Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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The House of the Gods

I am very proud to announce that my new novel, The House of the Gods, published by Severed Press, is up and running on Amazon.
And I am damn proud of it.

house1

The story is set on top of one of the forbidding plateaus that rise along the Brazil/Venezuela border.
The crew and passengers of a charter flight come face to face with a “pocket lost world”, filled with dangers, wonders and dinosaurs.
Then the bad guys with the big guns arrive…

I will do another post in the next days, or maybe two, about the background of the story and the characters.
But right now, my new book is out, is published by a publisher I admire, and I am in a catalog that features some of my favorite writers.
So I’ll take a break and celebrate.


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New tool: bullet journal

22350Things with pages.
I am a compulsive buyer of things with pages – books, sure, but also copybooks. I had an early fetish for those MEAD composition books with sturdy, thick cardboard marbled covers and rounded corners. But also, cheap Moleskine knock-offs from the Chinese supermarket, organizers, ring-binders.
I’m weird like that.
Last Sunday, during a provision run at the local hard discount, I spent two bucks on two oversized copybooks.
Why? They might come handy, I said to myself.

And today, during lunch break, I read a post about Bullet Journaling on Shanna Germain’s blog, which led me to googling about the subject, and so I discovered the joys and the promises of bullet journaling.
That’s the sort of thing I like finding out early in the new year, as this might be an interesting year-long experiment. Continue reading →


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New Toy: Anchor

I keep flirting with the idea of setting up a podcast to go with my blogs.
My earlier experiments received some very positive feedback but where really too time consuming: writing, recording, re-recording, producing… writing textual posts is way faster.

Selection_999(009)But I have not renounced, and right now I’ve set my sights on a new service called Anchor, that allows one to use the smartphone to record, edit and upload soundbites, short podcasts, interviews and other things.
Just what I need, right?

I’ve been trying to find a user’s handbook, so far without any luck (but hey, I’ve been studying the thing all of half an hour right now… gimme a little more time).
But I’ll keep looking and experimenting.
It would be fun, to make my voice heard again.
Well, fun for me, at least.

Something short and sweet – ten minutes episodes.
About what? Ah, nice question.
But first, the tech side.
One way or another, things will happen. Watch this space.


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Introducing Wilfried Veidt

Coincidences happen.
94f6d9d4cde6257a83120fc02820c26cFor instance – today my friend Lucy posted on her blog a piece on the classic Conrad Veidt movie, The Man Who Laughs1.
A movie that, Lucy pointed out, is mostly known as the inspiration for the character and looks of the Joker in the Batman comics, an nobody remembers Conrad Veidt, that was a high class actor, anymore.
We talked about Veidt, that I remember as Jaffar in The Thief of Baghdad and as Major Strasser in Casablanca, and I mentioned my intention to see Tempeste sur l’Asie, a movie featuring Veidt and set in central Asia and Tibet.

Then, going back to my writing, I decided that one of the characters in AMARNA needed a new name, and so, the character being very secondary, I logged into Fantasy Names Generator), and got me a list of randomly generated German names.
The top of the list was Wilfried Veidt.

It’s the sort of thing that just happens, but never fails to surprise me.
I wonder now what other surprises herr Wilfried Veidt, “an independent researcher associated with a German university”, has in store for me and my story.

  1. the post is in Italian, but Google Translate is your friend. ↩


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Seven Stars unabridged

aa117ebe2ef23034997a167da91a67ffMy first exposition to Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars was through the Hammer classic 1971 movie, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb.
Yes, the one featuring Valerie Leon.
I can’t remember where I first saw the movie – I was probably in the last year of middle school at the time, or on my first year of high school, and anything with the Hammer logo was a cherished treasure for me and my schoolmates.

Dark_detectivesI later read a cheap paperback translation, and found it somewhat boring.
I appreciated a lot more what Kim Newman did with the central themes of the novel, in his Seven Stars, which is contained in Stephen Jones excellent Dark Detectives, that I read at least a decade later.
Admittedly, I was never a Stoker fan, being more in the Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard field.

For the uninitiated,1 in what is considered to be the first modern “curse of the mummy” story, young Margaret Trelawny (daughter of a famous Egyptologist) is possibly the reincarnation of ancient (and fictitious) Queen Tera, whose astral body’s been preserved in as a mummified cat.
But it’s more complicated than that. Continue reading →


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The man from the Nile

In July, 1878, when serving as lieutenant in H. I. H. the Crown Prince Rudolph’s regiment, the 19th Foot, on the Bosnian frontier, I received a letter from General Gordon, inviting me to come to the Sudan and take service with the Egyptian Government, under his direction.

Rudolf_Carl_von_SlatinRudolf Carl von Slatin, later known as Slatin Pasha, was born near Vienna in 1857. In 1873, while attending a commercial school, he heard about a German bookseller in Cairo that needed an assistant, and he left for Egypt.
He ended up in Karthoum, and he traveled extensively before he had to return to Austria to fulfill his conscription in the army.
While in the Austrian army, he was contacted by Gemneral Gordon, ad mentioned in the opening of his 1896 best-seller Fire and Sword in the Sudan.
Because when he finally accepted Gordon’s invitation, things got interesting: appointed governor of Dara, and when rebellion erupted in 1882, Slating tried to face the music, but without much success. Continue reading →