Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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And so I wrote my first club story

Club stories are considered out of fashion and boring today, but there was a time when they were a standard of literary and genre magazines. In case you missed them, club stories are defined as stories set in a club or circle or social gathering, usually with regular recurring characters. A story is told by one of the club members, usually with a twist ending.

Asimov’s Black Widowers are club stories, as are the Jorkens stories by Lord Dunsany, and two of my all-time favorites, Lyon Sprague De Camp & Fletcher Pratt’s Tales from Gavagan’s Bar, and Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales from the White Hart. And of course Maurice Richardson’s Exploits of Engelbrecht (that you shouold really check out if you never read them).
And today, working on the latest prompt from the #StoryADayMay challenge, I wrote what I think could by my first club story.
Not that I had planned for it, of course.

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There is money on your account

One of the most irritating mails that pop up in my mailbox from time to time come from PayPal, and they are sent to remind me that I have money on my account, and here’s a selection of ways in which I might like to burn them.

Now, apart from the fact that I never needed suggestions to find ways to spend my money, really, the fact that there is still some credit in my PayPal is usually reason to celebrate. PayPal has been functioning like my last-ditch fund for four years now, and there’s been moments when without PayPal we would have not been able to eat.
So, yay, there’s funds on the account!

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#StoryADayMay, day 4: Clockwork

As promised, every week I will post here on the blog one of the stories written for the #StoryADayMay challenge. I will also post the prompt, so that you can see where I come from. And in all fairness, I’ll add a Ko-Fi button at the end, in case you feel like buying me a coffee to keep me going.
Your call.

And today we start with the prompt provided by author Joe R. Lansdale:

It was easy to repair the clock in the tower after the headless corpse was removed from the gears. Before that, it was thought to be a problem due to the age of the machinery, but except for the decapitated body, its mechanics were functioning perfectly.

And now, my short story… this was written in one hour flat, and I did not edit it save for cleaning up typos.
Enjoy!

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Brushing shoulders with the greats

One of the most interesting bits in the #StoryADayMay challenge I am doing is, the daily prompts we get and must develop into short stories come from professional writers that support the initiative.

And so today I got a writing prompt from Joe R. Lansdale – a giant in the field and one of my favorite writers.
When I opened this morning’s mail I was starstruck for a few moments, then copied and pasted the prompt in the Scrivener file in which I am writing all my stories.
The prompt is really good, and I really look forward to developing it.
And I think – should I be able to write the story – I’ll post the finished work here for you all to read.

Just a little patience.

In other news: I’ve just got contracted for a new story for a forthcoming anthology, and there’s another coming… things are picking up.


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The Algorithm got me wrong – and a neat dance

In the last weeks I’ve spent quite an amount of time on Youtube watching streaming, subbed Chinese TV series, and it was a lot of fun. I like watching something new, and often the different cultural nuances add an unexpected spin on classic themes and tropes.
It’s good entertainment, and food for thought.

A curious side-effect was that the Youtube Algorithm decided, based on my viewing history, that I am obviously Chinese – and as a consequence it started suggesting a selection of Chinese language contents – of which I can’t even read the description.
And this is curious, because – for instance – I usually watch a lot of Japanese music videos on Youtube, and it never tried to push on me Japanese drama, or Japanese news service.
I wonder what’s different in this case.

Anyway… being considered Chinese does have its perks, as I am discovering a lot of traditional music and other contents.
So, today being Sunday and all that, I offer you a neat little song and dance number.
Enjoy!


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The most infuriating way to waste a few hours

This afternoon I gathered my Hollow Earth Expedition players – also known as The Friends of Mister Cairo – and I spent the afternoon playing, chatting, and having a much needed laugh. And it’s really great to have the web to help us keep our sanity this way.

But before that, and afterwards, I wasted the best part of the morning and a fair chunk of the evening trying to dream up one of the most dreaded things for a writer: coming up with a title.
It seems easy, right?
And most of the time it is not a problem _ I usually can come up with something feasible. But today? No cigar.

The fact is, this is for a big-ish project – quite fun, but also rather big – and it does not involve only me, and I can’t get myself and my accomplices stuck with a bad name forever.
We need something easy, catchy, original, and that conveys certain ideas at a glance. Something that cannot be mistaken, or twisted out of shape. Something with staying power, that can be printed on a T-shirt in a fancy font, and sells in cartloads.

There is no formula, and indeed I tried a couple of online title creators, because … technology.
But it turned out to be useless mostly useless.
And so it’s back to the basic pre-tech systems: jot down as many titles come up for your work, and then start erasing all those that really don’t work on a second pass – and so on and so forth until you have only one left, and that’s the good one. Well, at least the one that provides you with the highest degree of fit for the subject. A starting point, if nothing else.
And rather a time waster.