Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Writing Short Stories: the best advice I ever got

shortstory1OK, I was talking with my friend Claire, the other day, and she was telling me she wants to start writing more short stories.
Which is just swell, because, hey, I want to write more short stories too!
So – you know me – I tried to talk her into doing something together, because she’s a fantastic writer and a great person and I’d have a lot of fun working with her – and who knows, she might have fun working with me on some weird and sideways project.
She was kind and measured as ever at my advances, and, what can I say, we’ll see.

But in the meantime I looked here on my shelves for stuff about short stories – because if that’s going to be the mood of the next few months, why not write a few posts on the subject. So I checked out books and stuff, and I will do a few posts and things, but because one has to start somewhere, I think I’ll start from here: from the best piece of advice I ever got about short story writing, that appropriately enough is a suggestion about beginnings.
Isn’t that neat? Continue reading →


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A night with Hansel & Gretel

Long sleepless night?
Tired of writing?
Watch a movie, then review it.
So I went and checked out Hansel & Gretel – Witch Hunters, a 2013 movie1 I had missed back then, and that, I said to myself, can’t be worse that that Brothers Grimm movie.
I was somewhat right – and here I am to offer a quick-and-dirty review.

Continue reading →


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It’s not depression, it’s just an overload of a-holes

Ever since I saw my father sink into depression and drag all of our family with him in his self-destructive attitude, I have blamed myself for not being able to catch the hints early on, and I have also started keeping my mind under observation.
Scared of losing it? You bet.

I have written in the past about the ups and downs of pursuing what could be described rather presumptuously as a creative career – be it writing, or teaching, or scientific research.
The condition of being constantly engaged, the mind constantly working on ideas, connections, developments, is in my opinion a big help in keeping dark mood at bay, but when it fails, it helps the dark moods to come on and do their thing.

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In the last few weeks, while battling with insomnia and other things, I noticed a curious thing: I’d be perfectly fine until sunfall, and then a sort of exhaustion would creep over me, stopping me from doing anything constructive.
Even reading a book becomes a fight, while a deep sense of unhappiness sets over my spirit.
It really got me scared. Continue reading →


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Art requests and a new series

One of the best bits of this writing business is sending cover art requests to the publisher.
Oh, it’s a bother, because, well, I grew up with those incredible Whelan, Sanjulian, Frazetta, Maitz covers, and so my imagination tends to run amok when I have to describe my dream cover to the artist, but it’s also lots of fun.

manuel-sanjulian-huntress

… and then we put a big sabretooth tiger skull in the right corner…

And it usually only takes two or three attempts.
But this time it took only one.

Which is a rather circular way to say that my sword & sorcery story, tentatively called Heart of the Lizard, is getting a cover, and is, therefore, “a thing” – or it will be soon-ish.

Hopefully this will be the first in a series of 20.000 words novellas, and it will feature a larger cast compared to my usual works.

Right now I am hard at work on the text to surprise my publisher and hand him the finished story one week earlier than promised. And I still hope to find time to write a few other things this weekend.
Who needs to sleep anyway?


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More shopping suggestions from Amazon

Amazon keeps suggesting me books, and I am happy to report the very dubious books and DVDs about the Fascist Regime are gone – and gone are the books about the Arabian Nights and the Tits & Sand movies, alas.

logoRight now, Amazon is pretty sure I need a writing handbook and/or a programming handbook. Which is not all bad: I have just accepted a suggestion from the latest mail and splurged 99 cents on a book about data analysis with Python, because after all environmental data analysis was my “real job”, and I like to keep up to date.
Also, turns out data analysis in Python is one of the most requested skills in tech jobs right now – not that they’ll ever hire an old guy lost in the hills somewhere, but let’s power-up, the CV, what?

The writing handbooks are a different thing: those I’d like to add to my collection, such as the one by Scarlet Thomas or the one by Philip Pullman, are expensive as hell. And the cheap ones are really a sorry lot – including the handbook about characters of that (supposedly) noted author that manages to get an example character’s name wrong on page one. Not good. Not good at all.

Curiously enough, no matter if it’s suggesting me programming books or writing books, now Amazon slips into the list at least a title by Ursula K. Le Guin, and one or more titles by Virginia Woolf.
Many of which I already have, having bought them on Amazon.
Mysteries of the Algorithm.


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Prudence interrupted

And so I ended up writing an origin story.
It all started whit the plot for the wrong story I told you about.
I had a character and an idea, and a possible story, and last night I spent some time playing with the bits and pieces I had.
In the end I had to drop the work halfway – an urgent request arrived from a client, for a quick-and-dirty translation, and you know how that goes. Bills to pay and all that – paying jobs get the priority over on spec projects.

But in the meantime I had got some feedback from my Patrons, that had a look at my preliminary notes. Continue reading →