The KDP morlocks did their job, and right now A Wisp of Smoke, Rising is live on Amazon.
A Wisp of Smoke, Rising is a horror story set in Japan in 1960.
It is also a spy story, a mystery of sorts.
It is also a homage to the media through which my generation discovered Japan.
And it has a historical twist, in more senses than one. Continue reading
As you may remember – or maybe not – I manage a small service, together with my brother, called RE:CON. We do bibliographical and documentary research for writers, game designers and, basically, anyone who’s willing to pay our very cheap fees.
It’s a fun job, one that gives us a little extra to pay the bills, or to have a pizza once a month, and it can be lots of fun.
Because we so far have worked chiefly with game designers and comics writers,and their requests can be really weird.
Like today, that we were hit by a request for a short report on N’Gobi and its vampire queen.
Wow. Continue reading
As I am writing these, the gnomes in the service of Jeff Bezos are hard at work converting my file into an ebook.
Hopefully this will be available in time for Halloween.
Which is good, considering it is a horror story.
This is a bit of a ranty post, so bear with me.
OK, I have often written about the Turin Egyptian Museum, the second largest collection of Egyptian antiques in the world, the place where I used to hang out with my friend back when I was in school.
Today, the news that the Museum hosted a night of Zumba fitness dance hit me like a ton of bricks.
OK, I thought, the guys are kidding.
No, they were not. Continue reading
Just a quick post to remind all interested parties that the Karavansara Telegram channel, Dispatches is now functioning.
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I have just contacted and contracted an excellent artist for the cover of my new project.
I have already mentioned I am going to do a serial, a number of self-contained episodes pushing forward an overarching plot, so that readers will be able to enjoy each episode but in the end will also have a full novel in their hands.
It’s the first time I try something like this seriously.
Writing a proper serial, I mean.
I did something that might have looked like a serial when I was in high school, to entertain my classmates and try to win the affection of a certain blonde. It was fun, and it did fit my extremely underdeveloped ability to carry a story for more than thirty pages. And in the end I won the affection of a brunette.
But in retrospect, it was not a very good story. Continue reading
I’m having a lot of fun reading Kiss of the Cobra, a horror story by Peter Tremayne originally published in 1984, and recently reprinted by Venture Press.
Tremayne – the alias of Cornish writer Peter Berresford Ellis, famous for his historical mysteries featuring Sister Fidelma, also has a solid track record as an author of horror thrillers.
Kiss of the Cobra is a very straightforward horror, classic in the way the old Hammer and Amicus movies were classics, or old Cannon Films summer features tried to be. And it has an Indian setting, which is a bonus – I can’t remember many Indian horrors apart from Dan Simmons’ masterful Song of Kali. Continue reading
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