Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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It’s all fun and games until… – The Last of Sheila

The Last of Sheila is a 1973 mystery movie that I first saw somewhere in the early ’80s, during a long summer, and indeed, what’s better than a good chiller on a hot summer night?
Or in a cold winter night – and so I re-watched the movie last night, to see if it was as good as I remembered.
Well, mostly it was.

The basic premise: Sheila was killed in a hit-and-run accident. One year later, her husband reunites a number of friends on his yacht to play a game. How the game is connected to Sheila’s death is part of the mystery.

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Longlisted

I am absolutely speechless (but not really, you know me) at the news that my short story Singularity, published in the magazine Shoreline of Infinity, has made it into the longlist for the BSFA Award for Short Fiction.

The list features some incredible stories by a number of excellent writers, and I am really feeling proud and humbled at the same time. It’s the first time a story of mine gets any kind of recognition, and … oh, well, I could get used to this sort of thing!

Anyway, I do not have a hope in hell considering the colossal stories that are on the list, but I do not care. This is great!

Enough rambling.
Back to editing.


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Editing on a cold Sunday afternoon

There’s a chicken experimentally going in the slow cooker – new recipe, somewhat dubious – and I am wrapped in a blanket at my PC, editing three stories for publication – three stories I sold in December 2020 and that will be available in March, or later, via the respective publishers.

March 2021.
It feels at the same time very close (“heck, one fourth of the year is gone already!”) and very far (“March is like… six weeks away!”).
As usual, working on the edits suggestions from top notch editors is a pleasure – there’s a faint thrill of panic, but it is under control.

But sitting here on this cold Sunday afternoon editing stories I wrote last year and now will see publication, put me in the mood for more writing.
First, because we’re fifteen days into 2021 and I have not yet submitted any new story, and second, because I’d like to self-publish something, to capture the fast turnover that only self-publishing allows.

Anyway, right now, there’s some edits to be approved.
Then, we’ll start jotting down ideas again.


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Another massive book haul…

One of the most frustrating, if minor, things out there, is the way in which promotions on Amazon are handled – so that maybe you get an announcement from an author’s Twitter account, “hey, my novel’s on sale for the next week!” and you go and check and no, it’s not.
It is on sale for customers from the US, or the English-speaking world, but on good old Amazon.it the ebook is still going for ten bucks.
Oh, shucks!

I subscribe to a service known as The Fussy Librarian, that hits my mail every day with curated special offers and free promotions. It’s good, and the frequency of disappointments is lower.
But still, the feeling of being promised a discount and finding out that no, not in our corner of the empire… well, it’s bad.

But sometimes life is good.

Case in point, a recent campaign that I’ve found out by chance, and taken advantage of straight away – Tor Books trilogies, on sale as single-volume massive ebooks. As I think I mentioned in the past, I’m no longer so hot about big fat thick trilogies (life is short) but sometimes the opportunity is just too good.

What got me going was finding out, while browsing the Amazon.it pages, the Amberlough books were on sale – Lara Elena Donnelly’s deco-flavored fantasy stories have been on my to-read list for quite a while, and at first I thought The Amberlough Dossier was a collection of shorter works set in the same universe as the novels; it is not: it’s the three novels, in a single ebook, for little over two bucks.
So I bought it.

And then saw there were more three-books collections going for the same ridiculous price. So I gave myself an allowance of twenty bucks (just what I got for selling a flash fiction), and went on a shopping spree…

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Storm Constantine (1956-2021)

I have just learned about the death of British fantasy writer Storm Constantine, popular for her Wraethtu stories and for her collaboration with Michael Moorcock on Silverheart. A strikingly original writer, I first encountered her work back in 1992, when I discovered the trade paperbacks of her first trilogy – The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, The Bewitchments of Love and Hate, The Fulfillments of Fate and Desire.
In a beautiful style reminiscent of some of Tanith Lee’s works, the Wraethtu Chronicles were ahead of their time, in tracing the future history of humanity’s slow but inescapable replacement by a new species of hermaphroditic beings, the titular Wraethtu.

The stories were rich of atmosphere and tackled a variety of ideas and situations not often seen in commercial fantasy – which probably explains why Constantine’s novels developed a sort of cult following.

Constantine would later expand the series (that also came to include a roleplaying game), exploring further aspects of her future history, finally launching a publishing house devoted to her works (including expanded versions of her earlier books) and those of other writers she supported.
She published other series – most notably the Grigori sequence – and she also wrote a number of essays on magic, including a few spellbooks.

Often described as a writer of “shadow fantasy”, Storm Constantine was an impressive writer, both for her bold ideas and her sophisticate style, and she was also that rarest of creatures, a fantasy writer that would have been perfectly at home in one of her imaginary worlds.
She’ll be sorely missed.


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More options for February

I am going on with my plan to spend February (also) learning a new skill – because I think it’s fun, and because should it work, I could start collecting new skills, one month after the other. After all, that was what I always was about ever since I was a kid: my mother used to tell me to spend my summer vacations “doing something useful”, and I learned conjuring (the stage magic kind), tarot-reading, playing the flute and some french, some Spanish, some Japanese.
I guess she was hoping I’d find small jobs or stuff like that, like she would do when s he was a teenager – but she was a teenager in the ’50s, I was a teenager in the ’80s: the whole part time jobs ecology had changed, and all I was able to find was a contract job as a scarecrow…
But I always loved learning new stuff.

So, I made a list a few days back (WordPress will probably link the post below), I got some feedback, and it looks like knitting, harmonica-playing and juggling are the three top contenders. Of the three, my brother is averse to the harmonica (“it will feel like we’re in some kind of prison”), and juggling is better done in the open, so knitting is really looking like my choice – or at least, that was the state of affairs until Humble Bundle launched their latest book bundle, that is huge and is called Start Something New.

And I was not kidding about the bundle being huge. Drop one buck, and you’ll get seven volumes – cookbooks, a knitting encyclopedia (aha!) a book about redesigning your life, a Texas Hold’em guidebook…

But you can go up to over 20 bucks, and land a staggering collection of 61 books, each one covering a different skill.

And so yes, I put down a few bucks – knowing the money will go to a charity – and now I’ve increased my options. Texas Hold’em looks interesting, but I could also devote the four weeks of February to Feng Shui or book-binding, or some kind of creative, artistic craft.

But no matter what, I have now one week to decide – and then I’ll have a week to get all the necessary equipment to start my adventure in February.

Ideas, suggestions, odds and ends are welcome – just use the comments.


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Guilty (or so they say)

After fifteen years, my Italian language blog, strategie evolutive, has been anonymously reported to the Facebook authorities for unspecified “abusive contents”, so that I can no longer share my posts on the platform.
This begs a number of obvious questions – such as Why? and Why now? – but does very little to my online existence. I can still post and share on other platforms, and in general, who cares.

And as I seriously anybody could find my Italian posts so triggering they need to be reported and silenced, this in the end feels like that guy that scratches the paintwork of your car because you’ve parked where they would have parked had you not been parked there.
Petty and stupid, in other words.

The irritating thing is that filing a complaint with Facebook does not work – because as an automated message informs me, they have more urgent problems to deal with (to wit, checking the fake news about the pandemic and the American political situation), and therefore they will not review my complaint.

So here we are – and really, nothing has changed, except my perception of the number of dicks out there reading my blogs.

And as I am at it, I can close this post with a song by Alice Cooper, from an Alice Cooper record my late mother liked a lot (weird girl that she was, sometimes)