Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Writing


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Blazing keyboards in the dead city

s-l300According to a website that caters for collectors of vintage stuff, my mother’s last typewriter, an Olivetti Lettera 35, is worth 40 bucks – but on eBay I saw some specimens go for 100 euro.
Not bad, for an obsolete piece of tech that carries a QZERTY keyboard.
Mine… well, OK, my late mother’s is still in perfect working order. It only needs a new ribbon, that goes for about 8 bucks on Amazon, and no shipping fees with Prime.
And I’ll need to buy one, because on the 4th of August I’ll be using my old Lettera 35 for one of those “cheap stunts” that, I’ve been told, “proper writers” don’t do.
Well, screw them.

On the 4th of August, barring incidents, we’ll be sitting between a bookstore and a Chinese restaurant, in Nizza Monferrato, me and my friend Fabrizio Borgio, a first class mystery writer living like I do in these hills, and we’ll be typing two stories in a single take, and the pages, fresh out of the typewriters, will be hung on a string to dry, and for all the people to see and read. Continue reading →


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Not just the bills

happyToday, a beautiful person told me she likes reading my stories because even if she suffers from dyslexia, my writing style is clear enough for her to be able to go through my tales without too much difficulty. And she really enjoys them, she says.

It does not happen often.
I do get feedback from my readers, and it’s always great to hear from you guys, but this one, today, was really unique.

This is the sort of thing that reminds me I’m not doing this just to pay the bills. And that the reason why one manages to pay the bills is because sometimes things like this happen.
This is the sort of thing that makes it worth it.
I’ve been happy happy most of the day, and I’ll be most of the evening.

And this is all.


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Medium Plans

1_emiGsBgJu2KHWyjluhKXQw (1)I need some help.

Fact is, I am just totally fascinated by Medium.
It’s not just that it’s apparently very easy to set up, and promises to pay me if a lot of people read my stuff, but I like the idea of a primarily word-based platform.
Yes, one can drop an image in and all that, but from what I saw while I was working on another project, on Medium word is king (or queen, or whatever). And I like it a lot.

Uh, yes… for the uninitiated Medium is a sort-of-blogging platform that features some classical elements of other social media – like the possibility to upvote articles, and a focus on quality of contents.
And I like it, and I’d like to try and use it.

Only, what could I do on Medium that I am not already doing on Karavansara?
It would be the right place, I think, for more extensive and less improvised contents. I could write longer pieces, complete with bibliography and all the whistles and bells, somehow connected with my writing.
Articles about history, and about world-building.
It could be an idea.
A monthly thing, well-written and researched, but that would not steal too much time and energy from my other projects.

I guess my Patrons would see the articles first, and then I could post them on Medium.
Create a publication, maybe. [which means finding a title, designing a logo…]
Heck, my Patrons could even request articles!
Ah… ideas ideas ideas…
What do you say, ladies and gentlemen?
Help me make a decision.


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The Demoness with White Hair

I have just posted a 4000-words short story on my Patreon page, for all the members of the Five Bucks Brigade. Today I uploaded the English version, the Italian version goes up tomorrow.
It’s called The Demoness with White Hair.

As I explained, it all started with a 500-words test I did to apply for a gig as a freelance writer. I don’t have much faith in the result of the test, but I liked my piece, and others liked it too.
I got compared to Harold Lamb, of all things.
As soon as I stopped bragging to my friends, I decided I would like to expand that vignette, and do something more substantial with the barely sketched setting.
And I did it.

So, if you want to read my story, you’ll have to join the Five Bucks Brigade or hope and wait that I manage to sell the story to a magazine. But to kindle your curiosity, here’s some notes about the characters, and the setting. Continue reading →


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At the feet of a giant

41T7fyFa80L._SX350_BO1,204,203,200_I discovered Harold Lamb pretty late in my life, about ten years ago.
I had retrieved, as a kid, a pair of biographies written by Lamb, I had found in my grandmother’s attic. They were from my mother’s collection of young girl’s reads. I think one was Tamburlane, and the other might have been Theodora.
I don’t know what happened to those books – I guess my mother gave them away. I was not overly interested in historical biographies, at the time I liked dinosaurs.
Only much, much later I found the collections published by Bison Books and edited by Howard Andrew Jones, and it was a delight.
“Who,” my friend Claire asked, “Lamb the one of the Cossack?”

I knew, through my readings, that Harold Lamb was a great author of historical adventure, “always the scholar first, the good fictionist second” as one of his editors said, and I associated his names with Adventure magazine, that to me was possibly more iconic than Weird Tales or Astounding.

Continue reading →


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8000 words to the end

The only constant in my writing of AMARNA as a serial has been so far the fact that I usually jettison about 6000 words three days before the deadline.
Today it was different.
Today I jettisoned the whole 10.000 words of the final episode.
We are back to page 1.

But rest assured, I will get you the final episode of the serial by the 30th of this month – and then I’ll start working on the deluxe, content-rich, Kindle X-Ray enabled edition.
And the deluxe paper book.
And all the rest.
Now I only need some time to fit the pieces back together.
Hold on.