Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Writing


by 2 Comments

Bookshelf archaeology

51jAwNDM1rL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_I was looking for a book, and I found two.
I did some digging on my shelf for Damon Knight’s classic Creating Short Fiction. As I mentioned, I started talking about short fiction with my friend Claire, and I wanted to check out if Knight’s book held some momentous secret I had forgotten.
For the uninitiated (but then, what are you doing here), Damon Knight was one of the greatest short story crafters in the field of science fiction – he is the author of To Serve Man, that was adapted in what is possibly the most famous episode of The Twilight Zone – and he also was an editor and critic. He was one of the founders of the SFWA, and of the Clarion Workshop.
He is the man that, as a critic, defined the idiot plot.

His writing handbook focuses on short stories, and it is quite good all things considered. It was originally published in the early ‘80s, but it is still well worth a look. Continue reading →


by 2 Comments

More writing advice: don’t let them know

When I was young and reckless, I received a piece of advice about writing that later I forgot.
The advice was

Never never never let them know how fast you can write.

It is an excellent piece of advice, but I was stupid, and I forgot about it. And they found out how fast I can write.
Up to 2000 words per hour on a decent first draft – it is a necessity, yu see: when you pay your bills by writing, you have to write a lot to make sure you’ll have enough when the guys from the bank come a-callin’.
So yes, you are fast.
And you were foolish enough to let them know.
And this, as the man that gave me that piece of advice so many years ago well knew, is a problem. Continue reading →


by 6 Comments

Writing Short Stories: the best advice I ever got

shortstory1OK, I was talking with my friend Claire, the other day, and she was telling me she wants to start writing more short stories.
Which is just swell, because, hey, I want to write more short stories too!
So – you know me – I tried to talk her into doing something together, because she’s a fantastic writer and a great person and I’d have a lot of fun working with her – and who knows, she might have fun working with me on some weird and sideways project.
She was kind and measured as ever at my advances, and, what can I say, we’ll see.

But in the meantime I looked here on my shelves for stuff about short stories – because if that’s going to be the mood of the next few months, why not write a few posts on the subject. So I checked out books and stuff, and I will do a few posts and things, but because one has to start somewhere, I think I’ll start from here: from the best piece of advice I ever got about short story writing, that appropriately enough is a suggestion about beginnings.
Isn’t that neat? Continue reading →


by Leave a comment

Prudence interrupted

And so I ended up writing an origin story.
It all started whit the plot for the wrong story I told you about.
I had a character and an idea, and a possible story, and last night I spent some time playing with the bits and pieces I had.
In the end I had to drop the work halfway – an urgent request arrived from a client, for a quick-and-dirty translation, and you know how that goes. Bills to pay and all that – paying jobs get the priority over on spec projects.

But in the meantime I had got some feedback from my Patrons, that had a look at my preliminary notes. Continue reading →


by Leave a comment

Oh, damn!

So I spent most of last night listening to some music (I’m currently on a Shiina Ringo/Tokyo Incidents bender) and fitting together the little pieces of a short story based on the guidelines I posted yesterday.
You know, the one about the wrong sort of leading lady.

It was not easy, it required a lot of staring at the screen and playing solitaire and what not.
But finally, I got all the bits and pieces in place, and the mechanism worked like, well, clockwork, while still leaving me enough margin to improvise and keep the narrative lively.

c592537a0399d51d88d929dbe765d99b

Continue reading →


by 1 Comment

New tools

logo_todoist_schemaI just started using a tool that is likely to improve and streamline  somewhat the way I attack my workload. It’s pretty popular, as far as I know, and it’s called Todoist.
Basically it is a list-making tool, a scheduler.
You put in the stuff you have to do, with dates and details. You can flag and prioritise the single entries, and it’s got a lot of nifty bits.
You can use it on your smartphone (I don’t) or on your PC, where it appears as a plugin for both your browser and your mail client.

I usually key in

  • Title, brief description of each interesting open call
  • The URL with the complete call description
  • The deadline

And this is helping me a lot. Continue reading →