Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Meet the new system – same as the old system (but faster)

And so we’re back to normal.
The delivery boy delivered (that’s his job, right?) a big box that turned out to be mostly fluff and a smaller box in which there was my new PC – black and with a big power button that turns blue when pressed.

The bad news: this new PC thing set me back of a nice amount of cash, and I would have happily done without the expense.
The good news: buying online a no-brand machine without a pre-loaded operating system meant spending exactly one third of what the local big chain dealer asked for the same set-up.

So, all in all, I could have done without the expenditure, but it was not that painful. Continue reading →


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Original, on topic, impossible to misspell

Despite my continuing PC problems, I felt like sharing a good laugh with my readers.

tumblr_lymilaeYLF1r421yoo1_500Back when I was working on this blog, before launch, I spent some time thinking about the name.
The rule of thumb is, give your blog a name that’s original, on-topic and impossible to misspell.
It took me some time but finally I hit on a concept (the caravanserai, the place where travellers meet, rest and trade stories) and a suitably original name.
Yes, there’s a hotel out there with the same name.
And a minimal spelling difference would have taken you to a supplier of belly dance costumes and accessories.
But let’s just say that Karavansara is a good name.
Solid.
Easy to remember.
Or so I thought. Continue reading →


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In praise of Scrivener (in the face of catastrophe)

And so my much vexed, five years old PC finally kicked the bucked and went dead on me.
Utterly completely dead.
Dead dead dead.

Sinking-ship-via-Shutterstock

Which is bad – considering I have a lot of things going right now, and all the work in progress is currently buried in my dead hard disk.
It’s still there, mind you, safe and warm.
Only, I need a new PC to get to it.

But not everything’s lost. Continue reading →


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More ghosts (and other supernatural things)

And talking about ghost stories, two big fat books landed on my desk this week.
Well, actually one on landed on my Kindle and the other on my desk.

dark_detectives_cover_largeThe great old Fedogan & Bremer collection Dark Detectives, edited by Stephen Jones, has been recently reissued, both as a paperback and as an ebook.
Alas, the new edition does not have the incredible Les Edwards cover, but the contents are all there, and they are simply great – including Kim Newman‘s complete Seven Stars cycle of stories1, and a wealth of other supernatural investigation adventures from an authors roster that includes the likes of Neil Gaiman, Brian Lumley and Clive Barker (among many others).

The introduction by Stephen Jones is a good introduction to the subject of supernatural investigation and occult detectives, and has the power to add a number of titles to an already crowded to-read list.

51bbW8wT5ZL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_And yesterday, I received as a gift the highly suggestive Voodoo Tales, a thick Wordsworth Classics paperback collecting the ghost stories and supernatural tales of Henry S. Whitehead, that were originally published by Arkham House, and are today pretty hard to get (and expensive as hell).
Whitehead was an author specializing in uncanny stories set in the West Indies, and worked from first-hand experiences – he had spent a lot of time in the Carribean, and had met and interviewed real practitioners of voodoo.
His stories appeared in Weird Tales magazine, and it is a nice addition to my collection.

Now, the nice bit is, the first of these books was a much anticipated purchase (I pre-ordered the ebook, saving some money), but the second was a gift – and an unexpected gift, too.
A sign?
A weird coincidence?
For sure, I better start putting my notes and outlines together…

  1. in turn inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle‘s Jewel of the Seven Stars, in itself another quite interesting read you can find in the Gutenberg Project. ↩


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Chapbooks

time-cover-final-smallOne of the best bits of writing is getting a box full of copies of the book.

A rather disheveled courier just braved the rain and the wilds of Astigianistan to deliver the first batch of the print run of my essay on geological time, La Misura del Tempo Geologico.
The box was in very poor conditions, but the books were fine.

The paper version of La Misura del Tempo Geologico is a fine white and blue chapbook.
It looks like a copybook and it feels like a copybook, and it’s just great, because it was designed for schools, for teachers and students.

In less than one month I’ll be facing an audience, talking about the beginning and the end of time, pyramids and dinosaurs, and why evolution is real.

And there will be a pile of these nice chapbooks for sale.
It will be good.