Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Cook books and other writer’s resources

A quick heads-up.
As I think I mentioned already I love cooking – it’s a relaxing activity, a way to leave problems behind and be good to ourselves, and what the heck, somebody’s got to do it, right?

cooking-techniques_hero

Through the years I have collected a number of cookbooks and recipe collections, and I’m always on the lookout for new sources of gastronomic adventure.
Selection_999(030)From which, the heads-up: The Humble Bundle is doing a special Sous Geek Cookbooks bundle, offering 21 books about food and cooking aimed at the geek, and part of the money you pay goes into a charity.
The offer is open for another twelve days.
As usual with the Humble Bundle, the offer is tiered. Continue reading


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Tides, Mornings and Ghosts – fantasy at sea

68041An unexpected post.
Fact is, a friend of mine, Mauro Longo, a fine writer and an even better game designer, did a post yesterday in remembrance of Ursula K. Le Guin, and reviewed the Earthsea series on his blog.
One of the comments hit hard the books, claiming they are boring and badly written, and that in general the sea is no place for fantasy, because the sea is boring.

When I stopped laughing, I thought…

I guess nobody ever told it to all those screenwriters that penned Sindbad movies, nor to Disney when they did Pirates of the Carribean.

Continue reading


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The Phantom Rickshaw

Nearly every other Station owns a ghost. There are said to be two at Simla, not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree dâk-bungalow on the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very lively Thing; a White Lady is supposed to do night-watchman round a house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one of her houses “repeats” on autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible horse-and-precipice accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and, now that she has been swept by cholera, will have room for a sorrowful one; there are Officers’ Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors open without reason, and whose furniture is guaranteed to creak, not with the heat of June but with the weight of Invisibles who come to lounge in the chairs; Peshawur possesses houses that none will willingly rent; and there is something—not fever—wrong with a big bungalow in Allahabad. The older Provinces simply bristle with haunted houses, and march phantom armies along their main thoroughfares.

The_Phantom_Rickshaw_&_Other_Eerie_TalesOriental ghost stories, we said, and let’s start with Kipling’s The Phantom Rickshaw and other ghost stories, that you can find in a variety of formats on Project Gutenberg.
The book was first published in 1888, but I think the Gutenberg edition is somehow later, because it includes an extra story, The Finest Story in the World, that’s not listed in the Wikipedia page devoted to the book.

The original stories in the book were written by Kipling in his twenties, and published by The Pioneer or the Civil and Military Gazette.

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Back to playing Go

9781400098033I started playing Go because of a novel1.
I read Trevanian’s Shibumi when I was in high school, and I liked it a lot. I knew the man that had translated the novel, and we both were chess players (he was quite good, I sucked pretty bad).
I played a lot of chess in high school – I used to carry a small magnetic chessboard in my bag, and we’d play games during break with some of my schoolmates. We played fast, and it was good training, but I still sucked.

After reading Shibumi (that is an excellent spy story novel) I started looking for a handbook for the game of Go, but in those pre-internet days the going was tough.
The friendly gaming store where I used to buy my roleplaying games had Go boards for sale, at a crazy price, and no handbooks. Continue reading


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Robert E. Howard’s Birthday

It is Robert E. Howard’s birthday.
Is there anything I can say about Howard that was not said already, and better than I ever could? Unlikely.

I could once again say that Howard was one of those writers that I read as a kid, and made me say

This! This is what I want to write.

And I did – I wrote some horrid Conan pastiches when I was fifteen, and they are dead and buried, and it’s better that way. Continue reading


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Ghosts from the East

nightbird coverLet’s leave Egypt behind for a while.
Last week my friend Lucy published her new novel, the first with Acheron Books. It’s called Nightbird and it’s a ghost story1.
So we had the opportunity of talking a lot about ghost stories, and our favorite novels, movies and what not. It was fun. It also turned out that Lucy would love to write a vampire novel, while I’d love to write a few ghost stories. And as we talked about books, I realized that while I love Peter Straub’s Ghost Story or James Herbert’s David Ash books, what I really like is ghostly short stories. The sort you can read in one sitting, and be scared and entertained.
And so I started compiling a list of my favorite collections of ghost stories. Continue reading


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AMARNA on Amazon

Amarna preview smallMore oompa-loopa shenanigans: last night, Amazon informed me that the first episode of AMARNA is now live.
And what about the disappearance of my files and the long silence afterwards?
Nothing – this will remain a mystery forever.
And it’s somewhat fitting, don’t you think?

But let’s look at the bright side: AMARNA is available on Amazon, too.
More choice for my readers, hopefully more sales.
Everyone’s happy.
Possibly Jeff Bezos’ oompa-loompa’s too.