My Projects | Karavansara

30 October 2013
by Davide Mana 1 Comment

Free Swamp God on Halloween

Shoggoth by pahko (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s Halloween!
Or it will be soon.
And to celebrate this pagan festivity, why not spend a few hours with the Swamp God?

Bride of the Swamp God, the first story in the Aculeo & Amunet series, is free on Kindle from the early hours (Pacific Standard Time) of October 30th to the late night (ditto) of November the first.

Now you know – tell your friends (and your enemies!)
Enjoy!

Bride of the Swamp God! (karavansara.wordpress.com)
Bride of the Swamp God – the cover (karavansara.wordpress.com)
Favourite Monsters of the Cthulhu Mythos (total-party-kill.blogspot.com)

25 September 2013
by Davide Mana 11 Comments

Bride of the Swamp God!

Bride of the Swamp God

It’s 276 AD, in the Roman province of Aegypt.
And in a late summer night, the stars are coming right.
In the swamps of the Nile’s delta, after strange aeons the sleeping Isfet is about to wake.
Young and ambitious, Aegyptian princess Amunet is here to become theBride of the God.
But she is not alone, as she descends in the depth of the lost temple: many are seeking the power of Betentacled Isfet to make it their own.
Sestus Cornelius Aculeo, centurion of the Second Traian Legion, is not one of them.
His problems are simple, their solution is equally simple.
But before the sun rises, Isfet will meet its Bride – and the problems of Aculeo & Amunet will become very complicated.

Sword & sorcery done the old way, Bride of the Swamp God is the first story in the adventures of Aculeo & Amunet.

Available now everywhere, through Amazon, in DRM-Free Kindle format.

24 September 2013
by Davide Mana 3 Comments

Bride of the Swamp God – the cover

OK, let’s try and amp the hype a little.

Here’s the cover of my forthcoming ebook, Bride of the Swamp God.
Which, as I think you can guess, has something to do with Ancient Egypt, and with tentacles.
And swamps and brides, I guess.

The cover uses some free resources provided by zememz – check out her pages on DeviantArt.

The lettering is by Giordano Effrodini.

Ancient Egyptian Art @ Museum of Fine Arts (sohflo.wordpress.com)
File under ‘hype’ – a new story coming soon (karavansara.wordpress.com)

12 September 2013
by Davide Mana 1 Comment

Free Adventurers Weekend

While of limited interest for my English-speaking readers, here’s news worth spreading: starting tomorrow, the 13th of September, at 00 am, Pacific Standard Time (7 am GMT), and for the whole weekend, my pulp-non-fiction ebook, Avventurieri sul Crocevia del Mondo (Italian Edition), will be available for free on Amazon worldwide.
The Free Adventurers Weekend ends on September the 15th, at midnight PST.

4 September 2013
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

Writing for a solid target

Targets are important.
Important in general, and important when you are writing.
The basic target for a writer is finishing the damn story, of course*.
But there are other targets – word counts, word per day, are classics.
And then, paying the bills is another extremely good target – highly motivational.

Right now, I’m setting myself a new target – an important one, one for which I feel strongly.
I plan to write and publish enough stories (mostly in English) and non-fiction (mostly in Italian), so that I can put together enough money to go to London in August 2014, and meet my friends for the 2014 WorldCon, also known as Loncon 3.
I have less than 12 months, but I will make it.

I was supposed to go to the Worldcon in Japan, in 2009, but the sudden death of my mother forced me to change my plans.
And this year I had planned a trip to Texas for the 2013 Worldcon – but unfinished business with my university, the horrid state of my country’s finance and the worse state of my own finances forced me to drop that idea too.

Now, I want to go to Loncon 3.
And I think it would be just great to pay for the trip with my writing.

It’s a big target, and one that is very dear to my heart.
But I’ll put everything in to make it.
And now it’s public, I can’t back down.

—————————–
*There’s two kind of writers: those that finish the story, and those that do not.

World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) (genesedavis.wordpress.com)
Your Role at WorldCon – Bigger Than You Think (murverse.com)
Writing targets and discipline (thrillingwriting.wordpress.com)

22 August 2013
by Davide Mana 3 Comments

Tyrannosaurus Tex

I’m happy to announce that my somewhat steampunkish short story, Tyrannosaurus Tex, is now available, in English, through Amazon.

Because in spite of all the stuffed shirts in Harvard and Chicago and Konigsberg, the medicine men in the hills, the books and articles and all the rest of the stories, the Age of Reptiles ended on the twenty-ninth of October, 1879, when the last of the cursed beasts died in Moderation, Arizona Territory, shot in the forehead with a forty-four bullet in a regular duel.
Yessir.
I should know.
I was there.

The true story of how the Age of Reptiles ended – and How the West was Won – Tyrannosaurus Tex is a 20 pages, DRM-free ebook, and it goes for 99 cents – or the equivalent in your currency of choice.

1 August 2013
by Davide Mana 9 Comments

Translating the (Savage) Worlds

Some great news.
As of today, I’m one of the translators for the Italian Edition of the Savage Worlds roleplaying game system.
As a long-time fan and player of Savage Worlds, I’m proud and excited about the job ahead – and a bit scared, as times are tight, and the work to be done is huge.
But the fun of the project more than compensates the hardships to come.

And I will be translating the main rulesbook!

In the next thirty days, I will be eating, drinking and breathing this book.
But considering I already did it, as a game keeper, and for many years, it will not be such a hard thing to do.

And there’s some more exciting, Savage Worlds-related stuff coming.
It will be great.

My other projects will have to fall back on spare time and stolen moments.
Who needs to sleep anyway?