Unboxing videos, cover quotes, acknowledgement pages
Please make all this nonsense stop
Today, Saturday, started very well. I woke up around 5:00 in the morning, at the time a posse of parakeets arrives at the massive tree that blesses our back garden — this never ceases to amaze me, even if they wake me up so early, day in, day out. I pushed one of the cats off my chest, got up, made myself a cup of good Italian coffee in the Moka, opened my laptop and started writing. I was in a good mood, after a rather productive week working on a new collection of short stories and a translation from Italian that I hope to place somewhere soon. The writing plan for the weekend was to finish a post about how to use dialogues for characterisation and plot; the words were flowing until I made a terrible mistake: in a moment of procrastination I fired up Twitter, and there it was, an unboxing video, ready to ambush me1. This unfortunate chance encounter with one of the most harrowing contemporary authorial rituals made me reflect on several things I greatly dislike about the Anglophone scene, things I wish didn’t exist.
Now I have no other choice but to inflict them on you in an angry rant. I apologise in advance — I hope you can forgive me. I think I’ve been churning out good pieces lately but if I were to keep these things to myself I wouldn’t be able to move on.