 8-episode audioseries, a thriller with a supernatural element created and written by me and Luca Blengino and starring Filippo Nigro (Citadel: Diana on Prime Video), Francesco Pannofino and Fatima Romina Ali. Italian only, for the moment. Cross those fingers. Good.
But when I think about when I pitched them -- well, I pitched them both in 2020. Four years in the making. Before Covid and lockdown. A lifetime ago. I was still married at the time, just to name one.
Maybe it's hard for people who are not in this business to understand how much goes on before an author sees a book cover or a movie billboard and realizes that they indeed “are” the author of that story. Four years. How much have you changed in four years?
It’s a long time. The person who pitched and wrote these stories and now sees them being part of the real world is no longer the same.
Most of all, it’s hard to get how many “sliding doors” there are in between a potential project and a project becoming a reality.
This team-up would literally not have been approved had I not been totally broke at the end of 2022 (see? It doesn’t start well). I was waiting for payments from several of my clients, the money was not coming in, the only thing I had was some gas left in my car, and a friend of mine kindly offered to lend me a modest amount of money if I had reached him. After inviting me to have a sandwich together, I asked him what he was going to do and he told me he was going to a meeting on one of the characters featured in the team-up. Jokingly, I reminded him that there was a pitch that had been waiting for a couple of years for feedback. He reminded them. And the feedback was: we are interested.
Literally: if my clients had paid me on time, I wouldn't be standing here today talking about this.
When everybody was in lockdown (see? It doesn’t start well), I -like every other film and TV writer in the world, so not a particularly brilliant insight- couldn’t fathom when it would have been possible to start pitching projects again. I was literally banging my head against the desk in my studio when I realized that the voice actors of the commercials I was writing could work from home, and with a naive/stupid association of ideas, I told myself, “So maybe an audioseries can be produced during lockdown.” It was indeed 2020. Since that moment our interlocutor in the company changed three times. More than once the audioseries was in danger of never being produced, for example because our new contact person… just did not like it, and that happens and it’s more than legit. And it was only because on my own initiative I went to the Turin International Book Fair and put on an “Adrianism” (no details, imagine a non-technical but emotional pitch, and more of a.. erm… performance than a pitch), so unexpected and weird that I convinced the producer to go home and reread my stuff.
And they change their mind.
If I had not literally (but politely) “gone a little over-enthusiast/crazy” (I said no details), if I had not followed my own way of being, we would not be here talking about the only Italian Audible original audioseries in recent years (warning: that was me being me. Don’t copy me. Be yourself. If you’re shy, be shy. If you’re flamboyant, be so. But most of all, learn to read the fucking room, whatever you’re gonna do).
Sliding doors. Scheduling changes. Format changes. Executive changes. Editorial policy changes. Chances. Coincidences. Nothing that is within our control. Creative work hangs by fragile threads, so fragile that you have to be crazy or highly motivated (the famous “Do it only if you can't imagine doing anything else”) to think about making this a profession. [AH. I laughed when I typed that word.]
The more I do this stuff, the more I’m positive that the fact that a few of these stories see the light of day is already a true miracle per se.
But we keep going, because… that's all we can do, I guess?
To those who are aspiring writers, I can only ask: “How persistent are you?”
It took four years for both of these projects to come to fruition.
But let me offer another couple of examples from my own experience.
In 2022, Nathan Never/Justice League came out.
I was the first Italian person to write a story featuring Superman.
Next year, in 2025, Overruled, my first miniseries in English will (finally!) come out in the United States.
I decided to write comics (in general), and in particular superheroes, and also something directly for the American market in 1990. It took me 15 years to break in as a professional comicbookwriter, 32 and 35 years to write those two projects respectively (I hope they are the first ones and not the only ones).
4 years, 15 years, 32 years, 35 years.
Going on and saying, “Well, I'm going to make it eventually.” “Well, I feel like I'm getting closer to the result.” “Even though it's not exactly what I wanted to do, in the meantime I've been doing and discovering and learning interesting things. This is a positive result per se, and unexpected. I’ll give it another try.”
How much have you changed, how much has your life changed and how much has the world around you changed in 4 years? In 15? In 32? In 35? How many times have you failed? How many times have you told yourself it wasn't worth it? How many times have you told yourself, “Uhm, okay, everyone makes mistakes, but I'm getting better. I'll try one more time. And one more. And one more.”
I'm afraid I’m not able to convey how long a period it is to maintain focus when most of the time, despite even the most positive attitude, there are no tangible results. Years. As growing up turns into getting older, as you change jobs, change homes, change partners, get married, get divorced. But that thing doesn't change, it's the very center of your being and the reason you get up every morning.
[Just to be clear: even this is NOT enough. I am assuming that you have not taken the wrong path in life, and for example if you are tone deaf as a bell and have not the slightest musical ear but insist on becoming a professional singer, you can put in all the hours you want, but it just may be true that you have made the wrong career choice. Usually you see in time some minimal step forward, if your choice is right].
So, let that sink in. 4 years, 15 years, 32 years, 35 years. In the meantime you write and make things you never thought you would write, like cartoons for the biggest Italian publishing house or one of the biggest video game publishers… or an audioseries.
4 years, 15 years, 32 years, 35 years. And beyond. Because I fear I'm not done yet (why? Why? I’m so stupid. I should. I can’t. Stupid.). As Kobe Bryant said, “I see too many kids get so discouraged because they are expecting to make quantum leap. When that quantum leap doesn't come, it feels like it'll never come. But that's not how it works. It's step by step. One foot in front of the other. Day by day. Get better every single day. And when you look back and look down, you realize the mountain that you just scale, but you can't jump from the bottom of Everest and get to the top of Everset. Superman is only in comics.” True. But you can write Superman. Even if it takes years just to write a single Superman story from a small town in Northern Italy.
Do you want to be a writer? How persistent are you?
At the end of the day, the difference between a professional and an amateur is that a professional is an amateur who has never quit.
[This last one was my friend Stefano Di Marino (author of more than 200 novels and essays) favorite expression. He took his life 3 years ago. The way he lived and decided to end his life carries with it a lesson to be learned, but of a completely different kind. That’s for another occasion. Maybe.]