Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Armchair adventuring


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Night thougths and story ideas

Last night I was going through a bout of insomnia, so I wrapped myself in a stack of blankets and I watched me something. I chose a Japanese animated series, one I liked a lot when I was a kid. A spin off of the original, 12 20-minutes episodes that came out in the mid-’90s and that I had missed at the time.

I watched and enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. I liked the storytelling, the characters and their dynamics, and OK, there was a certain amount of fluff and adolescent angst but what the heck, it was a Japanese anime, it’s supposed to have those.

And while I was between episodes, a strange sensation hit me…

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Raiders of the Lost Franchise: Biggles (1986)

So, the idea was proposed to do a few posts about movie franchises that never started. Movies, mostly shot in the 1980s, that were all set up to be the Next Star Wars, the Next Conan or the Next Indiana Jones, but for some reason (usually a mix of ineptitude, lack of funds and madness) went nowhere, and sometimes entered the legend.

And I like very much the idea, and I think I’ll start with a movie that believed so much in its First in a Series status, that it proclaimed it in the title itself – well, at least in some countries. Today it is considered a cult movie by some, and one of the most ludicrous movies ever by others. The fact that it came with a very well established pulp cred, and it featured Peter Cushing in his last big screen role, only make the whole a lot more painful.

The movie is of course the 1986 Biggles, sometimes known as Biggles, The Adventure Begins (ah!), but also as Biggles: Adventures in Time.

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Hotel rooms and airports

There’s this story I heard a few days ago, that goes like this:

Q: How do you know that a stand-up comedian is being too successful?
A: All of their new jokes suddenly are about hotel rooms, airports and comedy venues.

The risk of success is, you start working on your successful routine and you lose touch with everything else. Staying in touch with what’s out there, with everyday life, with people and events and ideas is absolutely indispensable to keep having fresh ideas.

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A shout out for Ghamak

And now for my next trick, I will do something completely different.

One thing I learned in my early days in the trenches as a self-publisher is, pushing my colleagues’ work costs me nothing, and it is good both for my readers – that discover something new and interesting – and for the colleagues, because this way they my reach a new audience.
And I cash in some good karma.

So, I will start pushing my friends’ work here, once in a while – new books, Patreon pages and what else. And right now I will start with something really different – Francesco A. Pizzo’s Patreon page for his Ghamak project.

Take a look at this…

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A Christmas Mystery

What is Christmas without a good mystery? Or even better, a ghost story… because what I have here right now does feel a lot like a ghost story, a haunting, in its own way.

I mentioned a while back how my periodic mail from Amazon with suggestions and offers had suddenly become filled with books (and DVDs!) about Mussolini and the Fascist Regime.
I am happy to report that the problem has no longer presented itself, and in the last weeks Amazon’s suggestions have been happily free of Fascist stuff, and limited to my own books (Amazon is always sure to let me know that I “might be interested” in something I actually friggin’ wrote) and books by Italian authors I detest.
But something new came up, and it is intriguing indeed.

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Playing on the web

I am hard at work to learn the ins and outs of Roll20, the online platform for gaming. Tonight – that is, in about three hours – I will be hosting an online demo game for Hope & Glory, thanks to the guys of D20Nation, a very popular Italian gaming community.

They say that using an online gaming platform is like going on a bicycle – you did it once, you’ll do it again as soon as you start.

The problem is, bicycles do not get updated as often as software. 


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Accountants, Soldiers and Nurses

Accountants are dangerous. And no, I am not going to entertain you with my adventures in mortgage and banking. The fact is, while doing a bit of research both for The Ministry of Lightning and for a short article I am about to write, I chanced on something that will not go in the article – being only tangentially connected with the topic – and will certainly get into the novel. And it’s all about accountants.
One accountant in particular.
His name was Andrea Compatangelo, and he was an Italian, from Benevento.

Let’s bactrack a little – during the Great War, a number of Italians fought in the Austro-Hungarian forces, simply because the territories from which they came, while being ethnically Italy, were part of the Hapsburg Empire. Many of these men were taken prisoner on the Eastern Front, and deported to Russia.

After the war, an Italian military mission took care of extracting the “talianski” from the Russian working camps, and bring them back to Italy. This is the subject of the article I am writing.
But there were others. And here we go down a wholly different rabbit hole. This is a strange story…

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