The third Adventure of Asteria is out, and got some pretty good feedback from my beta readers.
You can currently download the epub, mobi and PDF file of Asteria in the Court of the Sun King from Gumroad, and within 72 hours the file will be also available on Amazon.
I hope you guys enjoy this, the first completely new Asteria story in over two years.
It’s good to be back.
True to the pulp rule that stories should be kept doing the rounds until they sell1, I got a rejection slip at 8 am, and by 10 am I had revised and sent the story to another publisher.
It’s a very short, quirky piece and should make me no more than fifty bucks, but that’s no excuse for it to be idle.
Run, little story, and please do your best to impress the editor!
And so…
The first story of Asteria was a straightforward peplum, but with a strong influence from Go Nagai and Mazinger Z in particular.
The second Asteria adventure was a Harold Lambesque story of Mongol warriors, with a supernatural horror twist.
The third Asteria novelette, that’s coming out in the weekend, is a lace & steel sort of swashbuckler, with a side of clockpunk shenanigans.
It is fitting, I think, that the fourth story, that I started writing yesterday, will be a tits & sand adventure with Arabian Nights and Marco Polo references. Continue reading
Have you ever spent a whole afternoon looking for the plan for a Renaissance Venetian house in order to use it as the setting for a few scenes in the story you have written already, but is missing that extra something?
Well, I did.
And thank goodness for domestic refurbishing companies, because otherwise all I had been able to find was a detailed plan for the Palazzo Ducale. A little too upscale for my purposes.
But architecture studios today are quite proud to put up the plans of the buildings they have worked on. It took me the whole afternoon to find the plans, but now they are here on my desktop.
The following step was ditching three thousand words of my 10.000-words story, and go back to redesign the whole action scenes at the core of the story.
Because now I have reality to work with.
That is the reason I did my research in the first place. Continue reading
My Italian readers had to wait two years for the second adventure of Asteria: Minos was published in August 2014, Great Khan in July 2016.
The foreword to the English language edition explains a bit of the background on that hiatus.
And my English readers are getting the Second Asteria Adventure, Asteria in the Court of the Great Khan barely one week after the first, both on Gumroad (for those that do not like Amazon, or prefer a different file format) and on Amazon.
Nice and smooth1. Continue reading
I have just uploaded on Amazon my 80th self-produced ebook – you might have heard about it, it’s called Asteria in the Court of the Great Khan and it is the second episode in the Adventures of Asteria, my sword & sandal series.
The story was originally published in Italian in the summer of 2016 – almost exactly two years ago – and was the last thing I wrote in Italian for years.
Now the series is coming back in English – you can get the first book, Asteria in the Court of Minos either on Amazon or on Gumroad.
Considering the times that Amazon usually has, I guess volume two will be out by the weekend – and I’ll upload a zip file with the mobi, epub and pdf versions on Gumroad too.
My Patrons will get a discount, but you knew that already.
Eighty ebooks is a lot of words.
And that’s not counting my traditionally-published work – those should be nine volumes, if I am not mistaken, not counting my participation at multiple-author anthologies and collections of essays.
A whole lot of words.
And there will be another dozen titles coming out before the end of the year.
A fair chunk of this work – 26 titles, to be exact – were published under an alias.
They are selling better than the remaining titles in my name.
I guess that should tell me something.
Indeed, my next big project – should the publisher accept it – will be published with another alias.
Diversify the offer, you know.
But in the meantime… eighty ebooks.
Not bad, all things considered.
But the best, of course, is yet to come.
And now, a little music…
While you can still read my Imaginary Girls stories only on Instagram and Patreon, I am posting the inspiration images on Facebook (on the pages of my blogs, Karavansara and strategie evolutive – there should be a badge in the sidebar) and on a pinboard on Pinterest.
I hope this will bring new readers to discover my work.
And it’s fun.
Karavansara 