Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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A brief ramble,like every summer

There is a moment, when you are working as a freelance writer, that’s terrible and scary. It comes regularly, usually in the summer, as August approaches.
The paid jobs dry up, and you catch yourself out of breath, metaphorically and literally, as you see money go and never come in, and overdue bills come to haunt you as letters or phone calls from the energy company or the phone company.
It’s a frantic moment, in which you find yourself juggling too many projects in the hopes that one, just one, will go down properly and get you enough to make the crossing of this desert, and bring you to the safety of Autumn. A safety you are not sure really exists.

Maybe I talked already about this state of affairs, in the past. As I said, it hits hard as August approaches, and you hear the Beatles in your head

See how they run.

It will get better.
I know it will because this is the third August I face, and still, here I am.
But it’s bad, really bad.
It’s anxiety and fear, amped up to eleven but at the same time not immediate, not close enough to wrestle it.
Add to that the torpid countryside in the heat, the desolation and the intellectual isolation of this backwater place where they can’t spell your name properly, and you get an idea of the horror.

monferrato-7

And yet…

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Rejection slips

Got a rejection in the mail this morning.
Short pitch for a novelette – general plot and a 500 words scene.
It was a long shot.
Two hours at the keyboard, one night, a long time ago.
It happens.
Getting rejection slips is part of the game of writing and submitting to publishers.
Sometimes our stories are just not good enough.
No conspiracies, no misunderstandings of our art, no bullshit.
The submitted material was not good enough.
A writer trying to make this their work should learn to take stock, accept the rejection and move on.
And start thinking at possible ways to recycle the material.

Talking of which… Of course my Patreon supporters might get a chance at reading both outline and sample scene, for their delectation.
I suffered for my art, now it’s their turn.


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Sagas

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERANow I’ll hit you with one of my (many, admittedly) pet peeves.
This particular pet peeve is about the use of the word saga.

Now, if you are old as I am you might recall a Canadian prog band called Saga, and of course there’s a series of comics published by Image with the same name. I’ve got nothing against either. Ditto for the place in Japan called Saga.
What peeves me is this habit of calling anything with a fantasy flavor and lasting more than two issues/volumes/episodes, the Saga of… whatever. Continue reading


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1991

This is probably the worst writing job I took this year.
No, hold it.
Probably researching the connection between Nazi occultism and sexual magic for a client of RE:CON was the worst, but this one comes damn close.
I am revising a novel I wrote when I was 24.
And boy is it tiresome.

This I have to say about the myself that lived in 1991: the kid had some pretty cool ideas.
Granted, he stole most of them from Michael Moorcock, Edward Bryant, Arthur Byron Cover and Tanith Lee, but as that guy said, you gotta steal from the best.
The novel, written in Italian of course and with a title taken from a song by Toyah Wilcox – a fact that, I am sure, dates the whole business nicely – is roughly 40+ thousand words, and is built like a mystery. Continue reading