Karavansara

Coming in 2019

18 December 2018 by Davide Mana Leave a comment

18 December 2018
by Davide Mana 4 Comments

As a Christmas gift, I’ve just received a copy of W.F. Harvey’s collection The Beast with Five Fingers, a massive volume featuring fifty odd-stories by this lesser known British practitioner of supernatural and horror fiction.

A Quaker, Harvey had a degree in medicine and had served as a surgeon during the Great War, and writing was not his main career until his early retirement in 1925, aged 40, due to ill health (his lungs had been damaged during a rescue operation at sea during the war). The Beast with Five Fingers is probably his best-known short story, it was originally pyblished in The New Decameron in 1919, and gave the title to the author’s second collection, published in 1928.
In case you are interested, you can read it in Famous Modern Ghost Stories, a fine collection from the ’20s you can download for free as an ebook on the Project Gutenberg (and that features also Algernon Blackwood, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert W. Chambers and Ambrose Bierce, among many others).

And while I am waiting to find the time to read this beauty, last night I went and watched the movie featuring Peter Lorre that in 1946 was based on the Harvey story, and on a script by Curt Siodmak. And here’s my impressions.

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17 December 2018
by Davide Mana 2 Comments

One Year on Patreon

I am preparing an online archive of all the contents I shared with my Patrons in my first year on the platform. Patreon is an excellent service, but it does not allow an easy search and retrieval of previous contents – so new Patrons might have a hard time getting the old stories I shared.

In 2018, my Patrons had the dubious pleasure of reading:

One Night at the Circus (Urban Fantasy)

The Tales from the Frontier (Oriental Fantasy):
. The Demoness with White Hair
. The Last House in the Valley
. The Waterfall’s Wife

She Who Mauls, A story of the Contubernium (Historical Fantasy)

Funeral Point (urban fantasy)

The Chopping Squad (horror novella)

The Annotated Imaginary Girls – season #1
. Sara
. Lucy
. Tamara
. Alice
. Michelle
. Cheryl
. Livia

All of these stories were made available both in Italian and English.
My Italian Patrons also got

the Burning Typewriters Story (science fiction)
Dracula: The Duel (dark fantasy)

Plus articles, behind the scenes, artwork, development notes and what else. AND discounts or free copies for all the ebooks I self-published.

Now all the stories will be revised, turned into handy PDF and uploaded somewhere easy to browse. I’m open to suggestions, by the way.

Once this is done, I’ll start working on the new material and on a general revision of my Patreon page, to make it more pleasant and easier to access.
As they say, it’s good to be my Patrons.

17 December 2018
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

Karavansara University

Here is a good proposition for the coming year: expand Karavansara’s offer of topics and ideas, while remaining within the scope and theme of this blog. Keep talking about adventures, and history, and books, about fantasy and genre fiction, about the East and the pulps, but adding a little something you guys might like.

And you all know how much I love online courses and MOOCs, and how wonderful I think it is the opportunity of learning from home, and for free, about any topic.

So here is what I am planning to do – I’ll do a post, once per month, presenting a curated selection of online courses you might find interesting. Courses about history and literature, maybe writing, possibly languages. Archaelogy and art, and the topics you expect to find covered here on Karavansara.
No more than four or five courses, all of them free.
No strings attached – just a way to promote learning and, most importantly, curiosity.
I will call it…

KARAVANSARA UNIVERSITY

(because we have to stay humble)

I hope to have the first selection up between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, with courses for the early months of 2019.

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17 December 2018
by Davide Mana 4 Comments

A night out with Johnny Hawke

I first became aware of David Stuart Davies through his Holmes books and his work as editor on the mystery and supernatural anthologies for Wordsworth. I particularly liked Sherlock Holmes and the Hentzau Affair, a fun pastiche that crosses the Baker Street Detective with the Prisoner of Zenda.
If you read this blog, you understand how I find that mix irresistible.

But there’s another series of books by Davies that always intrigued me, and that’s the one that goes by the name of Johnny One Eye – and in the past two nights I’ve had the opportunity of reading Johnny’s first outing, Forests of the Night.

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16 December 2018
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

Playing on the web

I am hard at work to learn the ins and outs of Roll20, the online platform for gaming. Tonight – that is, in about three hours – I will be hosting an online demo game for Hope & Glory, thanks to the guys of D20Nation, a very popular Italian gaming community.