Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: My Projects


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Christmas before time

You guys know this has been a hard year for me and my brother. We lost our father in May and our lives shifted and rotated and changed. We had to face bureaucracy, expenses, problems. Solitude, sometimes.
We found ourselves broke and in a mortgaged house, lost at the bottom of a depressed rural area, with the economic crisis raging and no job in sight. And finally we faced hell and high water when the rivers flooded the countryside.
But we managed, and if the end of the tunnel is still a long way off, we keep going in the right direction.

And it’s not always bad news and hard work. Thanks to the Black Friday and associated things, we sort of celebrated Christmas one month earlier this year. Continue reading →


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Still High & Dry (thanks goodness)

The emergency is now under control.
The Belbo river remained in its argins this time, and it’s not raining anymore.
And we have enough supplies to last a week without going to the supermarket (that’s five miles away).
The weather did hit hard both north and south of where we live – there were no victims, but lots of damage. People were evacuated from towns, areas were flooded, and in the very center of Turin we lost two river boats that used to do the tourist run in summer.

As a side note, the line of submerged lamp-posts at round minute 2:10 in the video is a place where I used to go walking with my girlfriend at the time of university.

Anyway, situation almost back to normal, there’s a lot of work to be done because in the past two days we had other things keeping us busy (like, taking books and electronics upstairs just in case – and today back to the ground floor again).


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Offutt does Howard

51b9y98wpol-_sy346_A very quick heads-up – The Sign of the Moonbow, by fantasy legend Andrew J. Offutt, is free today in Kindle, and it’s well worth a read.
I’m planning a review ASAP, but I wanted to signal this offer while it still lasts (and I don’t know how long it will last, actually).
The Sign of the Moonbow is a story featuring Cormac Mac Art, one of Conan’s brethren, created by Robert E. Howard.
Offutt is enjoying (if that’s the word) a bout of new popularity due to the biography published by his son, in which his activity as a pornographer is described in lurid detail.
I never read any porn book by Offutt, but I read his fantasies – and the guy was a solid entertainer, with a certain sense of humor and a good pacing.
Check out The Sign of the Moonbow.


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Listening to the radio in the night

radio-graphicI think I already mentioned how much I like radio.
Radio dramas (old and new, with a soft spot for the Thrilling Adventure Hour), music (and vintage wonders like the Buddies’ Lounge), and talk radio.

Now, something happened two nights back.
I was not feeling well (what with old age, the cold and the mileage thing), and so I stood up the whole night, and scanned the airwaves with my small, cheap multi-band radio receiver to try and get my mind off my aches.
My brother was up with me, and a little worried, but in the end we chanced upon a strange radio program from a very local station. Vinyl Dust it’s called and no, it’s not a fetish sort of thing – it’s an all-night talk and music show in which a guy that does not know how to properly pronounce English talks about vintage records, and plays old 45s.
The show focuses on covers and alternate versions of classic songs from the 60s, weird stuff produced for the European and Italian 45 and juke-box markets. Always quirky, often bad. And my oh my, was the show we caught focusing on bad. Continue reading →


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A story in search of its place

I might need a little help here, so suggestions are welcome.
Last April I wrote a story, in about a weekend. It was a one-shot horror story set in New York in the 1930s, but as I usually do when I write shorts, I designed it to work as the first in a series, should the characters meet the fancy of the readers.

call_of_cthulhu_task_force

I wanted to do something in the vein of the old pulps, but also more modern, closer to our modern sensibilities.
Straightforward but quirky.
So, it was a one-shot “with possibilities”, and it was intended as (possibly) the first outing of my very own occult detective/monster hunter, the extremely reluctant conjurer Steve Davies, a.k.a. The Mysterious Doctor Wu Yang1… Continue reading →