Idea for a new story
Category Archives: My Projects
Back in Aegypt
“Welcome to Pelusium,” the Tyrean captain said, “gateway to the Delta, last haven of Pompeius, and our final destination. Here I think our routes will part.”
“Yes,” the tall Roman by his side nodded. “I think we’ll stay on terra firma for a while.”
The captain looked over his shoulder, at the Aegyptian woman leaning on the gunwale, her face pale, and somewhat greenish. She glanced at him and grimaced. “A pity the sea doesn’t agree with your woman,” he said. “Or the other way around.”
“She’s not my woman.”
A shrug. “Anyway, I could use a strong man in my crew. Should you ever change your mind—”
“I will come and look for you,” the other said.
They shook their hands the Roman way, grabbing each other’s forearm, and then the big man went to collect his things, and to check how the seasick passenger was faring. The captain frowned at them, and then went back to more pressing things. The crewmen were folding and securing the sails. From the pier, dock-hands shouted greetings and directions, and the helmsman started manoeuvring to moor.
As soon as the gangway was deployed, and before the harbormaster could walk up the pier with his table and his writing tools, the Roman and the Aegyptian nodded a goodbye and disembarked. The captain followed them with his eyes until the Roman’s red headscarf and the woman’s white tunic did not disappear, swallowed in the bustle of the port.
Two Roman roads departed from Pelusium – one followed the coast west to Alexandria, the other struck south to Heliopolis and Memphis.
Aculeo & Amunet are back (and there’s two new stories in the works).
Odds and Ends #4
I’ve just posted the 4th Odds and Ends selection for my Patrons. This week, a free videogame, one of the best RPGs around, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, a great fantasy novel (free), and a free selection of songs by They Might Be Giants.
Because it’s good to be my Patrons.
Scrap paper
One of Bob Heinlein’s rules for writers is, you shall finish what you started. It’s useless to start a dozen stories and not finish even one of them. And I did, for ages – I had boxes full of started-and-never-finished short stories, back when I still used a typewriter. And later, diskettes – dozens of them.
Nowadays, what with the fact that writing is paying the bills and all that, I finish what I start – or try to be smart enough to drop it after 1000 words tops. If the story is not working for me after 1000 words (give or take 200), it means that it needs more thinking and planning. I drop it and move on to something more defined, that I can reasonably start and finish.
This is the case with the stories in the new series I had planned, and that are going nowhere. I have three – count’em, THREE! – stories outlined and defined, the characters are profiled and engaging (to me, at least) but the stories fail to start up. They are limp and undefined. They are broken. They are bad. So I dropped them.
I’m moving on to other things, while ideas sediment and I wait for the right angle to become clear. This means that my planned new project on a new platform will have to wait. But what the hell – there’s my name on the stories, they are better be good.
Rorke’s Drift (and Hope & Glory)
It is the 140th anniversary of the battle of Rorke’s Drift, a minor engagement in the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879. Contravening orders, Prince Dabulamanzi kaMpande led a force of roughly 4000 Zulu warriors against a unit of 150 British soldiers led by lieutenants Chard and Bromehead, based at the mission station in Rorke’s Drift. On the 22nd and 23rd of January, the Zulu forces repeatedly attacked the British defenses, and were pushed back, in a battle pitting numbers against technology. An estimated 350 Zulu warriors were killed and 500 wounded, and 17 British soldiers died and 15 were wounded.
I first heard of Rorke’s Drift when I was ten or twelve, when I first saw the film Zulu, directed in 1964 by Cy Enfield and featuring Stanley Baker and Michael Caine. It’s still one of my favorite movies, and back in the day it made a colossal impact – the Anglo-Zulu war is not something you get in the history curriculum in Italian middle grades, and therefore the movie was, to me and my friends, first, basically an adventure story, and secondly, totally open-ended; we had no idea of how it would end, every twist and turn, every new charge was a surprise.
Zulu is a great movie (yes, I know, it is historically inaccurate, so sue me) and I guess my interest for colonial history and the British empire started there.
It was therefore only to be expected that I would do my own take on Rorke’s Drift sooner or later.
Cue to Hope & Glory.
Robert E. Howard Did More Than Just Create Conan
A worthy read…
REH in a pensive mood
Today marks the 107th anniversary of the birth of Robert E. Howard, the quintessential American pulp author best-known for creating Conan the Barbarian.
REH, as he known to fans, had an incredibly prolific and all-too-short career lasting from roughly 1929-’36. His powerful, evocative writing has always been an influence on my own writing, almost as much as H.P. Lovecraft. Like Lovecraft, Howard had a talent for painting lush, detailed scenes in only a few evocative words — although literary critics like S.T. Joshi dismissed REH’s prose as “subliterary hackwork that does not even begin to approach genuine literature.”
But, hey, Howard did much more than unleash a barbarian on pop culture. He helped shape modern pop culture by fathering the “sword and sorcery” subgenre of fantasy and contributing to Lovecraft’s horror mythos. Howard came up with a number of other vivid characters…
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Titles
Two thousand words into a four thousand words story that will turn into a six thousand words story, I have a title for the thing but not for the series that this story is part of. This is the sort of problems that writers face, and there’s nothing about it in the handbooks.
There’s a lot of things you need to do when you write that the handbooks don’t cover: finding a title for the story and/or the series, writing a blurb…
The story i s called Weekend in Monaco, like one of the Rippingtons songs I’ve been playing in the background while writing. The fact that the story is set in Monaco is also significant.
This will be the first in a series and the first in a new bold experiment etc etc.
I have the characters, the premise, the action and twelve – count them, twelve! – stories already outlined.
But what do I call the series?
I might in the end just go for the name of the main characters, and call it Gastrell & Molinot.
But I’d like to do something a little more… umph.
Oh, well, first let’s write the stories, and see if they work with the public…
Karavansara 