Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: My Projects


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24-hours vacation

1426741881.71Not much to show today – I spent most of yesterday’s night finishing my editing/cleaning-up/setting-things-straight work on a new novel.
The hard part was trying to make my Linux-based LibreOffice digest and show properly a MSWord document (the one my editor sent me).

But apart a few crashes and recoveries, it all went for the best.
Now, I’m relaxing a bit – and I just gave myself a big gift for finishing this big job.
I read wonders about Chris Willrich’s Gaunt and Bone series, so I got me the first volume, The Scroll of Years.
I love the Chinese feel of the artwork.
Now time to dig into it.

Later!

PS: I don’t know if it’s the same for you, but it looks like it’s snowing on my blog.
Apparently WordPress decided to get festive.


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I caught the Pulp Fiction Bug

92184In Bruce Campbell‘s entertaining Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way. the author describes how he became sort of a healthy carrier of the B-movie bug: no matter how high-profile the production in which Campbell is involved, no matter how classy the leading actors, his sole presence on set is granted to turn the whole project into a B-movie extravaganza1.

I think I just caught a similar for of virus – the Pulp bug.
I tend to turn everything I touch into pulp adventure fare.

Consider the following… Continue reading →


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Fedora

$T2eC16Z,!)oFIem9qvv,BSPwymvbP!~~60_35One of the perks of living in a rural area in depressed Northern Italy is the easy availability of cheap, high-quality hats.
People hereabouts still wear a hat every day – and if the dread agrochemicals-sponsored baseball cap is spreading as the standard working headgear of tractor-riders, slowly replacing the straw trilby with a sponsored band, out of the fields a lot of people still favor what goes under the name of lòbia.
The standard Borsalino hat.
What’s universally known as a fedora hat1.
And this is good, because in these autumn days I need a new fedora.
Continue reading →


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New covers for Aculeo & Amunet

One of the best features offered by ebooks is the option of updating the files.

In the last few days we’ve been hard at work on some new covers for my Aculeo & Amunet ebooks.
Reader feedback has been pretty consistent in the past months – the readers love the stories, but they don’t like the covers.

And we know it’s the covers that sell the stories.

So, in a few hours the ebooks will be up with new artwork1 – the work of Italian graphic master, Luca Morandi.
And the readers of Karavansara can take a glimpse at the first of the three new covers, right here and now.

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Africa

I feel like Jock Mahoney.
No, wait, let me explain.

Jock Mahoney was a former Marine that starred in two Western TV series and a few Western movies, and ended up playing Tarzan in the ’60s after auditioning for the role in the ’40s.

In particular, Mahoney starred in Tarzan goes to India, in which Burroughs’ character moves from his home turf in Africa to Asia,  in order to save the elephants endangered by the works for a new dam.

And no, it’s not that I’m about to start wearing a toupée.

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How I became a test subject

braininjarAnd so I became a guinea pig.
Unsurprising, some of you might say.
Ok, ok.
It went like this…

I already mentioned, ad nauseam, that I love MOOCs and online learning – to me, taking part in a MOOC is a great way to do research at university level, to tickle my curiosity1, and to spend my free time here in the desert hills of Astigianistan.
This autumn, I’ve enrolled in a MOOC, hosted by FutureLearn, about mindfulness. Continue reading →