Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: My Projects


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Visit Versailles online

I often speak of the joys of research. While I am polishing Asteria in the court of the Sun King I have checked out a few online resources about the palace of Versailles.

Asteria, as I have often said, is not historical fantasy, but more pseudo-historical fantasy. Very pseudo. The model being the old peplums, we don’t care much for authenticity or accuracy.

gg3

But I still like to get an idea of the places, before my characters wreck them and lay them waste.

And while I was researching King Louis XIV’s apartments, I found the official website of the Palace of Versailles.
And I think you should visit the website, and like I do, dream about a visit in person.


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The Return of Asteria

sun-kingDuring the coming weekend I will write a 12.000 words story, give or take 2000.
It will not be hard, at least the first draft – the story’s been outlined for two years, but I never got around to actually write it.
It’s called Asteria in the Court of the Sun King, and it’s the third in the series I started in 2014 about Asteria, a formerly dead amazon that is a pawn of forces beyond her comprehension.

It all started in 2014, with a discussion with a friend of mine, Italian indie author Alex Girola, about the old peplums, the sword & sandal movies that were the staple of Italian fantasy cinema in the 1950s and 1960s, and that gave us a lot of fun and even a few good movies.
What both Alex and I found fascinating – and promising from a writing point of view – was the mix of spurious Mythology, mismatched genre tropes and time periods the movies displayed. Continue reading →


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The Imaginary Girls are coming

I mentioned this a few days back: Imaginary Girls is a fun project, halfway between writing exercise and flash fiction.
The idea: take one photo, and write a 100-words story/character sketch based on it. A “drabble”, to call it properly.
Any genre. 100 words. Not 99, not 101.

instagram-logo-7596E83E98-seeklogo.comAs I said, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and now I feel like trying, and here’s what I will do: I will publish my Imaginary Girls on Instagram.
I did a little research, and found out that Instagram allows up to 2200 characters of caption for the images that users upload. Continue reading →


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Imaginary Girls

Yesterday’s short bits about cities as people reminded me one of my old – very old – projects that went nowhere.
I’ve got a few of those.
The project was called Imaginary Girls, and it was partially inspired by a song by a long gone band called Danny Wilson, called – you guessed it – Imaginary Girl

He said an imaginary girl
Is so exciting
Marry an imaginary girl
And you need nothing
In writing

The idea was to write a series of drabbles, based on a series of photographs. Continue reading →