Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Books


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Inspirations

There are two questions that usually pop up during interviews, and they are

  1. Where do you get your ideas?
  2. What authors inspired you to become a writer?

The answer to the first is, of course, Schenectady.
The answer to the second, for me, is a little more complicated – or at least lengthier – because I am convinced that if we are readers – and writers can’t not be readers – then everything we read is a source of inspiration.
This kind of answer usually is interpreted as evasive by interviewers, so I usually have a list of authors I recite like a mantra.

And I thought it might be interesting to write a list, not only of authors, but also of the books by those authors I found inspiring. The books that made me say

THIS! This is what I want to write.

Who knows, maybe you need some reading suggestions for what’s left of summer. Here we go. Continue reading →


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Back to Monte Cristo

I mentioned a few days back my nice big book haul – or my book shopping spree, if you prefer.
Yesterday morning the courier dropped a box containing the brick-sized Wordsworth Classics edition of Dumas père’s The Count of Monte Cristo, and I decided to tackle it from the start.

$_72

The cover is suitably pulpy

Now, I first crashed and burned reading Dumas’ masterpiece when I was in high school (I did a lot of reading in those years). Dumas is a straightforward adventure writer that is also a classic and a pillar of literature, a double role he shares with other writers such as Dickens and Stevenson.
Like Dickens, Dumas was a serial writer with a staggering output and if The Three Musketeers is his best known book – and it has been inflicted in many abridged versions to kids all over the world these last two hundred years, it’s The Count of Monte Cristo that is considered THE Dumas novel you need to read. Continue reading →


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A book haul

Your wildest desire?
No, OK, not a night with Cleopatra or Empress Theodora or Catherine of Russia (why are we always so fascinated by racy women?)
Something actually possible.
Try this one out for size: unlimited credit in the largest bookstore on the planet.
Boy, I’d go nuts with that.
And I just got the next best thing: a fat gift card on Amazon.
And being a good guy at heart, and money being tight, I decided to invest a fraction in a gift for a friend, and then look for something real cheap for me.
I ended up getting a cartload of books.

And is there something better than getting a ton of good books to read?
Obviously, it’s telling your friends what great books you just bought. Continue reading →


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Meddling

You know that sensation, when you are reading a book and you are one one hand completely captivated by the story and by the author’s technique and on the other hand you are saying to yourself “Damn! I wish I had written this!”
It happens to me sometimes.
51U5hA-9TQL._SX326_BO1,204,203,200_More often than one would expect. I guess it’s because I always read cool books.

The last time it happened with Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station, and right now is happening with Edgar Cantero’s horror/comedy Meddling Kids.
That not only is a great book, written in a highly imaginative and original language, and not only is the sort of story I wish I could write.
It’s a book that appears to have been written for me.
I am the target audience.
And I am a happy guy.
I mean, a story referencing Scooby Doo, and It and H.P. Lovecraft?
At the same time a comedy and a pretty tough, ’80s-style horror?

meddling-hero

Here’s the ad copy…

SUMMER 1977. The Blyton Summer Detective Club (of Blyton Hills, a small mining town in Oregon’s Zoinx River Valley) solved their final mystery and unmasked the elusive Sleepy Lake monster—another low-life fortune hunter trying to get his dirty hands on the legendary riches hidden in Deboën Mansion. And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids.

1990. The former detectives have grown up and apart, each haunted by disturbing memories of their final night in the old haunted house. There are too many strange, half-remembered encounters and events that cannot be dismissed or explained away by a guy in a mask. And Andy, the once intrepid tomboy now wanted in two states, is tired of running from her demons. She needs answers. To find them she will need Kerri, the one-time kid genius and budding biologist, now drinking her ghosts away in New York with Tim, an excitable Weimaraner descended from the original canine member of the club. They will also have to get Nate, the horror nerd currently residing in an asylum in Arkham, Massachusetts. Luckily Nate has not lost contact with Peter, the handsome jock turned movie star who was once their team leader . . . which is remarkable, considering Peter has been dead for years.

The time has come to get the team back together, face their fears, and find out what actually happened all those years ago at Sleepy Lake. It’s their only chance to end the nightmares and, perhaps, save the world.

I’ll write more about this baby as soon as I’m finished with it (soon, by the way it’s going).


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The Hour of the Dragon

For a short course I gave online in the past weeks, I went back and revisited The Hour of the Dragon, a novel by Robert E. Howard, also known as Conan the Conqueror.
This is the only novel about Conan ever written by Howard, and it was used many years ago to introduce the character to the Italian public. In this, the Italian publisher followed the lead of Lancer Books, that in 1950 started its Conan series with this same book.
It was not the first Conan book I ever read (that was Conan the Adventurer) but it was the first Conan story by Howard I ever read in English. And I read The Hour of the Dragon in the Berkeley edition curated by the late Karl Edward Wagner, and based directly on copies of Weird Tales. Without, that is, the editorial interventions of De Camp.

The-Hour-of-the-Dragon-Berkley-fold-out

Much later, in the mid-90s, I managed to get a copy of the Donald M. Grant hardback edition, that rests on a secret, heavily guarded shelf, too priceless to be contemplated by mortal eyes.
And finally, I re-read the book in the past week in the Gollancz complete Conan Centenary hardback edition.
Let’s take a look at this thing. Continue reading →


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Fake interviews and pulp writers

Yesterday I read what I think is the fakest (is that a word?) interview ever published. The sort of interview that makes me absolutely certain the guy being interviewed never wrote the story he’s been interviewed about.
Stilted answers, that failed to capture the plot, the characters or the background of the story being discussed.
Generic, sum-zero platitudes, the sort of meaningless placeholder text one finds in bad writing theory books (“a story about captivating characters”).
It was infuriating, because I take writing seriously, but some evidently don’t.

51KKCGDFlLL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_I’ve read a lot of personal accounts by writers, and a lot of biographies. When they are not fake they are a great insight on the creative process, and are a never-ending source of ideas, techniques and tricks of the trade.
In this sense, I cannot recommend enough the volumes Speaking of the Fantastic, that collect the interviews Darrel Schweitzer did during his long career. Better than a writing course. Much better.
And mind you – I give writing courses.

Anyway, to recover from the bad aftertaste of that fake interview, I went and got me a nice little book that sells for 2.99 in ebook and is worth every last cent. It’s called Pulp Era Writing Tips and it’s a collection of articles about writing by – you guessed it – authors from the era of the pulps, as edited by Bryce Beattie. 514HLWfJs9LAnd I found in the volume all the freshness and the authenticity that was sorely missing from that other text.

Authors, in my experience, generally like to talk about their work. They like to relate anecdotes, point out funny or uncanny bits, and generally go through their creative process. Many tend to romanticize their working routines, or give it a too organised, planned and one-size-fits-all sort of feel, and sometimes some will provide what my friend Hell (yes, they really cal him like that) calls “the Commode Story”, like in Reservoir Dogs: not the truth, but a story so finely crafted, so thoroughly rehearsed and so often repeated that they believe it themselves.
But most of the time, you get good value and solid, reality-based information.
And that’s what you want to get.
You get it in this small booklet.
Pulp Era Writing Tips is highly recommended to anyone with an interest in writing, and to anyone with an interest in the pulps and in entertainment fiction.
Might even help someone learn a trick or two when they try faking it at interviews.


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An idea for a summer camp for high-schoolers

As I said, I took most of the weekend off, and enjoyed a good book. One that was given to me as a gift for my birthday.
And as a result, I created a course/summer camp – something that would be fun to offer to kids the high-school range of age.
And yes, I know, I know, I said that I would not think about work and all that, but then, what with eating some ice cream and re-watching some old Haruhi Suzumiya anime and all that, ideas sort of collided and I sketched this course and even so it’s really OK – no, really! – because they will never allow me to do it anyway, so it’s, in the end, a flight of fancy on a summer afternoon.
And yet, boy I’d like to do it!
Let me tell you about it. Continue reading →