Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Flash!(-fiction)

photodune-8326461-lightning-xsI never was very hot about flash fiction – while I still like short stories best, I don’t like too short stories. Six thousand words is my ideal length, followed by ten thousand.

According to Wikipedia

Flash fiction is an umbrella term used to describe any fictional work of extreme brevity, including the Six-Word Story, 140-character stories, also known as twitterature, the dribble (50 words), the drabble (100 words), and sudden fiction (750 words). Some commentators have also suggested that some flash fiction possesses a unique literary quality, e.g. the ability to hint at or imply a larger story.

As I said, not my thing.
But it is important to try new things. Continue reading →


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The Pirates are Coming (very slowly)

Today is the International Talk Like a Pirate Day, so, first and foremost, arrrh!

strangertidesbookThis said, I was reflecting yesterday that I still haven’t written a story about pirates. Which is a damn shame.
On the other hand, then I think about William Hope Hodgson’s stories of ghostly pirates, or Tim Power’s wonderful On Stranger Tides1, or George MacDonald Fraser’s masterfully silly but historically sound The Pyrates, or Michael Scott Rohan’s Spiral of Worlds stories, and I realise I’d be facing some pretty harsh competition.
And I did not mention the sacred name of Rafael Sabatini.

By the way, is there any good recent pirate-based fantasy story you would suggest?
I need to update my reading list.

But I was saying… Continue reading →


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Our dinosaurs are different

Terribly late, today – I’ve been writing, because as I said, the sprint for House of the Gods is on. NaNoWriMo has nothing on ditching 20.000 words in a 35.000 words draft and having to rewrite the lot in two weeks.
But I am making it – even if I find it a bit taxing, physically.

But anyway – one thing I’m having fun with is, of all things, the good old Tyrannosaurus rex. Because really, you can’t write a novel featuring dinosaurs and leave old T rex *out of it.
*Iconic‘s the word.
But why not have fun with it?

t-rex_2

And the best way to have fun with the old T rex is, believe it or not, through science. Continue reading →


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Fawcett’s Dream

While I wait for the movie about the expedition of Colonel Percy Fawcett – one of the most famous cases of missing person in the golden age of exploration – I spent some time to re-watch a Discovery Channel documentary on the man’s disappearance, called Colonel Fawcett’s Dream.

treasure-hunters-chaptershot0

A lean, entertaining feature, the documentary was short on details about Fawcett’s expedition, but more than compensated with gorgeous shots of the sector of the Mato Grosso where Fawcett and his son disappeared1. Continue reading →


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A most disreputable book

51iu0ea3n7l-_sl500_sy344_bo1204203200_One of the fun bits – well, if you are the kind that finds such stuff fun – of doing research, is that you get a lot of weird stares for some of the books you are reading, or re-reading.
And because in these days either I am at home typing or I am sitting in a waiting room somewhere, I usually read my books in public.

And in the weird stares/odd looks department, my current perusal of a very very old and badly mangled used copy of Ralph Shaw‘s Sin City is certainly setting a record.
Yes, it’s because of the cover.
And the title, that even in an English-illiterate area such as the Astigianistan hills can be pretty obvious. Continue reading →


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Ruminating about sword & sorcery

scan0001I am writing an article about sword & sorcery.
Now, mind you, I have written a lot about the genre – a lot of scraps of ideas, scattered here and on my Italian blog, basically me, talking out loud in a vain attempt at putting my ideas in order.
But this time it is different – because I have pitched an article to a learned magazine, and therefore I must write something that will, hopefully, make sense.

I have been through a lot of discussions, in the last few weeks, about the definition of sword & sorcery – and indeed a good friend of mine just posted on his blog a thing called The Definition of Sword & Sorcery (According to Myself), grab yourselves a translation system and check it out, it’s not bad, not bad at all1.
But I still find it extremely unsatisfactory.
And of course it’s just me – so here I am once again talking out loud to myself, trying to give my ideas some order. Continue reading →