Aculeo & Amunet | Karavansara

5 September 2014
by Davide Mana 1 Comment

… and it was the wrong cover!

No, I know – you won’t believe it.
I mean, I would not believe it, were I in your place.
It must be a ploy, a trick, a stunt to increase the hype, right?

Well, it’s not so – it’s just that I posted the wrong cover for the preview two days back.
Yep – wrong cover.
The one I posted earlier was an alternative take we finally decided to ditch.
The definitive differs from that one in some minimal but significant ways.
So I’ll post the right one here… you can use the two images to play “spot the difference“… Continue reading →

3 September 2014
by Davide Mana 5 Comments

The Hand of Isfet (the cover)

The Hand of Isfet, my new collection of stories about Aculeo & Amunet will be released in ebook form on the 22nd of September (as you can see from the nifty count-down thingie here in the sidebar) – but it can be pre-ordered through Amazon as of now (and you save a buck on the final retail price).

The book has been long in the coming, but I’m quite proud of the final result.
It features a great cover, and it lines up five good tales (if I say so myself).

I’ll do a pair of posts on the stories, the characters and all the rest, but for starters, here’s the cover… Continue reading →

18 August 2014
by Davide Mana 2 Comments

An Aculeo & Amunet Spin-off?

One never knows.

I was putting the finishing touches on one of the Aculeo & Amunet stories that will be collected in the next A&A ebook (coming in september, barring accidents), and I noticed that a number of throwaway characters had proved to be tougher and much more fun to write about than expected.

Centurion Nennius Britannicus is a short, balding man that looks somewhat like Bob Hoskins in my mind’s eye – a second-tier officer with a tendency to get on his commander’s nerves.
When we meet him in The Hand of Isfet (the immediate sequel to Bride of the Swamp God), he’s on patrol duty in the streets of Alexandria.
He’s not exactly enjoying the ride. Continue reading →

16 August 2014
by Davide Mana 1 Comment

Choreographing violence in stories

I said I was going to take the day off, but in the end I spent a fair part of yesterday afternoon planning and choreographing a big complicated action scene in the next Aculeo & Amunet story.

The hardest part, for me, when writing A&A, is the part about the fights.
Maybe I already mentioned this.

Fact is, I don’t like violence that much, and I’m not very good at describing it in an entertaining way because… well, because I don’t find it entertaining, I guess.
With some exceptions.

And yet, considering my Aculeo & Amunet stories are sword & sorcery, there are to be swords in there somewhere, and someone got to use’em.
And Aculeo, being a soldier, is supposed to be the one trained in the use of swords (Amunet takes care of sorcery – nice and smooth). Continue reading →

Free Swamp God on Monday!

13 July 2014 by Davide Mana 2 Comments

7 July 2014
by Davide Mana 3 Comments

Blue copybook

Last Saturday I did something I should have done one year ago: I broke open a new IKEA copybook (white pages, sturdy cardboard cover, rubber band strap to keep it closed), and a new BIC black-ink pen, and I started writing down everything I know about my Aculeo & Amunet stories.
Everything.
A timeline for the stories written and being developed.
Another timeline for historical events and characters.
A short but thorough fact-file for each major character.
A list of locations.
Notes on stuff like currencies and other odds and ends. Continue reading →