Hope & Glory inspired art
Unleash the Little Ghost! – The Seventh Curse (1986)
There was a time, in the 1990s, when I watched an awful lot of Hong Kong movies. With the Hong Kong Handover drawing closer and serious critics suddenly discovering John Woo and Tsui Hark, it was quite easy to get a lot of 1980s Golden Harvest and Shaw Brothers flicks. And I really liked some of them, and happily forgot about a lot of others, like, right after the end titles stopped rolling.
One of such forgotten movies came up two days ago in a chat with some friends – having just been reviewed by a popular vlogger – and I said to myself, hey, I saw this one, but I actually can’t remember how it was—let’s see it again!
So, here’s a quick review of that weirdest of things, The Seventh Curse.
Continue readingThree kinds of stories
There’s basically three categories into which the stories I am writing these days fall. This is something I was considering this morning, while I divided my time between a short that doesn’t want to work, and checking how my latest ebook is doing on KDP.
Crowdfunding Hope & Glory
We have just launched the crowdfunding for the Italian edition of Hope & Glory, my steampulp/adventure roleplaying game.
While this is of little immediate interest for the readers of Karavansara (you can already get the game in English, via DriveThruRPG), this is a big moment for me and the crew, and I want to share it with you guys.
Also, it’s likely that any extra development fueled by the Italian crowdfunding will then see the light, in a form or another, in English. But that’s for my publisher to say.
In the meantime, HERE IS THE LINK to check out our crowdfunding page.
Immortality through art
My brother is an amateur criminologist with a thing for Jack the Ripper – maybe I have already mentioned in the past his blog, Red Jack – and yesterday he mentioned to me two interesting facts:
- Fact the first: we live in the area of Italy with the highest suicide rate in the nation (a fact I already knew and I think I mentioned in one of the Buscafusco stories)
- Fact the second: the Christmas season is the time in the year with the highest rate of suicides – the forced merriment increases the sense of solitude, just as the shopping frenzy can push people in financial difficulties towards dark thoughts.
And today a friend, a widely published British writer, mentioned on Facebook the fact that he once sought immortality through his art – or, if not sought, he sort of gave it a thought – but nowadays he’s sceptical. He observed, and I agree, that our books are not a reliable portrait, as they represent a snapshot of what we were in a certain moment in time.
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Karavansara U. – first courses
When you have a good idea (or one you think is a good idea), you better put it in practice as soon as possible. Hesitation is a trap. So, I mentioned my idea to present a selection of courses the readers of Karavansara might be interested in taking, using online platforms.
The rules of thumb (we can’t really call them by-laws) of the Karavansara University are quite simple:
- free online courses
- related to the topics we usually cover on this blog: adventure & historical fiction, fantasy & pulp, history, the East, the Silk Road, and the whole wide world
And with this in mind, here’s a first selection of five courses that might kindle your curiosity…
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