My Projects | Karavansara

18 December 2014
by Davide Mana 4 Comments

Meet the Shanhui

According to Chinese bestiaries, such as the Guideways Through Mountains and Seas, a strange creature exists in the wild, which is called the Shanhui …

There is a beast here at Penal-Law Mountain whose form resembles a dog but with a human face. It is adept at throwing things and laughs when it sees people. It is called the Shanhui. It moves speedily like the wind, and if seen by people is an omen that great winds will blow throughout the world.

Now this passage stuck with me as I was looking for creatures for my story, The Ministry of Thunder.
What caught my attention, I think, was the idea of a dog with a human face; hybrid creatures are popular in supernatural and fantasy fiction, and the Shanhui reminded me of Brown Jenkin, from H.P. Lovecraft‘s The Dreams in the Witch House.

And so, the green* devil dog of the ancient Chinese bestiaries entered my book – first as a dire warning, then as a nightmare, then as a beast in the dark, and finally as a dangerous monster trying to… Continue reading →

18 December 2014
by Davide Mana 2 Comments

The Ministry of Thunder is up and running!

It should have been easy – pick up a drunk Italian in a fifth-rate Shanghai dive, and then deliver him unharmed to an Irish guy in Foochow Road.
A small simple job, just what Felice Sabatini needed to pay his way out of town.
Nice and smooth.

But this, of course, was before the guys in black pajamas, with their throwing stars.
Before the knife-fight in the back of a runaway rickshaw.
Before the gunfight on the bank of the Foochow Creek, and the dragon waiting in the depths of the river.
Before the Irish guy turned out to be a Chinese woman, and beautiful.

They said it would be easy.
Well, they lied.

Continue reading →

17 December 2014
by Davide Mana 8 Comments

The Ministry of Thunder – cover reveal

Yes, it’s out, and we’ll talk about it, tomorrow.
But for now, here’s Antonio de Luca’s gorgeous cover for my first novel!

17 December 2014
by Davide Mana 3 Comments

Writing fluff

More talking aloud with myself, in English, about my current project.
In roleplaying games, “Fluff” is the name usually given to the gaming material that describes the setting – as opposed to the “Crunch“, the rules and mechanics of the thing.

Fluff is what I like in games – and what I normally write in gaming books.
After all, to me, roleplaying games is about living adventures in strange and new worlds – rules are for the weak.

Right now, in the early phases of my new work, I’m trying to decide how to present the fluff in my book. Continue reading →

15 December 2014
by Davide Mana 7 Comments

A new gaming project

I started working on a new roleplaying project – at the moment it is still very hush-hush, but it’s certainly the largest, most complicated RPG project I ever had to face: I’m designing a whole world, and I have to write about it in a way that will make it accessible to players.
The estimated word count comes close to 80.000/100.000 words.
That’s huge.

Writing for gaming is very different from writing fiction, it requires a much more delicate balance between invention and organization.
They don’t call it “game design” for nothing. Continue reading →

1 December 2014
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

Fear of the future

I joined a new MOOC last saturday.
For those not in the know, MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course.
I’m an enthusiastic supporter of online education, and I think learning something new is still one of the best things you can invest your time in.
And when you’re stuck in the backwoods of nowhere, it helps feel a little less intellectually isolated.

So starting on the second week of January, I’ll be taking a 12-weeks course called Disasters and Ecosystems: Resilience in a Changing Climate.

This is a pretty tough course, judging from the program, but it’s also very much up my alley – I’m an environmental scientist, and resilience has been one of my pet topics (my first research project proposal – that was obviously refused as “too complicated” – was about using plankton fossils to gauge ecosystem resilience).

It will be fun. Continue reading →

24 November 2014
by Davide Mana 2 Comments

Working at a collaborative novel

So I’ve finished my novel – what now?
Quite simply – I’m working on the next one.

Starting this weekend, I am working on a collaboration with a young writer, a kid of twenty five that has a 40.000 words science fiction novel first draft needing some doctoring.
The idea is to go through the manuscript, see what’s good and what’s not, and develop a full novel – say 50.000 words worth of it.