Good piece on dramathic irony and explanations in narratives, from the Black Gate Blog, by Violette Malan.
Enjoy!
Interesting piece by Betsy Dornbusch, out on the Night Bazaar blog, about what action and fight scenes are – and what they are not.
And how to handle the lot.
Enjoy!
Yes, we have a thing about camels, here on Karavansara.
But can you really beat a camel-traction anti-crime patrol carriage?
Interesting reflection on the language of sword & sorcery from the Black Gate Blog.
The right thing to read while revising my sword & sorcery story!
Enjoy!
Historically inaccurate, maybe… but cool!
As I already mentioned, with a new series in the works, I’m researching my next (?) short story.
One finds the most wonderful things, in old travellers’ tales.
Here’s a snippet from the diaries of Ruy Gonzales de Clavijo, Spanish envoy in the court of Timur Leng (or Tamerlane), in 1403.
It is exactly the sort of information I was looking for.
And I thought you might like it, too.
Fifteen days journey from the city of Samarcand, in the direction of China, there is a land inhabited by Amazons, and to this day they continue the custom of having no men with them, except at one time of the year; when they are permitted, by their leaders, to go with their daughters to the nearest settlements, and have communication with men, each taking the one that pleases her most, with whom they live, and eat, and drink, after which they return to their own land. If they bring forth daughters afterwards, they keep them, but they send the sons to their fathers. These women are subject to Timur Beg; they used to under the Emperor of Cathay, and they are Christians of the Greek Church. They are of the lineage of the Amazons who were at Troy, when it was destroyed by the Greeks.
There’s a new story coming.
First in a series, hopefully – with two other shorts in the works.
The beta readers just sent in their reports, my editrix did her magic on the text, the cover’s ready, now time for a final re-reading and a check of my sometimes quirky (as in “wrong”) English, and we’ll be all set to go.
The story has a strange genesis.
The main characters, Roman centurion Aculeo and Aegyptian princess Amunet, began their life and their unlikely partnership on my Italian-language blog (strategie evolutive), in a series of posts I did on how to use the web and other resources to try and hoodwink the reader into believing the author does know a lot more about a lot of stuff when he writes some kind of historical fiction.
“Let’s say I’m writing a story about a Roman centurion saving a plucky Egyptian princess from some lovecraftian horror. Let’s start with their names…”
Using Aculeo and Amunet as examples, I built an outline and sketched some characters, throwing in some handy references and a few details; and I did in fact hoodwink my blog readers into believing I knew what I was talking about.
Nice and smooth.
Fast forward two years. Continue reading
We discussed Tales of the Gold Monkey – now it would be bad form not mentioning the other pulp show of the ’80s.
And the other pulp show of the ’80s was, of course, Bring ’em Back Alive, which ran for 17 60 minutes (45-minutes according to other sources) episodes and then folded, in 1982.
The set-up: Frank Buck (Bruce Boxleitner in his pre-Sheridan youth) is a big game hunter turned animal collector in Southeast Asia and… well, and that’s it.
The main problem, to me, when it comes to Bring ’em back Alive is, the sense of void which lurks sometimes beneath the Gold Monkey stories, here strides frightfully across the script.
Karavansara 