Autor: Marco Siena

Born in Mirandola in 1976, I was an early reader. At the age of 4, I was devouring Mickey Mouse comics, alternating them with any book I could find at home. With two older sisters, I had a rather decent library at my disposal. At the age of 6, however, I had already made my first library card in the municipal library, where I got to know children“s authors such as Franklin W. Dixon, but also Poe and Lovecraft. During my teen years, I divided my free time between reading novels and comics, and a strong interest in signing. I played in a couple of bands to then abandon music and drawing in favor of story-telling. The first rudiments I received from an exceptional Italian teacher of the Technical Institute, a professor who passed on to me the passion for the Gothic novel and the terror, which I partly loved already, but teaching me the structure and the essential elements for the genre. I waited years before having anything mine read. The opportunity came in the circle of role-playing games of which I had been taking part for almost twenty years and where I was able to give myself a discipline and experiment various techniques to refine my style. But only with the advent of Internet and having reached a personal maturity that I sent my first stories to be included in anthalogies. The next step was to participate in a contest to be published by a small publishing house. As the sole winner, I saw my first novel Le Nove Stelle [The Nine Stars] published under their label. Two years later, I offered them a second novel, Prima di Svanire [Before Fading], which is also the name of my blog, and it was also published, but only in paper format. The lack of distribution forced me to find other ways. I met some people with whom I had started collaborating, building for myself a small core of beta-readers and editors, experimenting the roads of self-publishing. The first work I offered as a self-publisher was DD1: Ignizione [Igniti