Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Other people’s pulps – The Riddle of the Sands

A few nights back, feeling the need to get my brain some vacation – because you can’t spend days on end either writing or reading to check out facts about what you’re writing – I took two hours off and I watched The Riddle of the Sands, a British 1979 movie starring Michael York (that also had a hand in the production), the always lovely Jenny Agutter and Simon MacCorkindale.

TheRiddleoftheSands_quad

The movie is based on Erskine Childers‘ novel of the same title, which is considered by many the forefather of all modern spy thrillers.
I was talking about it a few days back with some online friends, and decided to check it out. Continue reading →


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A fistful of Boomstick Awards

boomstick2015-SmallThe Karavansara blog has been awarded the coveted Boomstick Award 2015 – it’s the second year we catch the boomstick, and I must thank my friend Fabrizio Borgio for pinning the medal, so to speak, on my blog’s chest.

One of the privileges of being awarded the Boomstick Award is the option of awarding seven other blogs.

The rules in brief…

1 . the awards are 7, not one more, not one less.

2 . those that do not get a Boomstick do not deserve any explanation or justification

3 . prized must be motivated, if briefly

4 . the rules cannot be changed[^1]

Who deserves a Boomstick?
Bloggers that do their blogging with style, class, of course.
So here’s some people that, in my opinion, deserve a Boomstick… Continue reading →


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Narrative buttressing

And so, I spent the weekend doodling instead of writing.

The day before I was really on a roll – on Friday I hammered out 6000 words in two sittings, and that’s quite a bit of work.
In the meantime I got the revision of the first half back from my content editor.

Now, a lot of what he pointed out was already on my list, so I took it in stride – but he made a few other observations that were unexpected, and pointed out a number of problems.
And they are not word-problems – they are structural problems.
Or at least, they are problems whose solutions I think must be structural, not narrative1. Continue reading →


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A forgotten Frankenstein

Here’s something quite different – a short TV adaptation of Frankenstein, produced by Hammer Movies in conjunction with Screen Gems.
The film is directed by Kurt Siodmak and the screenplay is by none other than legendary C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner (here billed as “Catherine and Henry Kuttner”).
This was the pilot episode of a TV series that never happened.

Enjoy!


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Frühjahrsmüdigkeit

497Yes, that’s quite a mouthful, isn’t it?
It’s the German for “Spring Tiredness”, what sometimes is referred to, in th English language, as Spring fever.

Quoting from Wikipedia…

a temporary mood typically characterized by a state of low energy and weariness experienced by many people in springtime

Yeah, that’s me.
Right now, I’d sleep fifteen hours a day – which is not good, as there’s a lot of stuff to do right now.

So I went to the web and looked around for remedies – it’s the sort of idle thing one feels like doing instead of writing when he’s caught Spring Fever, I guess… Continue reading →


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Writing is good for the soul – so what?

rubbishYesterday my friend Lucy did a post about the quality of genre fiction1 and the horrid effect that in our country the sudden invasion of rank amateurs is doing to the field.
There’s an awful lot of third grade rubbish being self-published, basically written by adolescents of all ages, people that are lacking in terms of writing skills and of genre culture. The sort of people that start working on their fantasy trilogy because they saw Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies and nothing else.

Clearly, there is a Darwinian selection at work, and rubbish will not survive, but right now it is cluttering the (virtual) shelves. A few benighted readers are actually liking this sort of stuff, but basically anyone deserves what they decide to read2.

Now, one of the things my friend Lucy was told was, writing is good for one’s soul.

Which is certainly true, but also, it is basically meaningless. Continue reading →