Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Writing


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Journey with the gods: Takizawa Bakin and the writer as masterless samurai

36c970b7c39c9cba362d798ccec4baf2A few days ago I was reading a short pamphlet by a friend, that reprised, among other things, this idea we have been playing with, of indie and freelance writers being ronin, masterless samurai.
The comparison is strikingly fitting: individuals with competence and skill, bound to a code of conduct (or at least a work ethic), despised, mocked and feared because they lack a master (or an agent, or a publisher), trying to make ends meet.
A self-sufficient adventurer, a loner fighting his own wars.

The problem with these men was that they were armed and out of work.
(Nakasendo Way)

Romantic?
Possibly. Continue reading →


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Mars and details

I’ve been spending some time on Mars, recently.
Not only did I take part in the How to Survive on Mars course by Monash University – which was lots of fun – but I’ve been reading about the Red Planet in order to write a story (due in two weeks) for an Italian anthology. They mentioned the wrd contract, which is good, and the editor in chief is an old friend, so I said yes. They’ve been vague enough in their guidelines, so I decided to go and hit them with a Martian story.
It will be hard SF, uncompromisingly optimist. My way of optimism, the one that says that problems exist, and we must work hard to solve them. They will probably reject it, but it’s a risk I’m ready to take.

But the problem right now is, I’ve a wonderful setting, but I have no story. Continue reading →


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“Why did I start writing? The price of pork and beans made it necessary. I just got hungry enough, which is always a good thing for beginners. I was in New York and I knew Jeff Hanley, a red haired reporter on a paper there. I would pound out stuff on the typewriter and Jeff would come home, look my stuff over, say it was rotten, which it was, and make me go ahead doing more of it. Finally, under the stint of his irony I wrote a story and sold it to Frank Munsey.”
— Talbot Mundy.


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A story in search of its place

I might need a little help here, so suggestions are welcome.
Last April I wrote a story, in about a weekend. It was a one-shot horror story set in New York in the 1930s, but as I usually do when I write shorts, I designed it to work as the first in a series, should the characters meet the fancy of the readers.

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I wanted to do something in the vein of the old pulps, but also more modern, closer to our modern sensibilities.
Straightforward but quirky.
So, it was a one-shot “with possibilities”, and it was intended as (possibly) the first outing of my very own occult detective/monster hunter, the extremely reluctant conjurer Steve Davies, a.k.a. The Mysterious Doctor Wu Yang1… Continue reading →


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Did this guy ever see a movie?

I’ll ramble a bit, if you don’t mind. This post is somewhat connected to the Things I learned from the Movies post a few days back.
Sort of like a reboot.

Last night we were reading a passage from a novel, me and some friends.
It’s a good exercise, reading aloud, and see what it sounds like. It helps a lot.
Robert E Howard used to speak aloud the passages he was typing, or so they say – and it’s a good practice… well, ok maybe not bellowing out loud each and every phrase, but reading some passages aloud helps.
roastAnyway, the thing we were reading was incredibly bad. But really bad.
This was just some people sitting around a table, having lunch (roast with potatoes, that sort of stuff), and it was supposed to be a quiet naturalistic scene, with some sort of emotional charge underneath.
It was ghastly.
The prose was stilted, the dialogue was made of wood, the whole set up lacked life, rhythm, humor, that spark that brings the scene to your mind’s eye.
It was horrid, and it failed on every point. A disaster.
We laughed a lot, we cringed a lot.
But mostly laughed.

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And so it happened that me and my friend Lucy just ended up saying the same thing:

But did this guy ever see a movie in his life?

Which led to an interesting discussion, and it was fun because Lucy is a writer and a movie montage and editing expert1, and I’ll try and summarize it here, for your entertainment. Continue reading →


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#PoweredByIndie : I should be writing porn instead

This is the month of the indies, and this is an indie-related post in more ways than one.
I was having a talk with some friends, yesterday, about self-publishing, indie publishing and such, and as it usually happens, recently, we ended up repeating a mantra, a meme of sort that is growing popular by the day in our select circle:

I should start writing porn under an alias

hardatworkWhich, in all likelihood (or at least according to some persistent legend), would be an easier way to pay the bills than writing fantasy, or science fiction, or horror, or westerns, or whatever.

At that point, usually, the party splits in two fields: on one side, there’s the ones that list the technical problems of such a line of action, such as establishing an alias and market the new books; on the other side, there’s the guys that simply say they couldn’t do it because they find porn repulsive, they’d be ashamed of themselves, or the sole idea of writing smut makes them start laughing.

I’m a “I’d start laughing and end up writing a farce” sort of guy, and yet I normally side with the technicalities-minded. Continue reading →


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I feed on ideas

Pulpy sort of title, what?
I should write a story to it.

But the fact is, you see, I just had one of those horrible, horrible grief and self-loathing attacks as I watched a very interesting video on Youtube: Richard Dawkins interviewing Derren Brown.

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Now, this is a package that has everything to capture me: a scientist and science popularizer I like very much, interviewing a famous illusionist I follow and appreciate.
And of course Dawkins is a colleague (evolution being our plaything) and stage magic is, I often said that, strictly connected with writing. And I did some magic tricks when I was a kid.

So, why the self-loathing? Continue reading →