It's not a secret, it's a surprise...

Hello world, hope 2020 finds you well considering the circumstances. And happy 67th birthday to Pierce Brosnan, my all time favourite James Bond! If it wasn't for him, I'm sure I'd be now writing about something else, or probably not writing at all and maybe painting, playing football or the guitar, who knows, but it's thanks to Pierce that I got attracted to Bond some 22 years ago.

So, what am I up to? Well, the graphic made by yours truly should give you a huge hint. Yes, my next book will explore Die Another Day. Some 100 pages are already in, I have contacted people who worked in the film, made some research and expect to release Beyond The Ice -yes, that's the title- no later than in June in paperback and digital.

Unlike GoldenEye, Die Another Day is not my favourite James Bond film and my relationship with it has always been complicated. Somedays I hated it, sometimes I loved it. But the thing is that now I simply appreciate it and I think it's nowhere near being the worst Bond film. It introduced in the series that "dirty world of espionage" Ian Fleming talked about on a CBS interview back in the 1960s and -although it has a happy ending- it deromanticizes the world of espionage as the Daniel Craig films would do later. Also, Brosnan gives here his darkest performance as 007. And let's not forget all the little controversial subjects the story touches: North Korea, conflict diamonds, Cuban healthcare, the NSA's post-9/11 prominence... so, there is a lot to talk. Don't expect a "tribute" to the film, but more of a semi-objective analysis assesing the good and the bad, but leaning on the positive things.

Other than that, Bond 20 will always be special to me. This movie made me a "Bond journalist" of sorts. I wasn't old enough to cover GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies (wasn't even a Bond fan before the latter was released) and I didn't follow every step of the production of The World Is Not Enough. But the case of Die Another Day  was different, as I always went to cyberstations to save all the set and events pic on my floppy disks and sat in front of the TV screen for hours until Fox channel passed some TV spots and documentaries to record them on a VHS tape (sadly lost, after all these years).

Well, that's all for now. Nothing much to say about this year other that it's still very painful and there are lot of unfair things going around. But... life is really far away from fair, right?