Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: My Projects


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Warm-ups

Cover of "Writing down the Bones"

Nathalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones is (together with Tom Robbin’s Still Life with Woodpecker) the book that got me back to writing after a long dry spell, back in the ’90s*.

Right now I’m re-reading my second-hand copy of Wild Mind – Living the Writier’s Life, which is an ideal sequel to Writing Down the Bones.

The book was very dear to the previous owner – words and passages are underlined, stars are to be found in the margins, marking ideas or paragraphs the previous owner found significant. Continue reading →


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Refurbishing my LinkedIn

Let’s be serious – my LinkedIn page is in shambles, and my account is very popular with spammers and snake-oil salesmen.
The last time I updated I was still working on my PhD – now my PhD’s in the past.
Paid jobs are scarce, the crisis is rampaging through the country, the wolf is at the door – time to set things straight, and re-do my profile.

Considering the absurd amount of stuff I’m currently doing, this will be something that I’ll do in short steps, taking one hour every evening, as an after dinner sort of thing.
I want to plan the update and do it right.

As luck would have it, I just chanced on this one…

How To Create A Kick-Ass LinkedIn Profile [Infographic]

Just what the doctor ordered.

Let’s see if it works – I’ll keep you posted.


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Taking a hike

Owen-Latimore-Desert-Road-to-Turkestan-p220-A-HALT-ON-THE-MARCH

Owen J. Lattimore did it the old way in Turkestan.

A few posts back, I mentioned watching the sky as a probably normal practice of ancient travelers.
Travel in the ancient world (and not so ancient, now that I think about it) was done on foot.
Walking.
Even if merchandise and goods traveled on the back of camels or horses, humans normally went on foot.
Walking is a way of going that’s close to the territory, it’s slow and tiresome.
It’s something else.

Now I was talking about health, and getting back in shape (or at least try to), a few days back, with my friend Claire, and she suggested Nordic Walking as a soft, pleasant activity.
I pointed out that here, among the savage hills of Astigianistan, finding people to go hiking together might be a problem – the standard leisure activity hereabouts is sitting in front of the bar, gossiping. Continue reading →


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Wu Xing for writers – part one

In the pauses of my writing binge I’m trying to put together the bits and pieces I’ll need for my next writing job – a novel looms on the horizon.

Which, in a very circuitous way, leads us to Wu Xing – that is, Taoist elemental theory.

According to the Taoist masters, reality is built by the interplay of five elements: Fire, Earth, Metal, Water and Wood.
The five elements are connected by complicated relationships of generation and antagonism. Continue reading →


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New project – short-short and tongue-in-cheek

PulpCovers-UnknownVol.3,No.3,May1940In a perfect world, I’d have 36-hours-days to spend writing.
It would be fun, and maybe I might even turn a profit out of it.

And yet, sometimes there are weird silly ideas that pop up and won’t lay down.

As I think I mentioned in the past, I started reading fantasy with the rationalized fantasy stories that Unknown Worlds magazine used to publish.
I still love the Tales from Gavagan’s Bar, by Lyon Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, and I sometimes I feel deep down I’ve got a De Camp-esque approach to fantasy – I need a good laugh, in my stories, because I take the genre seriously, sure, but just not that much. Continue reading →


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Archive and scheduler

acc39702_1_1Yet another copybook.
Or, to be more precise, another ring binder.

Fact is, while my country sinks into terminal economic crisis and my CVs disappear in the black hole in which the CVs of the overeducated and underemployed end their life, I’m fulfilling my old dream of writing for a living.
Or die trying.

This means, among other things, keeping an eye out for open calls in the genres I normally write.

Which in turns means be organized, and write fast.
I already covered the write fast side of things in previous post, so I’ll talk about organization (or lack thereof) here. Continue reading →


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Author events for digital books

local-author-meet-and-greet-73Author events and presentations.
I like those a lot.
I was at one, yesterday evening.
Quite instructive experience.

And it got me wondering – I’ve twenty ebooks out now, covering a wide range of genres in fiction and non fiction.
A presentation might be a good way to move a few dozen copies, and also do something completely different.
A change of pace, a chance to connect with the readers.

But the point is – how do I go about it? Continue reading →