My short story The Altar of the Toad was reviewed (very positively!) by Black Gate Magazine.

The Japanese call it Hanami (花見 – flower viewing), and it is an important national festival.

The cherry flower is the Japanese national flower, and due to the geography of the archipelago, that runs south to north, the Japanese experience a wave of blossomings, that starts in February in Okinawa and ends in May in Hokkaido.
They call it sakura zensen (桜前線) – the Cherry Blossom Front.

And the thing is not exclusively Japanese.
In 1912, Japan donated three thousand cherry trees to the USA. They were put in place in Washington, DC, so that the yanks too now have a Cherry Blossom Festival.

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And I do, too. Continue reading →

Corsair paperback

11 April 2016 by Davide Mana Leave a comment

mermaid paper

10 April 2016
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

The Ghostbreakers

It’s been a while since I last posted a radio-drama on a Sunday – so here’s The Ghostbreakers, the radio adaptation of the 1940 Paramount picture featuring Bob Hope (that reprises his role in the radio version) and beautiful Paulette Goddard (that doesn’t, alas).

For the uninitiated, The Ghostbreakers is one of the two Goddard-Hope horror comedies that inspired, of all things, Disney’s Haunted Mansion attraction.

Enjoy!

9 April 2016
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

Hui Hui Gold Prospectors

challenge

And there’s still gold, in our story, as Ella Maillart and Peter Fleming, having joined a camel train, proceed to the Koko Nor.

It’s in the pages that relate their first leg of the journey with the caravan that we can notice the differences between Maillart’s and Fleming’s smile.
Maillart is more attentive to the people she is traveling with, and to her own phisical reactions to the journet, while Fleming has the tone of someone relating something that’s happening to someone else – there’s an ironic detachment, in the British autor’s books, that is completely absent in the one by his Swiss counterpart.
And realy one wonders what sort of conversations the two of them might have had on the road, and in those long, cold nights in their small tent.

But gold, we said… Continue reading →

8 April 2016
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

Friday Prompts: We’ll always have Paris

My Paris when it sizzles Pinboard, which I set up as I was collecting period photos to document my story A Spider with Barbed-Wire Legs¹, has grown to over 1000 black and white photos of Paris.

So here’s the sort of thing I’d love to do, and you might like to try yourself – why not pick 5 of these photos at random, and use them to build a story?

Might be fun.

the story is featured in the collection Delta Green: Extraordinary Renditions, by Arc Dream Publishing. ↩

7 April 2016
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

New browser

Looks like my bad luck streak with my PC is continuing: after the problems with the video, today it was the turn of the browser (Firefox), that for unknown reasons decided to freeze my system completely every time I tried to scroll a page.

The problem can apparently be solved by dumping all the Firefox personal files in the .mozilla folder – but that means losing all my passwords and personal settings.
Quite a drag.

So, considering I had to start from scratch anyway, I decided to test a fresh-off-the-press new browser – it’s called Vivaldi, and it was developed by some of the people behind the original Opera.