Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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What if it wasn’t him?

Something popped up through my socials, and made me think. Yeah, that’s dangerous, I know.
In a nutshell, a person was being very critical (let’s put it this way) of this newfangled habit popular authors have, of getting their books written by anonymous ghostwriters, and then published under their own names.

What would have happened had Dante Alighieri commissioned The Divine Comedy to some anonymous hack? He’d be undeservedly regarded as a genius, while the true genius would have been forgotten!

And it’s true, you know.
Also, it really does not matter.

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Not good, but very hard to kill: Blade of the Immortal

Hiroaki Samura’s dark fantasy Blade of the Immortal was the last manga that I bought regularly before I decided it was too expensive a hobby, and I did not like the local fandom anyway. The fact that the Italian publisher of the series went belly up halfway through the comic’s run was also part of my decision to let it go, and with it let go of the whole hobby for a decade or two.

But now, as I am digging into the Amazon Prime Video catalog, I was quite surprised finding there is an animated series, released as an Amazon Prime Original, and it can be viewed in Japanese with subtitles.
Well, why not?

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How much we changed

I have just finished reading the memoir of an Italian missionary priest that went from Hong Kong to Moscow in 1928, crossing China by train, river boat and various land transports (caravans, camels, etc) as he traced backward the itinerary originally travelled by Marco Polo.

Interesting read, all things considered, especially because father Capra, that’s the name of the priest, basically covers the same ground of the classic Fleming-Maillart Chinese Turkestan adventure, only with a completely different perspective. Where Fleming and Maillart are witty and crisp, turning a bemused eye on the ups and downs of their adventure, father Capra acts as an envoy not only of the Church but of the Italian Royal Geographical Society, and the Fascist Regime. His observation as not only cultural, but political and economic.

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Another War of the Worlds: Revolt (2017)

As part of my plan to milk the Amazon Prime Video subscription for all it’s worth, and as a way to take a break from the rowers’ bench to which I’ll be chained for the next twenty days, I dug into the science fiction offer of Prime and came up with the very generically titled Revolt, from 2017.

And what the heck, this is a nice little SF movie, that looks and plays a lot better than the official budget of 4 million dollars might lead us to expect.

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The World’s Greatest

As I browsed Twitter over breakfast – as one does – I chanced upon a link for a podcast, about … well, about stuff, the description was not that clear. What it was clear was, this podcast was being hosted by the world’s greatest expert in podcasting. It was written there, just like that “the world’s greatest expert in podcasting”. So I guess it had to be true.

Scrolling down, I landed on an ad for a new fantasy series. According to the author, this “most original” book features warriors, wizards, elves, dwarves, and a dragon. I am blown away by the originality.

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Numbers II – Write Faster

And today I mailed three more stories, early this morning, thus managing to post six submissions in roughly 24 hours. Should all six stories sell (unlikely), at the rate proposed by the respective publishers, it would mean six months of mortgage covered. It would be good.
It will not happen, but it would be good.

And I am writing on – not only my new novel (about which, more in a future post) but a story for another submission. I started it this morning, and hopefully I’ll have the first draft ready before midnight. The target word-count is 4000, of which I have already about 1600.
Then I will let it rest – the call opens officially in two weeks, and it’s good to let the new stories sediment for a while before revising and mailing them off.

Finding out yesterday that I have been slacking in my writing and submitting this year made me feel bad. Not only working for an abusive client has caused me health problems and a devastating amount of stress, but it has really come close to damaging my ability to earn a living.

This, more than anything else, has caused me a sort of frenzy.
Something that was supposed to help me has massively damaged me, and as a result, for a change, the future is bleak.
In such circumstances, all I can do is (like good old Ike Asimov said) write faster.