-AUTHOR-
TANYA BIONDI
Fiction
HOW WAS THE NOVEL BORN?
The Gospel According To Aaron
It happens to me to get lost in the labyrinths of thought, to imagine situations, asking myself what they might lead to. Since I was young I have been in the habit of investigating people's souls, of observing their reactions and trying to identify with their circumstances. In doing so I always hope to understand behaviours and analyse possible alternatives. My second novel starts from these premises. I was still working on the first novel, when one day an extreme situation started to whirl around in my head. I began to reflect on believing and not believing. I wondered how a non believer could survive a great tragedy, so I decided to explore this difficult territory with the aid of my characters. They come from a planet where faith and religion are forgotten since a very long time. I pondered on the meaning of the Gospel, trying to understand what it could represent even removing the divine within it. Could it be transposed and have sense in a different context? Naturally, all of this led me, as can happen from time to time, to meditate upon my own faith, my own feelings about Scriptures and the divine in general. At some point I felt the need to shift attention upon spirituality rather than specifically faith in God. This made me much more comfortable.
This was an arduous book to write, not for the plot, but for the deep reflections involved. It has been a sort of dialogue with myself, where I represented both the believer and the non believer, and actually this fits pretty well my situation. I have a rather conflictual relation with faith, that I haven't solved after this long journey. Let's say I found a good compromise with spirituality. While writing, I asked myself many times whether it was right to continue with the story, since I had no answers to give. I decided I had to carry on, because maybe this is the same condition in which many other people live, people who will be able to identify with this inner conflict. So the book has become a hymn to life and hope. I hope this more profound aspect of the novel will be appreciated by readers too.
Blustardusk
The novel has been written in two stages. I started it at the beginning of the years 2000, when, for the first time, I started on prose. Initially I indended to create a trilogy about some fantasy love stories, that was meant to be more of an experiment than anything else. At a certain point my writing came to a stop and for a few years I didn't look at it anymore. At that time I was not contented with the results of what I was doing, plus I was fully immersed in my music projects. Then, in 2013 we had a TV format here in Italy all about writers, it was called Masterpiece, and my enthusiasm was risen once again. A little miracle happened to me at that point. I started with the idea of concluding rapidly the story I had started some years before, in order to take part to the selections for the format, but when I went back to writing the novel I was not able to put it down anymore. Suddely this new world of narration had opened in front of me and during the whole summer I was in deep exploration of new worlds and creatures and living fabulous adventures as I would never have thought before. Everything around, in the beloved pinewood where I went for inspiration, was suggesting words to me and I just kept on reporting them. That first raw version was followed by many months of editing, cutting and correcting before deciding to self-publish the novel.
What is Blustardusk?
Blustardusk is the name of the Anusian ship where the whole story begins. It is the result of the fusion of three words, two in English and one in Italian, meaning something like "a blue starry dusk". I wanted to include both languages because I have a double nationality, and in doing so I have created a word that does not exist, which is quite suitable, since it belongs to an alien spaceship. I love that part of the day when the light dims into the blue of the night, especially when the sky is clear and stars shine like gold pin points in the vastness of the universe. That's were the idea came from.
Read the excerpts
The Gospel According to Aaron
Blustardusk