Let’s amp the hype – or something.
In the very end I found a good title for the new Aculeo & Amunet story – which is currently being lovingly dissected by my editors.
They cut it with their steely knives
but they just can’t kill the beast
And here’s a cover preview. Continue reading
Today I’ll mix nostalgia with hype, if you don’t mind.
When I was a kid, say 15 years old, I discovered Robert E. Howard and Conan the Barbarian through the Italian editions of the Lancer Books collections edited by Lyon Sprague de Camp.
My first was Conan the Adventurer, and I was hooked.
Also, I decided this was the sort of stuff I wanted to read, and possibly to write.
The little hardback book had a wonderful dust jacket (by Dutch artist Karel Thole), and it came with a gorgeous map of the Hyborian world.
Then there was a fun introduction by Italian critic and translator Riccardo Valla, and then the stories.
And each story was introduced by a snippet of text by L. Sprague de Camp, providing some sort of continuity to the series.
Stuff like…
After escaping from Xapur, Conan builds his Kozaki and pirate raiders into such a formidable threat that King Yezdigerd devotes all his forces to their destruction. After a devastating defeat, the kozaki scatter, and Conan retreats southward to take service in the light cavalry of Kobad Shah, King of Iranistan.
It was fun, it gave me a sense of history. Continue reading
Interesting article by award-winning blogger Anne R. Allen…
Today’s media-related post requires a little bit of introduction.
Jane‘s Journal, Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing was a pretty risque British comic strip in the thirties, designed by Norman Pett.
Basically, stories about an ingenue that would be shown as often as possible in her underwear.
The author used his wife as a model for the character.
But, with the Second World War, Jane took a more active role in the conflict, and was now based on Crystabel Leighton-Porter (who would later reprise the role, live, for a quite popular… strip show). Continue reading
Something different, for the first prompt of the year – a digital image I actually used as visual reference for the next Aculeo & Amunet story.
As it usually happens, I start with some image references and then my story and my description go in quite a different direction, but it is all right this way, I guess.
And so 2014 is here.
Last night, while I was browsing lists of Parthian names – don’t ask – we reached 20.000 visits here at Kravansara.
It’s a big number, especially for a small-time blog in its first year of life, and I’m very happy and proud of this result.
I hope the new year will bring more contents, more ideas, more fun for all my readers.
Thank you!
I wrote a short story, a new Aculeo & Amunet adventure, over the weekend.
It was fast and rough – I outlined it on a copybook while my brother drove me 80 kms to Turin on Saturday morning, I jotted down additional notes on the way back, checked my facts before dinner, and then wrote the first third after dinner on saturday night.
Yesterday I went and hammered out the rest.
8000 words story, nice and smooth.
Sort of.
Fact is, my story sagged in the middle.
I had a strong start, a big wham-bang! ending, but the middle was highly unsatisfactory. Continue reading
Karavansara 