I'm the deviser and organizer, together with Marco Guasti, of Premio Oltrecosmo, a science fiction literary contest for Italian short stories, which —I happen to believe— is very peculiar. Participation is totally free of charge, the jury is extremely qualified, and the ten best stories get to be published on a paper anthology whose cover is being designed by the talended Michele Amadesi; the best authors can even receive royalties for their work. But all of this is made even more interesting by our close collaboration with the OpenOffice.org Free Software Community in spreading the ODT [Open Document Text] format, and by the media attention that this initiative seems to have drawn in the last few months —I was even interviewed on national radio station Radio Montecarlo not long ago.
By clicking here {IT} you can read some of my science fiction short stories that I wrote a few years ago, downloadable in PDF format. There's a short comment/synopsis along with each story. As you can see, they're all in Italian... who knows, maybe one day I'll translate some of my favourites (which, lucky me, are also the shortest).
Apart from Premio Oltrecosmo, I'm also promoting the newsgroup it-alt.arti.scrivere.fantascienza, a meeting point for sf fans, but most of all for sf wannabe writers, which can post there their works and see them commented and evaluated by other users.
Finally, I also mantain Scrivere la fantascienza {IT} (Writing Science Fiction), a small blog which is meant to be a quick reference for science fiction writers and describes nuts and bolts of literary competitions of the genre. I seldom update it, but it's somehow managed to reach a decent visibility on the Web.
