Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: My Projects


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The Form of Desire: Zenobia

zenobiaGood old Zenobia.
My personal ancient-history crush.

Julia Aurelia Zenobia was the queen that, proclaiming herself Imperatrix Romanorum, defied the power of Rome and led the ill-fated Palmyrene Rebellion. They went down fighting, and a good fight it was. And we have been taught by captain Mal Reynolds that being on the losing side does not always mean being on the wrong side too.

I like the old girl. Always liked her.
I like that particular period of the Roman history known as the Third Century Crisis, and I like Zenobia, a woman defying an empire. The stuff of great stories. The stuff of legend.

According to Wikipedia…

Zenobia has become a popular name for exotic or regal female characters in many other works

… and they go on listing Hawthorne, Wodehouse, Golding, Heinlein and Robert E. Howard.

Continue reading →


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RE:CON Service – day one

OK, so the “professional” website is up and the Mana Brothers are in business.
Or something.
We launched yesterday afternoon the beta version of the website for RE:CON Service – a small venture whose main purpose is to provide research, fact-checking and content editing for authors on the run.

Selezione_018

Speed, accuracy and flexibility will be our by-words.
And we are cheap.

We are currently fixing the last bits – we are on Facebook, but we still miss a Twitter account and a G+ presence.
Also, something we are looking into is the option of working through TimeRepublik – so that we and our clients can trade in time, not in money.

Anyway, hello world!
RE:CON is go1.

Spread the word, if you will.

  1. incidentally, we will not fil Karavansara with RE:CON stuff from now on – this remains my personal blog, I talk about what I like… there will be a page and a banner, but nothing invasive.
    And yet, I had to start somewhere, spreading the news 🙂 ! ↩


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Other People’s Pulps: A hero worth resurrecting

The newcomer was a man of thirty-three, maybe thirty-four, and therefore a little older than his companion. He was of average height, very fit, his skin incredibly white, his features regular, his eyes gray and cunning, his lips mocking, and thin, a sign of an iron will. On first sight it was clear he was European, not only, but he belonged to some southern race.

Who is this mysterious stranger?
Now, let me take a circuitous way.

fd5429b1a5adc48216a9f254fd2e3c27Two nights ago I pitched a story for a forthcoming anthology by ProSe Press. The book will be called The Further Adventures of Ned Land, and it will feature… well, the further adventures of the harpoon-man from Jules Verne’s 20.000 Leagues under the Sea. The same character that in the 1954 Disney movie was portrayed by Kirk Douglas.
Now, I’m a big fan of both Disney’s film and of Douglas’ character – so as soon as I saw an opening, I threw myself in.
Will my pitch persuade the editors? We’ll see.

But after emailing my pitch, as I was having a glass of ice-cold Moroccan spearmint tea to toast a work well done, I started thinking about other out-of-copyright characters that it would be worth resurrecting for a series of all-new adventures.
And granted, there’s an awful lot of pulp characters out there that have fallen into the public domain, and would really deserve a comeback, but, what about Yanez de Gomera? Continue reading →


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Distractions

An unwritten rule of writing… well, it works for me, at least, is that in the moment you see deadlines looming massively on the horizon, and you have lots of stuff to write and deliver…

a . a number of other projects suddenly catch your interest
b . you get a ton of great ideas worth developing
c . you get buried in great books to read

As I said, I don’t know if it’s only me, but the problem seems to be widespread. Continue reading →


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Crossing the Desert of August

August is crawling nearer – and with August, the dead calm that signals that the whole country has stopped, and it will be in a state of half-life up to the first decade of September.
A relic of another time, when the whole nation stopped for the vacations at the same time, the Italian August sargasso is to me, this year, a true nightmare.
Work on translations and such has dried up in the last few days… useless to start a job in July, when then in August everything will be frozen in the leaden ennui of a dead country.
Better to postpone all contracts and discussions.
We’ll talk about it in September.

spiaggia

It’s always been like this. Continue reading →