Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


by 5 Comments

The Return of Asteria

sun-kingDuring the coming weekend I will write a 12.000 words story, give or take 2000.
It will not be hard, at least the first draft – the story’s been outlined for two years, but I never got around to actually write it.
It’s called Asteria in the Court of the Sun King, and it’s the third in the series I started in 2014 about Asteria, a formerly dead amazon that is a pawn of forces beyond her comprehension.

It all started in 2014, with a discussion with a friend of mine, Italian indie author Alex Girola, about the old peplums, the sword & sandal movies that were the staple of Italian fantasy cinema in the 1950s and 1960s, and that gave us a lot of fun and even a few good movies.
What both Alex and I found fascinating – and promising from a writing point of view – was the mix of spurious Mythology, mismatched genre tropes and time periods the movies displayed. Continue reading →


by Leave a comment

God Stalk and the Fantasy Interregnum

A woman with retractable claws like a cat, fleeing from a territory where an obscure power changes everything that lives, and where everything that dies rises again, hostile and unstoppable. A vast city, in which men and gods live side by side, and once a year the dead gods roam the streets in search of revenge on humanity that has abandoned them. A shadow that stretches slow and inexorable over the world, no longer opposed by those who were charged with preserving the order.

God Stalk, by P.C. Hodgell has been called one of the best fantasy of the last thirty years. Surely it was the best fantasy I happened to read in 2015 – quite the latecomer, considering God Stalk was released in 1982 for Berkley Fantasy.

God-Stalk-P.-C.-Hodgell

It was God Stalk that got me thinking about what I call The Interregnum, that has been a side interest of mine these last three years.
Let me explain. Continue reading →


by 2 Comments

Inspirations

There are two questions that usually pop up during interviews, and they are

  1. Where do you get your ideas?
  2. What authors inspired you to become a writer?

The answer to the first is, of course, Schenectady.
The answer to the second, for me, is a little more complicated – or at least lengthier – because I am convinced that if we are readers – and writers can’t not be readers – then everything we read is a source of inspiration.
This kind of answer usually is interpreted as evasive by interviewers, so I usually have a list of authors I recite like a mantra.

And I thought it might be interesting to write a list, not only of authors, but also of the books by those authors I found inspiring. The books that made me say

THIS! This is what I want to write.

Who knows, maybe you need some reading suggestions for what’s left of summer. Here we go. Continue reading →


by 2 Comments

Back to Monte Cristo

I mentioned a few days back my nice big book haul – or my book shopping spree, if you prefer.
Yesterday morning the courier dropped a box containing the brick-sized Wordsworth Classics edition of Dumas père’s The Count of Monte Cristo, and I decided to tackle it from the start.

$_72

The cover is suitably pulpy

Now, I first crashed and burned reading Dumas’ masterpiece when I was in high school (I did a lot of reading in those years). Dumas is a straightforward adventure writer that is also a classic and a pillar of literature, a double role he shares with other writers such as Dickens and Stevenson.
Like Dickens, Dumas was a serial writer with a staggering output and if The Three Musketeers is his best known book – and it has been inflicted in many abridged versions to kids all over the world these last two hundred years, it’s The Count of Monte Cristo that is considered THE Dumas novel you need to read. Continue reading →


by Leave a comment

The Imaginary Girls are coming

I mentioned this a few days back: Imaginary Girls is a fun project, halfway between writing exercise and flash fiction.
The idea: take one photo, and write a 100-words story/character sketch based on it. A “drabble”, to call it properly.
Any genre. 100 words. Not 99, not 101.

instagram-logo-7596E83E98-seeklogo.comAs I said, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and now I feel like trying, and here’s what I will do: I will publish my Imaginary Girls on Instagram.
I did a little research, and found out that Instagram allows up to 2200 characters of caption for the images that users upload. Continue reading →


by 2 Comments

Raymond Chandler’s Birthday

“down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

Raymond Chandler

“He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.

Bogie reading Chandler

“The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”
― Raymond Chandler