Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Writing


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Why Bother?

MR-writers-block-guy

(it’s A LOT less romantic than that)

Writing a blog is really a great source of ideas.
An example?
It’s 23.33, sunday night.
In theory, in about thirty minutes a post should go online on Karavansara.
And here I am, staring at the fog inundating my courtyard like a pool of soap water, and racking my brain for an idea.

And then, on my other blog, the Italian one, a surfer comments a recent post, asking…

Why do you care about the number of readers reading your blog?
Is it a matter of money – more readers, more donations?
Or is it a way to confirm how good you are? More readers means I’m a better writer?
Why bother about being read?

Now, ok, I’ll admit it – I’m facing a difficult week, and my first reaction is slamming repeatedly my forehead on the keyboard.
When someone that’s actually reading me asks me why I am interested in being read, the sense of emptyness and desolation scares me witless for ten seconds solid.
But then, c’mon, let’s think about it – here’s a theme for the new post! Continue reading →


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The cup, the plough and the sword

k8882One of the straightforward, instant side-effects of reading Christopher C. Beckwith’s excellent Empires of the Silk Road is, one sort of starts thinking we are all at least a little Indo-Europeans/Euro-Asians in the end.
While the approach might initially seem rambling to the uneducated (such as myself), in the long run the Princeton University Press book builds data upon data, creating a very organic, concise but complete picture of the comings and goings of our Indo-European ancestors in the last… make it ten thousand years.

Now, while I like the later part very much as it provides tons of information which I might use to tighten up the revision of my non-fiction ebook about the Silk Road, I must admit the first chapter, with its catalogue of creation myths, really got me hooked.
There is this very consistent myth, found almost everywhere from China to the Mediterranean and Western Europe, which goes more or less like this… Continue reading →


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Mediterranean pulp?

mediterranean_food[I’ll explain the groceries in a minute…]
Now, there’s an Italian, a Spaniard and an American…
No, it’s not a silly joke.
It’s what happened in a quick exchange of tweets, a few nights back, with two fine gentlemen from America and Spain respectively.
The subject was pulp.
New Pulp, if you will.
The question was – what about stories not set in the United States?

What about some international setting?

I contributed tha suggestion that, preserving the time-frame (stories set somewhere between the ’30s and ’40s), and the overall structure (character-driven thrills and derring-do), the Mediterranean area would be the perfect setting.

Just consider…

Continue reading →


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Prizes and Books

Hydropunk_DrowningLibertyOK, I’ll brag, but not much.
In 2012 I took part in an independent short story competition, called Hydropunk, The Drowned Century.
The competition was for stories set somewhere in a drowned version of the 20th century – high tides, sunken cities, sea monsters.
My story, called Tempi Interessanti (Interesting Times) is set in a Venice-like Shanghai of the 1940s, and features nightclub singing, Triad gangsters, a certain tentacled god and his fish-men cultists.
It was great fun to write, and it won the second prize in the competition – a quite pleasant result, considering the first prize was won by Alessandro Forlani, Italy’s most awarded young SF writer.

The story will be out in 2013 in the Hydropunk ebook anthology, together with the other winners and runner-ups.

In the meantime, I cashed in the Amazon gift voucher which was part of the prize. Continue reading →


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Music for Writing

Music was mentioned in a comment to one of my rambling “I’a writer, look at the way I do it!” posts a few weeks back.
I said I’ll write more on the subject of music and writing.
Here we go.
While it is not one of my favorite writing tools, I do use music when writing.

Music has, for me, three main functions :

  • as a distraction filter (for me, it works far better than Focus Writer and other such software)
  • as a soundtrack for my stories and for specific scenes
  • and as a tool to help me define characters.

Let’s see… Continue reading →


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Jotting down notes for future stories

It’s been a while since I have been writing regularly, but things are looking if not up, at least relatively level, so I’m slowly getting back on track.
Lots of dead weight to drop, gotta find new horizons, thatsort of stuff…

Right now, apart from working on two non-fiction projects, I’m looking for possible markets, and preparing to contribute to the second season of the collective Italian web-novel 2 Minutes to Midnight.
It’s fun, and it’s a great exercise, working on a round robin.

AND, I’m jotting down notes for a one shot modern horror tale, and for what could turn out as a series.

I was revising my hypothetical series stuff, before I started writing this post.
A series.
Adventuring, swashbuckling, some yog-sothoteries.
In other words, sword & sorcery.
Two main characters, moving from Alexandria (Aegypt) towards the heart of Central Asia, in the 4th century.
HIstory used as a generic backdrop, not as a central issue – so I’ll be playing fast and loose if the need be.
I’d like to set the earlier stories in the Mediterranean area. Continue reading →