Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


by Leave a comment

The Age of Style

ageofstylemdBut there’s not just soundtracks, of course.
I’m listening, as I’m writing this*, to The Age of Style, a compilation of 1930s original songs published by Past Perfect in 1999.
Past Perfect is a small independent label that markets remasters of original recordings from the past (roughly 1920s-1950s).

I found out about Past Perfect in the early 2000s, while I was looking for musical references for – of all things – my Call of Cthulhu games. I have a few recordings from their catalog – and they have proved over the years to be both good listening material and highly useful sound references. Continue reading →


by Leave a comment

Warm-ups

Cover of "Writing down the Bones"

Nathalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones is (together with Tom Robbin’s Still Life with Woodpecker) the book that got me back to writing after a long dry spell, back in the ’90s*.

Right now I’m re-reading my second-hand copy of Wild Mind – Living the Writier’s Life, which is an ideal sequel to Writing Down the Bones.

The book was very dear to the previous owner – words and passages are underlined, stars are to be found in the margins, marking ideas or paragraphs the previous owner found significant. Continue reading →


by 1 Comment

Writing Prompt – Jazz Singer

5e0f8d444da53c471b41d460a7cdb59b

Let’s stick to the theme of these weeks – Shanghai, 1930s.
Let’s do some “blitzkrieg characterization” (to use Michael Stackpole‘s turn of phrase).
Pick five fields (work, romance, family, hobbies etc.), and start writing a single sentence for each field, describing some this character’s background in that field.
Once you’re done, expand each sentence, adding two others.
Then, for each field, write also some contrarian detail.

Cheers!


by 3 Comments

Shanghai, Summer 1937

The Battle of Shanghai is the sort of big, fat chunk of history that somehow gets lost in the fury of the years just before the start of WW2. I learned about it doing research for my novel.
But for all its pulp trappings and Chinese fantasy elements, what I’m writing is still a historical fantasy.

battle-for-shanghai-20

To me, historical fantasy means that history as we know it stays in place, but fantasy happens in the dark corners and hollow places that history books don’t cover.
I can’t change the course of events and still call it historical fantasy – it can be pseudo-historical fantasy, it can become a form of uchronia*, but historical fantasy it can’t be anymore.
Continue reading →


by 4 Comments

Revision and final draft in Scrivener

Scrivener (software)

So the final draft of my novel is coming along, and I’m doing it in Scrivener.

Now, the first draft was written two years back using my usual Gedit + LibreOffice.
I hammered away at a chapter in Gedit, then I pasted it in LibreOffice, revising and cleaning it up.
Then on to the second.
In this way I wrote a workable first draft of a 40.000 words novel in 20 chapters, and I did it in ten days.
Nice and smooth.

Now, for the revision.
I have here the editor’s notes – I know what my editor and my publisher want from me.
We discussed the details, we worked out what worked and what not.
Time to do the final.
And I’ve to do in in English (the first draft was in Italian). Continue reading →