Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: My Projects


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Brushing up the language of the Caesars

I started doing Latin in middle school – Latin was not part of the curriculum, but my Italian teacher was really old school and he considered Latin to be essential fr the intellectual education of us kids.
Which makes sense.
This meant I got to high school – where Latin was part of the science curriculum – with a basic knowledge of the language and grammar.
It was a disaster.
For the first time in my student life I faced teacher hostility – I was “the upstart” who had “cheated” by studying Latin before.

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What was really shattering to me was my poor performance in translating Latin.
I’d be the first to acknowledge that my knowledge of the grammar was not organized and orthodox, but I did have a knack for languages (or so I thought), and translating Latin had never been a problem for me.
And yet all my translations came back loaded in red marks.
My average score was 3/10.
And while all students in my class had started poorly as I, suddenly, after the first trimester, a lot of them made a quantum leap and started getting very high marks, while I kept being a disaster. Continue reading →


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Buscafusco is (almost) back

buscafusco ghosts & shadows smallAnd with an extreme delay, the second BUSCAFUSCO story is done, and is currently being lovingly manipulated by Mr Bezos’ gnomes.

This one is called Ghosts & Shadows, and is set during the Montferrat Winter – following the Autumn exploits of the first story in the series.
The idea is to do four volumes, covering four seasons – the next one therefore should be Spring.

As in Women & Children, once again Buscafusco will be tackling two cases at the same time – a kidnapping and a haunted house. Continue reading →


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The Mask of Dimitrios

I was rather surprised, a few hours ago, finding out that Eric Ambler is almost forgotten in my country.
What a strange fate for one of the fathers of espionage fiction, author of novels from which popular movies were made, and he himself an Academy-nominated screenwriter.

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Finding out about this strange state of affairs made me go back to the The Mask of Dimitrios, a novel I read in my first year in university, in a well-thumbed used copy I bought somewhere.
I was familiar with the 1944 movie adaptation featuring Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet, but the novel was quite a discovery. Continue reading →


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Two weeks into my (first?) crowdfunding

I mentioned a while back that I was starting a crowdfunding for a story I’d be writing – the idea came from a few friends, and it sounded like an interesting experiment.
Two weeks have gone by as I write this,since the beginning of this experiment, and I thought some of you might be interested in a quick overview.

I’m currently 8000 words into a story tentatively called Santi & Fattucchiere – that is, Saints & Witches.
A thriller with some occult elements.
My friends offered as a story seed the idea of writing something set here in Astigianistan, and just as I was digesting the idea, something happened that offered me a story idea on a silver platter: somebody stole the holy relic of St. John Bosco from the church in which it was kept, a few kms from where I live.
The holy relic being the saint’s brain.

Sort of gives you ideas, right?
It certainly did give me ideas.
Continue reading →


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Rubbing ideas together to get a spark

And the question is, can I write a science fiction story, in Italian, in 48 hours, considering my publisher asked for it?
It’s always a good idea to keep our publishers happy.
And from a strictly mechanical point of view, yes I can – 6000 words in two days, first draft, in Italian, is not a special feat.
The problem is, with science fiction one has to be careful.
SF needs idea, and needs precision, and research.

The obvious way out: work on some stuff I have already researched.

  • Mars, but I did that to death.
  • Titan and Mimas (the moons of Daturn)
  • Sterling engines.
  • Artificial tornadoes used as energy source.

Yes, I do research some weird stuff, in my spare time.

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Mimas crossing Saturn

This is a good opportunity to finally write that story I mentioned I wanted to write.
Now I need a main character, a voice, and a story.
And then fire Scrivener up and pour my brains on the page.

It’s gonna be a wild two-days.


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50 New Pulp Movies To Get You Started

In case you need a movie or four for these hot summer nights, here’s a great list from Derrick Ferguson.

Derrick Ferguson's avatarThe Ferguson Theater

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So after stirring up more than enough trouble with my “50 New Pulp Books To Get You Started” why then would I go ahead and go ahead and dive into making up a list of New Pulp movies. And how can there be New Pulp movies in the first place when New Pulp has been barely recognized as a genre in the first place?

Simple: I think there should be a way for people unfamiliar with what I and a whole bunch of other writers/editors/similarly minded creative folk term “The New Pulp Movement” to get into it and movies are a terrific way of doing that. First of all, what is New Pulp? Broken down to the simplest of elements it is fiction written in the mold and sensibilities of the style of Classic Pulp of the 1930s and 40s. Linear storytelling, creative use of words and phrasing, larger than…

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