Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Honor among thieves

The thing one does for research. Today I weathered the heat and humidity by applying massive doses of cold tea and by reading an interesting article about the ethics of criminals.

Apart from the interesting bits about organized crime in 15th century Spain – that might come handy for future writing pursuits – I was particularly interested in one aspect of the ethics/crime/professionalism quandary: if I can compare writing to a con game (as Lawrence Block, among others, has done), and a writer to a highly skilled international jewel thief (cfr. Paddy McAloon’s “The Best Jewel Thief in the World”), then what is the place of ethics in all this?
Does being professionals only mean we get paid, and any way we get paid is OK?
Or is there something more? And how it works?
Spending a few hours with this article helped define some basic principles.

I might write about the whole thing, one of these nights.


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Ocean of Storms

It’s been fifty years, give or take a few days, since we first set foot on the Moon. One of man’s greatest achievements, one we should be all proud of.
I was there, sitting on the floor in front of the telly. I was two years old and I only have very confused memories of the screen and the excitement around me – and probably they are second-hand, false memories.

The doorstep of the universe, and we had finally placed a foot on it.
Then things went differently than what we dreamed.
We had to think about “real important stuff”, I guess, like building bigger cars.

But moon dreams are what pays my bills, so I wrote a story.
A short hard SF number, about the Moon, and the future, and us.
It’s called Ocean of Storms, and I’ve just delivered it in various formats to my Patrons.

Because it’s good to be my patron, or so they say.


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Voices in the Dark

The last time I listened to an audiobook I was driving along the highway to meet a friend, and I got so engrossed in the action that I missed my exit, and had to drive an extra fifty miles. I learned my lesson, and left audiobooks on the side for a while.

These days I no longer have a car, and I have a stack on audiobooks I never got around listening to.
I’ve got half a dozen Bryant & May mysteries by Christopher Fowler I got with a special offer a few years back, and I have a huge selection of Warhammer 40K novels I bought with a Humble Bundle two years ago.
And more.

These audiobooks, together with the huge troves of audio-dramas one can find online (via the Internet Archive), are an absolute blessing with this heat: I can turn off the lights, close my eyes and enjoy the ride as the evening gets cooler.
Because we need to adapt to the environment if we want to survive, and this place is too hot, humid and mosquito-ridden to do anything else.

Tonight I’ll start with Bryant & May – nothing better than a good mystery on a hot summer night.


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Heatwave at the Keep

Heatwave is the title of a song by a band called the Blue Nile that I discovered in the version by Dave Stewart (not that one, the other) and Barbara Gaskin.
Not that you care, I guess.
An heatwave is also what’s hitting Europe in this moment – we are at 38°C here in Astigianistan, with a staggering 58% of humidity (that goes up to ‘70% in the evening). It will get hotter in the next days.
People will die, like it already happened in 2003.

All we can do is stay indoors, use the fan in moderation, and try to go through these days. I’ve work to do, and I’ll do it in the night.
In the meantime, I pass my time listening to old records and reading a chiller – because, well, one can try and get chilled at least ideally, right?

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Without a Blog: the Earphones Diaries

And so I’ve gone and invented me another thing, a game of sorts to keep my brain going and get away from writing and reading 24/7.
It will be called The Earphone Diaries, and it will live only on my social networks: my Facebook profile, my Instagram page, my Pinterest boards and my Twitter. Much as I love blogging, there will be no blog supporting this guerrilla project.

The Earphones Diaries will be a series of daily post, presenting a record I am currently listening to. I’m going at this without a plan, the course is once again uncharted: no genre tags or other hang-ups, just the music that’s currently playing in my earphones, presented in short, less-than-2000 characters posts.
Just for the fun of it.

The first post will go online in a few hours.


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The new book has been outlined: now comes the fun part

This morning I put together the first proper outline of a book that will supposedly see the light in early 2020: a non fiction book for a small but classy Italian publisher dealing with one of the topics of this blog: travelers and explorers in exotic parts, between 1800 and 1940-something.

The trick will be weaving together the lives of at least twenty historical characters, so that the volume will be a homogeneous narrative and not a series of episodes.

So I spent quite some time trying to decide whether to use time or space to tie the story together.

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