Strangeways here we come

A blog written exclusively in English. By Brazilians. I´ve been thinking about this for a while now; why do this?

The answer is simple: to communicate more and better. I´ve been writing now and then some bilingual posts in my other blog, the Pós-Estranho (it means Post-Weird in Portuguese, but I think you probably guessed that by now), but I didn´t feel it was enough. I wanted to do more.

After creating in February the Pós-Estranho, I started in March to write short fiction reviews for The Fix, an online publication from TTA Press, the publisher of Interzone, and which merited high praise from the likes of James Patrick Kelly. I´m very proud to be part of the crew, for which I have to thank publisher Andy Cox and especially the managing editor, Eugie Foster, for publishing me and helping me to improve my English.

For longer reviews, I had the Pós-Estranho. But that blog is written in Portuguese, and that just can´t do any longer. That blog will go on, naturally, because I love it and, through it, I can communicate with my Brazilian friends and Portuguese-speaking writers. But what I really want to do is to be part of a larger net, a bigger collective of interlocutors, people from all over the world with whom I can dialogue.

So i thought to create this counterpart, for longer reviews of SF/Fantasy/Horror/Suspense. First I asked Tiago Casagrande, which runs this great blog condo called Verbeat, if I could do it here in his corner of the Web. Not only he said "damn sure you can"; he also created this blog for me in his (few) spare hours. Thank you very much, Tiagón!

Right after that, I invited a very good friend, Jacques Barcia, who created a superb blog, the Human 2.0, where he posts his thoughts and reviews in a way that has everything to do with what I´ve been doing so far. It was the logical, natural choice. (Not mentioning that he is a hell of a guy: a vegan-kung-fu-fighter-tech-journalist-hardcore-singer which also writes weird fiction! It doesn´t get much better than this!)

It will be a hell of a ride. And, if it flops, at least we tried, in the time-honored tradition followed, among others, by Samuel Beckett: Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.