I’m doing fifteen things at the same time as usual – it helps that the flu left me cranky and jet-lagged: I live by night and sleep through most of the morning, and night is fine for writing and reading, the hours seem to last longer.
Among the things I’m working on, there’s the online course in worldbuilding that will start later this month. I’m making plans, pulling resources and treasuring what I’m learning with the online course in self-publishing I’m teaching right now.
And I’m re-reading a few books to steal ideas and to compile a viable bibliography. I’m re-reading everything, from The Kobold’s Guide to World Building to Jeff VanDerMeer’s Wonderbook.
Right now, I’m going through Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft . Considering we just lost the author, it felt like the right way to celebrate her and remember her work.
I first read Steering the Craft in the year 2000, the first edition. A lost girlfriend kept it, and as part of my recent book haul, I added a copy of the new updated and revised edition – I filed it as an investment for my future courses. Continue reading
Chinese Ghost Stories
Publishing creates strange bedfellows. A new magazine has just hit the shelves in Italy, in which I find myself side by side with Robert E. Howard, Lin carter and Pu Songling.
Now Pu Songling was a weird chap.
He spent his life collecting ghost stories and other strange tales, and circulated them among his friends, privately, because stories of the supernatural were not considered a proper thing to take an interest into according to the dominating Confucian culture of the time.
This was, after all, the Qing dynasty.
Today, Pu Songling’s Liaozhai Zhiyi, translated as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is a well known and much loved classic. It can be found in a number of translations, and it inspired a number of movies and plays and whatnot.
It is probably the first stop for anyone interested in Chinese supernatural and folk tales. Continue reading
Gypsy Wagons
One half of it…was carpeted, and so partitioned off at the further end as to accommodate a sleeping-place, constructed after the fashion of a berth on board ship, which was shaded, like the windows, with fair white curtains… The other half served for a kitchen, and was fitted up with a stove whose small chimney passed through the roof. It also held a closet or larder, several chests, a great pitcher of water, and a few cooking-utensils and articles of crockery. These latter necessaries hung upon the walls, which in that portion of the establishment devoted to the lady of the caravan, were ornamented with such gayer and lighter decorations as a triangle and a couple of well-thumbed tambourines.
(Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop)
The above is the description of a gypsy wagon, or vardo, to give it its proper name. Continue reading
Where the wind leads us
This is another ramble written in a single sitting and without thinking.
You’ve been warned.
Because you see, we were talking about adventure, with my friend Lucy.
She’s a scuba diver and a cyclist – the sort of person that goes on the road with her bike as a form of vacation, cycling for miles.
I write about adventures. Make believe adventures.
I was all set, I studied geology and paleontology because I wanted to go out there – deserts, jungles, far off places…
I ended up in a lab and a classroom, first, and now in a small cold house in the middle of nowhere.
I should have been smarter, I’ve been told, I should have sought a post at the post office, or as a bank teller.
Everybody told me so, ever since I was 10, ever since I started saying I wanted to go dig dinosaurs or climb volcanoes.
End they were right.
Or were they?
After all, my chat with my friend Lucy started because there’s an organization out there handing out the European Adventurer of the Year Award.
What would our families, our teachers and our successful white-collar friends say, should they ever find out? Continue reading
A new story, a true first
I just finished going through the edits of the story I mentioned a while back, the one I wrote for the hell of it, and to clean my systems after a long writing-on-demand stretch. My friend Marina went through it and caught a lot of rubbish I had left in the manuscript, and now the text is clean and ready for action.
Now I’ll concoct a cover, and then self-publish it, once again going for both Amazon and Gumroad.
And of course my top-tier Patrons will get a copy, whether they like it or not.
The story is called Listening Post, it’s a little above 6500 words, and it’s a first for me, being military SF.
Or maybe I should call it Paramilitary SF, considering the plot focuses on a privateer ship working as a contractor during an interstellar war. Continue reading
A blogathon about Jack the Ripper
A quick announcement: my brother is setting up his first blogathon.
Alessandro writes the Redjack Blog, Italy’s foremost blog about Jack the Ripper, and so this will be a Ripper-themed Blogathon.
The thing will take place in September, so you have all the time to pick a topic and submit it.
Check it out, and if you feel like, participate.
I will, with a post here on Karavansara.
Karavansara 