Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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The gamification of piracy

Last week, Bride of the Swamp God, the first in the Aculeo & Amunet ebook series, was pirated on a forum.
A link, two servers, my ebook available for free.

It happened on one of those websites where the pirate – but they call them sharers – gets points for uploading items, points that can be spent for a number of services… including requesting a specific title, a book, a movie.

It was a first, for me, and while I did all that was in my power to have the links canceled, I had the opportunity of discussing the situation with a friend, and this led to a number of consideration that I’m trying to summarize in this post.
Mind you, I haven’t discovered nothing new, and I’m not offering any momentous solutions.
But let’s try and see where this gets us… Continue reading →


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West Berlin

Time for a true confession.
There’s been a few posts, here in the old C Block of the blogsphere, about the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It’s been 25 years, you see.

My friend Claire said she cried, watching the news.
Others have been telling us where they were, what they were thinking, how it felt.

So, it’s time to come out and tell exactly what I thought when I saw the broadcasts from Germany, 25 years ago. Continue reading →


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Within Wet Walls: A (short) Review

www-cover-3-frontI was invited to the launch party for Lily Childs’ Within Wet Walls, yesterday, and on my way there, I got me a copy of the ebook.

I love ghost stories, I read a lot of them in the winter (the atmosphere is right) and this one was presented as the sort of gothic delight I was looking for.

Later last night I read it in one sitting, and I was so completely fascinated that I decided a short review here on my blog was in order.
Here goes. Continue reading →


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E. Hoffmann Price

n19191As I explained a few days back, I set myself a series of rewards for completing various chunks of my story – sort of a bait to force me pour more words on the page.
It’s easy, innocuous, inexpensive – and it seems to work.

Having reached the 50.000 word mark, I awarded myself an ebook – the Wildside Press ebook edition of E. Hoffmann Price‘s The Jade Enchantress.
The book was originally published by Balantine/Del Rey (and you see the cover here on the right). Continue reading →


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Crazy birds

doore02And talking about the secret valley… last night my main characters faced a bunch of crazy birds.
As I mentioned, I’m going through the last third of my novel – this is the final reel of the movie, and everything gets pumped up to eleven.
More bad guys.
More weird critters.
More over-the-top action.

Crazy Birds are not something I made up – they were called Kuangniao in Chinese bestiaries, and were described as five-colored birds with a comb-like beak.
The Kuangniao (which means Crazy Bird, I kid you not) is probably a poor relation of the Feng Bird or Phoenix normally associated with the Chinese iconography. Continue reading →