Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: My Projects


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Crowdfunding

cookI’m currently reading Kicking It by Monte Cook and Shanna Germain. A nifty little guide to crowdfunding projects, that goes to complement the crowdfunding course I followed two years ago.

The book came with a nice bundle of game-design related handbooks, and is the right book at the right time.
The text is clear, and offers examples and pointers and instruction on how to plan a crowdfunding strategy.
How to think about crowdfunding, if you will.

I have two crowdfunding campaigns under my belt – the first, started as a lark, that resulted in a huge success, and the second, accurately planned, that failed to reach 50% of the target.
It is time to rethink my strategies.
I still believe that crowdfunding is the way to go for a lot of small creators – a category in which I think I belong. Crowdfunding a project is a great way to try and dare a little more: better cover art, professional editing, extra contents.
But for me, right now, crowdfunding requires more work, and more study.
So, let’s try and learn from the best.


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Plans and changes thereof

The old song Nothing Ever Goes as Planned by Styx should become my theme tune.
As I think I mentioned elsewhere, I have been writing like mad and I still am – lots of deadlines, lots of bills to pay.
Ugly.
And last night I finally decided that it’s thumbs down for Counterspinner, my hard-SF novella aimed at Tor.com.
The story is solid, and I like the way it’s shaping up, but quite simply I will not make it in time for the narrow submission window available.
Whichis a damn pity, but it is important to recognize one’s own limits.
I will still write it, but not now.

And on the other hand, renouncing an opportunity like an unagented submission for Tor.com is simply crazy.
But… Continue reading →


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Asteria in the Court of Minos

I know you guys are eager to learn what happened yesterday in Nizza, when I crossed typewriters with my friend Fabrizio Borgio for four hours of intense fiction writing.
And I’ll tell you, but not right now.

Right now, I am happy to announce that the first episode in the resurrected series The Adventures of Asteria is out and about, finally in English. You can buy it right now on Gumroad (epub, pdf, mobi) and it will be up on Amazon in a few days1.

asteria 1 eng

Asteria in the Court of Minos pits the gray-haired amazon against the king of Crete, and his sinister counselor, the scientist-magus Aischyuras.
Danger.
Intrigue.
Violence.
Minotaurs.
The Serpent Cult.
Giant robots.

Inspired by the old peplums and sword & sandal movies that were Italy’s own brand of fantasy film-making in the ’50s and ’60s, the Asteria stories play with time and space and historical accuracy, and often end with a big explosion.
I hope you’ll enjoy them.

All of Asteria’s adventures are stand-alone, novelette-length stories, and can be read and enjoyed in any order.

Next week…

Asteria in the Cour of the Great Khan

ADDENDUM: Amazon was faster than ever, and in about six hours made the ebook available. You can get it HERE

 

  1. my patrons have already received their free copy or their discounted copy, depending on their level of pledge. It’s good to be my patrons (or so they say). ↩


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Typewriter

So this is the day – in a few hours, as the thermometer reached 94°F, I’ll sit in front of a local bookstore with my mother’s typewriter and spend four hours (more or less) writing a story, based on prompts randomly picked from a bowl, where readers have put them.
I will not be alone, because Fabrizio Borgio will be with me. We even made the local news.

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What were we thinking when we proposed this?
Four hours for a story?
Using mechanical typewriters?
On the hottest afternoon of the year?

But we’ll make it. Continue reading →


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Stained fingers and ideas backup

My fingers are stained black and red. I have just fitted the new ribbon in my mother’s old Lettera 35 – tomorrow afternoon, together with my friend Fabrizio Borgio, we’ll challenge the heat and the fishbowl-grade humidity doing our Burning Typewriters challenge, and we’ll write a story each, in public, in Nizza Monferrato.
I hope someone will take pictures.

And I’m not kidding about the heat – here’s the forecast…

Screenshot from 2018-08-03 12-27-30

Meanwhile, a story proposal I mailed about four weeks ago got a positive response, so I am re-writing/revising the story.
Which leads to an important suggestions for writers: talk about your plot ideas with your family. Continue reading →


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John D. MacDonald in Hell

JDMdeskOne of the writers I like the most, and one from whom I learned a lot (or tried to) is John D. MacDonald. I’ve been a fan of his Travis McGee stories for ages.
So you can imagine what happened in my brain when I chanced upon an open call for a very short story for a small publishing house that had two requirements:

  1. A famous writer
  2. His experiences in the afterlife

And so today I skipped lunch and I hammered out a 1500-words story called The Man with the Red-Hot Typewriter.
In which John D. MacDonald finds himself in the Chinese hell. That it’s not that different from Travis McGee’s Florida: hot, damp, and the cops are crooked.

I hope they like it enough to buy it.
I’ve just sent it off, and now it’s just a matter of sitting and waiting.
That, my friends, is hell.


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Asteria is really back, and needs your help

asteria baseAsteria in the court of the Sun King is finished, and I am revising the text and deciding the final tweaks.
I am also uncertain, at this point, about the format of the publication: a single volume collecting the three novellas, or a new novella every week for this month of August?
Any suggestion is welcome.

And I mention one novella per week, throughout the month, because as I was closing Sun King, I fell back to the habit of closing the story with a hook for the next adventure. And it goes like this… Continue reading →