Yes true, JA Goodsell from The Course of Events Blog nominated me for this award ages ago, but I really wanted to respond the call before the year ends.

So here I am, answering her questions.

Hope you’ll enjoy.

 

Rules of the Award

If you choose to accept the award…

• Thank the blogger who nominated you (don’t forget to include a link to my blog!)
• Answer the 11 questions I gave you
• Nominate up to 11 other bloggers yourself (preferably those with fewer than 500 followers, this is more of a newbie award)
• Provide those bloggers with 11 questions of your own for them to answer
• Don’t forget to put the Liebster Award sticker on your blog!

 

And here are JA’s 11 questions for me

1. Who is your favorite author and why?

Favourite authors are strange beasts, aren’t they? They tend to change over the years, along with how we change as readers (and sometimes as authors) and so, depending in which moment you find yourself as a reader, you’ll give a different answer.
My first favourite author was Stephen King. I really liked (and I still appreciate) his imagination and attention to characters, the way he studiously made them all quirky and unique, even when they appear for just a few pages. I also really liked his inventiveness in terms of style, his personal way of create sentences. I think this is the most enduring lesson I’ve learned from him.
Then in my teen years, my favourite author was Marion Zimmer Bradley, and unsurprisingly so. Her stories were mostly about women, girls who were discovering themselves, their souls, their powers and their bodies. For a very long time, my prose was dense and brooding like Bradley’s, and my settings busy and detailed as hers.
Just out of my teens, I discovered David Gemmell and fell in love. I still think my style as an author comes vastly from him. The kind of characters I use, the themes I’m most fond of, the way characters reveal themselves through dialogue. It certainly comes from him my love for the short, clean sentence (widely different from Bradley’s) and for the visuality of actions. And, I’d say, my inclination from action.
But today, if you ask me who my favorite author is, I’ll say Sherman Alexie. I just love his style which merges together reality and fantasy is such seamless way. I love the imagines he can create with words, the way his characters reveal their soul without brooding, the way action always says something about the characters. Above all I love his ability to create meanings though layers of storytelling.
That’s the kind of author I want to be.

2. What are your thoughts on e-readers?

Well, I used to be quite scheptic about e-readers, but after I bought my own, I had to change my mind… at last partially. E-readers are very handy, no doubt about it. They may hold hundreds of pages and I can read PDF on them without having to print them out (that’s the original reason why I bought one). I can also try authors paying just a few euro for a book and discard it if I don’t like it, without that book taking up space on my (shrinking) shelves.
I’ll admit I’d be sorry if I couldn’t use one, now.

3. What is the most exciting thing you’ve ever done (that was also legal)? 

Mhm… nothing comes to mind. I must not be a very adventurous person.
Though my long stay in Dublin was quite exciting, if I think about it. I left with just a vague idea of an accommodation and no job. I knew I had to find one in Dublin and soon if I wanted to stay (and certainly I did want to stay). I had to accommodate to live with other four girls in an apartment, which sometimes was hard, but other times was fantastic. I met lots of people during that year in Ireland.
I still miss Dublin a lot.

4. Does your family read your blog?

No. Only my sister can read English, and she’s not interested in what I blog about.

5. What do you blog about and why?

I’d say I blog about my passion, which is writing. It has always been writing, but in recent years it has taken the shape of dieselpunk and so the connected era. I’ve always been fascinated by the diesel era (particularly the 1930s/1940s), and after I discovered the 1920s I really got into it.
I’ve also always been into history, since when I went to school. And the more I studied history, the more I wanted to know about people. Social history is much more fascinating to me than any historical event.
So this is what I blog about: social history of the 1920s and writing.

6. E-book or paper book?

Always paper books.
E-books are handy and cheap, but nothing is like a real book.

7. Do you listen to any podcasts (if so, which ones)?

I don’t normally listen to podcast, I never seem to find time to listen (I’m not good at listening while doing other things). But sometimes I’ve listened to the Diesel Powered Podcast. I really like the way they dissect dieselpunk subjects. It makes me think.

8. How do you work your daily life into your writing/blog?

Snatching every bit of time I can.
Normally I write in the mornings, since I only work in the afternoons. I also commute to work, so I normally try to use the time on the train to read (that’s my main reading time), and since I normally have a bit of time (like 20/30 minutes) between arriving in Verona and actually going to work, I normally use that time to sketch most of my blog posts.

9. What has been the most meaningful piece of literature in your life?

That’s a very scary question.
Well, if you mean what piece of literature changed your life in a meaningful way, I’m not sure I can choose just one. But if you mean what piece of literature marked your life in a permanent way, I’d mention an obscure fairy tale written by a teacher and her class of kids in the late 1970s. My teacher read it aloud to us. That’s how I started writing myself. I was nine.

10. Do you listen to music while you write/blog? 

No, I can’t write with any kind of noise, not even music. But I do listen to music before I write. It helps me get in the mood.

1. Kirk or Picard?

I’m not a trekkie, sorry.

 

And this time, since I am in a festive mood, I’ll leave the award opened. Whoever fancy grab it, pleas just do so.

 

Here are my questions for you:

 

1. Have you always been into history, or is it a recent passion?
2. What is it that has drawn you to history?
3. What is your favourite historical era and why?
4. Is there an historical person that you particularly admire? Why?
5. Maintaining a historical blog is its own peculiar job. Sharing historical facts requires knowledge and research. What is your payback?
6. What kind of historical articles do you like to write best? Why?
7. Blogging is becoming more and more a visual activity. How do you address this on your historical articles?
8. How do you think our past may help us address our future?
9. Back in school, I already loved history, but I could never remember a date. To me, it was more of a fascinating storytelling. How was it for you?
10. Social history is my favorite section of history. What is yours and why?
11. Try to tell a child into loving history. What would you tell them?

 

Have a very Happy Christmas and a Fantastic New Year