Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: My Projects


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One Year on Patreon

I am preparing an online archive of all the contents I shared with my Patrons in my first year on the platform. Patreon is an excellent service, but it does not allow an easy search and retrieval of previous contents – so new Patrons might have a hard time getting the old stories I shared.

In 2018, my Patrons had the dubious pleasure of reading:

One Night at the Circus (Urban Fantasy)

The Tales from the Frontier (Oriental Fantasy):
 . The Demoness with White Hair
 . The Last House in the Valley
. The Waterfall’s Wife

She Who Mauls, A story of the Contubernium (Historical Fantasy) 

Funeral Point (urban fantasy)

The Chopping Squad (horror novella)

The Annotated Imaginary Girls – season #1
 . Sara
 . Lucy
 . Tamara
 . Alice
 . Michelle
 . Cheryl
 . Livia

All of these stories were made available both in Italian and English.
My Italian Patrons also got 

the Burning Typewriters Story (science fiction)
Dracula: The Duel (dark fantasy)

Plus articles, behind the scenes, artwork, development notes and what else. AND discounts or free copies for all the ebooks I self-published.

Now all the stories will be revised, turned into handy PDF and uploaded somewhere easy to browse. I’m open to suggestions, by the way.

Once this is done, I’ll start working on the new material and on a general revision of my Patreon page, to make it more pleasant and easier to access.
As they say, it’s good to be my Patrons.


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Karavansara University

Here is a good proposition for the coming year: expand Karavansara’s offer of topics and ideas, while remaining within the scope and theme of this blog. Keep talking about adventures, and history, and books, about fantasy and genre fiction, about the East and the pulps, but adding a little something you guys might like.

And you all know how much I love online courses and MOOCs, and how wonderful I think it is the opportunity of learning from home, and for free, about any topic.

So here is what I am planning to do – I’ll do a post, once per month, presenting a curated selection of online courses you might find interesting. Courses about history and literature, maybe writing, possibly languages. Archaelogy and art, and the topics you expect to find covered here on Karavansara. 
No more than four or five courses, all of them free.
No strings attached – just a way to promote learning and, most importantly, curiosity.
I will call it…

KARAVANSARA UNIVERSITY

(because we have to stay humble)

I hope to have the first selection up between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, with courses for the early months of 2019.

Continue reading →


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Playing on the web

I am hard at work to learn the ins and outs of Roll20, the online platform for gaming. Tonight – that is, in about three hours – I will be hosting an online demo game for Hope & Glory, thanks to the guys of D20Nation, a very popular Italian gaming community.

They say that using an online gaming platform is like going on a bicycle – you did it once, you’ll do it again as soon as you start.

The problem is, bicycles do not get updated as often as software. 


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The Hope & Glory quickstart

The Hope & Glory Quickstart in Italian has just been published, as a preview for the crowdfunding we are about to launch, to bring my game out in my native language.

And one of my Patrons decided to print and bind the pdf document, just like he did with the Hope & Glory novellas, and they look like a million.

With a tip of the hat and a thank you to Marco.
Great job!

(because it’s good to be my patrons, but also having patrons like these is just great)


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Return to the stars

Yesterday a story I had submitted for an anthology in November bounced back. Very kind letter from the editor, but alas, my story did not cut it. A pity, but it’s part of the game.
I asked my friend Marina to go through it, and then sent it along to another publisher. A British magazine, this time.
We’ll see what happens.

In the meantime I am writing two stories for two other submissions, the calls closing with the end of this month, and it’s been a strange sensation, because for the first time in almost five years I am back at writing my first love.

In the last three years, as writing became my only source of income, I have written basically anything as long as there’s a market: sword & sorcery & crime thrillers, Lovecraftian horror and time travel stories…

Continue reading →


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BUSCAFUSCO is Alive!

BUSCAFUSCO: Fun & Games is finally available on Amazon!

In the end it was a problem of file coding, or so the kindly gnomes at Amazn KDP told me. So I reloaded the file – this time as a rough RTF, and in about 36 hours the ebook has gone live.

So, if you are curious about the ebook that Amazon did not want you to read… well, now you can read it.

ADDENDUM:  with the release of the ebook on Amazon, the special promotion on Gumroad has ended. Thank you to all of those that used it.