Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: My Projects


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In Egypt with Sax Rohmer

saxrohmer1Let’s kill two birds with a stone: today’s the birthday of Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward, better known to the world at large by his pen name Sax Rohmer – the man who created the original Yellow Peril, Dr Fu Manchu.
A lower-class child that started a career as a civil servant before he turned to writing for a living and claimed to be part of the Order of the Golden Dawn, Rohmer would be 135 today.

His most famous creation, Dr Fu Manchu, first appeared in The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu, as a serial, in 1912. Two other novels followed,and then the character went on hiatus for about fifteen years, only to return with The Daughter of Fu Manchu in 1928. Continue reading →


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Singing Sweethearts Blogathon: The Merry Widow (1934)

Jeanette MacDonald -1937I’ve been invited to contribute to The Singing Sweethearts Blogathon, dedicated to the movies of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy.
The blogathon was set up by Rebekah Brennan, co-founder of the Pure Entertainment Preservation Society blog, and you can point your browsers in that direction to check out the full list of participants and read a number of great articles on the movies of MacDonald & Eddy, both together and on their own.

And once you’re done, come back here, because we are about to take a waltz with The Merry Widow. Continue reading →


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Van Maanen’s Star

9a410eaaf9963756201434ccdb46df82_originalStar Eagles is a game created by Damon Richardson and published by Andrea Sfiligoi’s Ganesha Games.
Humanity faces an alien menace in this fun, easy-to-learn game of space battles.

I’ve been lucky enough to be involved very marginally in the project when I provided a few short snippets of fiction to spice-up the game handbook.
And as it usually happens, I found the universe interesting and worth exploring, and two characters, Tam and Lol, that would make it a fun thing exploring it.
So I asked Damon and Andrea for permission, and they allowed me to play in their backyard. The result is a story – hopefully the first of many – called Van Maanen’s Star.

privateers 1 cover 2

My first ever military SF story is currently available in multiple formats through Gumroad. It will also go up on Amazon, but it will take a little longer for the oompa-loompas to do their job.
Check it out.

ADDENDUM: the oompa loompa were as fats as hell, and now Van Maanen’s Star is also on Amazon.


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Two-months review

It’s been a busy two months, December 2017 and January 2018, two months during which I finally put to work the fast internet connection activated in October and I started my online courses. Two months during which the first phase of the AMARNA project started, and of course the first two months on Patreon.
With this post, I will try to give a brief overview of these two months, focusing on Patreon in particular. Continue reading →


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Craft enables art

I’m doing fifteen things at the same time as usual – it helps that the flu left me cranky and jet-lagged: I live by night and sleep through most of the morning, and night is fine for writing and reading, the hours seem to last longer.
Among the things I’m working on, there’s the online course in worldbuilding that will start later this month. I’m making plans, pulling resources and treasuring what I’m learning with the online course in self-publishing I’m teaching right now.
220px-SteeringTheCraftAnd I’m re-reading a few books to steal ideas and to compile a viable bibliography. I’m re-reading everything, from The Kobold’s Guide to World Building to Jeff VanDerMeer’s Wonderbook.
Right now, I’m going through Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft . Considering we just lost the author, it felt like the right way to celebrate her and remember her work.
I first read Steering the Craft in the year 2000, the first edition. A lost girlfriend kept it, and as part of my recent book haul, I added a copy of the new updated and revised edition – I filed it as an investment for my future courses. Continue reading →


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A new story, a true first

I just finished going through the edits of the story I mentioned a while back, the one I wrote for the hell of it, and to clean my systems after a long writing-on-demand stretch. My friend Marina went through it and caught a lot of rubbish I had left in the manuscript, and now the text is clean and ready for action.
432115Now I’ll concoct a cover, and then self-publish it, once again going for both Amazon and Gumroad.
And of course my top-tier Patrons will get a copy, whether they like it or not.

The story is called Listening Post, it’s a little above 6500 words, and it’s a first for me, being military SF.
Or maybe I should call it Paramilitary SF, considering the plot focuses on a privateer ship working as a contractor during an interstellar war. Continue reading →