Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Blackdog

If you are reading Karavansara, chances are you have an interest in fantasy and sword & sorcery, adventure fiction, writing and storytelling, the East and the Silk Road, history ancient and recent, knaves and adventurers, or an intersection of any of these. You are welcome – those are also some of my interests. Which is why I am willing to bet that you might like the book I am reading right now, and I am liking quite a lot.

The book is called Blackdog, and was written by K.V. Johansen, a Canadian writer that in 2012 was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award thanks to this book. The book was published by Pyr, a publisher that has a killer catalog and also, alas, is usually pretty expensive, but Blackdog is worth every penny. You don’t trust me? Dig the back cover blurb…

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That time I became a fascist

This is one of those “fun and surreal” stories it was suggested to me I should share to build my author platform. The ridiculous things that sometimes happen to a writer, oh my, what a cartload of laughs. I should do a brief cartoon of this one. But I can’t draw so here we go, it went like this…

I wrote the first Aculeo & Amunet story as a very first submission to an American anthology. It was, if I remember correctly, 2012. The story bounced back – deservedly, I should add – and I let it sediment for a while and then revised and rewrote it for self-publishing. Without a word-count limit and with the freedom to push the story in directions I wanted to explore.

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Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes

The cover was what did it for me at the time – in a game shop filled with Larry Elmore’s buxom fantasy heroines and Chaosium’s tentacle monsters, the cover of Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes promised the sort of fun that I expected from a roleplaying game. I mean… Classy dames in fur? French-looking guys with silenced UZIs? Scarred evil masterminds? Explosions and brawling? Humphrey Bogart?!
Come on, shut up and take my money!

So I bought it.
Twice.
The second time around, maybe five years later, my first box having been… ehm, borrowed and never returned (curses!), I ordered directly from Flying Buffalo Inc., taking advantage of an incredible special offer. I still have the box here on my shelf. Now that I think of it, this was probably my first ever online purchase. I used my Mosaic browser to access the Flying Buffalo web page.

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Sons of the Crow, pre-order

This was FAST!
The Amazon gnomes went through Sons of the Crow in record time – eight hours and the book was cleared for pre-oreder, and you can get it now for 2.99$, and get it delivered on the last weekend of this month, directly to your kindle.
Isn’t technology a wonder?

Of course if you are my Patron, you just have to go on my Patron page and download your copy.
Because it’s good … yeah, I know, I told you already.


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Cross-training

Back when I was a geology student (yes, I wax nostalgic these nights), we went on a field trip in the Alps, in the Aosta Valley, to study the Matterhorn. Due to some sort of deal our teacher had struck, we were staying as guests in a religious institution. It was a very serious sort of place, verging on the positively dreary. The sort of very strict place in which a state of the art audio system was used every morning at 6 am to wake us up with a selection of Gregorian chants. It was something.

Until the last day. The previous night a commando of geology students sneaked in the control room and changed the tape and the following morning at 6 am we woke up, the amps turned up to 11, like this…

This, too, was something.

The above, just to explain I always had a soft spot for David Lee Roth.

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