Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Night of the Befana

I have already posted in the past how, in the Italian tradition, on the night between the 5th and the 6th of January the more-or-less benevolent hag known as Befana brings little gifts to the good kids, and coal to the bad ones.
The Befana is a very old tradition, and apart from the bad press she got after being sanctioned as the Fascist Regime’s response to too-British Santa – so that in the 30s she became “Befana d’Italia” – it’s still a sort of smaller-scale Christmas in a lot of Italian families.

Traditionally, the Befana is said to bring the festivities to a close, clearing the field for the Carnival that follows.

We usually exchange gifts on this night in my house, simply because the festivity of the Befana also happened to fall on my mother’s birthday – cue to obvious jokes – and so we skipped the gift-thing on Christmas.
And now that our parents are no longer here, we’ll celebrate with a good dinner and we’ll exchange small gifts – or the promise of gifts “as soon as Amazon delivers”. Sweets, chocolate, oranges and tangerines, a watch for my brother, a few ebooks for me.

Then I will spend the night working – I have a translation that’s long overdue, and I’d also like to try and submit a two-page story to a call I received yesterday – it’s a low paying market, but it’s also a two-page, 500-words story. Why not?
It will be a fun way to take a break from the translation work.


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Hits and Misses

I’ve spent the last two days working in the morning (I’ve got a translation to deliver, and that’s overdue) and watching TV series in the afternoon, while nursing a bad case of cold.
I’ve also been writing, but not as much as I’d have liked. But I consider myself on vacation until the 6th of the month, and I’ll be recharging my batteries and feeding my idea box with stories.

I’ve been watching two old TV series – one old, the other very old – and two pretty new ones.
So here’s some quick notes.

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The first book of 2020

Last night I splurged 8 of my hard-earned dollars to acquire the first two tiers of the latest Humble Bundle, called 2020 New year, New You – a grab bag of titles on a variety of topics, good as fuel for new year’s personal resolutions – self-help books (from time saving to meditation to retirement plans) and cookbooks (a book of slow cooker recipes!), writing handbooks and a thesaurus, books about bucket lists and other wonders. These sort of bundles usually capture my fancy, because they feel like going through a bookstore filling a basket with stuff that makes me go “wow, that’s interesting!”
My 8 bucks contributed to help a charity (in this case, Every Child a Reader), and bought me 16 very different books.
I was particularly interested in the cookbooks, in the memoir by a former undercover detective, and in the writing handbooks.
The first I started was therefore David Morrell’s The Successful Novelist.

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Dreaming up a new series (because rust never sleeps)

I was talking with some friends, a few days ago, of how much The Avengers (the British TV series, not the guys in spandex from Marvel) had an impact on my life. It was the vision of the classic Steed & Peel seasons back when I was around 8 that made me a committed Anglophile for life – and so everything, from my desire to learn English to my spending one year in London as a student, stems from there.

My interest for spy stories and a certain brand of strange, surreal adventure certainly owes a lot to The Avengers (and to The Prisoner).
I believe my attitude towards women was shaped (also) by an early crush on Mrs Peel, and if I keep writing stories about couples bickering, chattering and working together as partners in crime, it is certainly because of The Avengers.

Here I should note that when I was a kid we did get an awful lot of British TV series, and those shaped my tastes and left a huge impression: The Avengers, The Prisoner, The Persuaders, UFO, Space 1999, Children of the Stones…
It was good being kids back then, and a lot of the imagination sparked by those shows filtered somehow in what I write.

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Bill Shakes in 2020

Because I needed something different to do (boredom can be a terminal illness in these hills), I have just joined the Shakespeare 2020 Project, a bunch of like-minded individuals that will read the whole of William Shakespeare’s works in the year 2020.
We begin tomorrow, with, quite obviously, Twelfth Night.

In case you are interested in joining the initiative, here is the link.

I think I will post about my adventures in Shakespeare – my brother suggested a podcast, but the more I think about it, the more I understand that I HATE talking to myself in public.
So I’ll write.

And as I am at it, here is the list of what I’ll keep handy throughout the year:

  • The Oxford Complete Works of William Shakespeare
  • The Rough Guide to Shakespeare
  • Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, in two volumes

It’s going to be fun.


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The last twist of the year

My friend Angelo pointed out to me a recent article on an Italian newspaper about Andrea Compatangelo and the Battaglione Savoia, that – with minimal changes – are featured in Guillotine Wind, my recent historical adventure novella.

Based on the little I was able to find on the character (that I called Campatangelo, with an “a”, adopting an alternate spelling found in some documents) and his adventure, I played fast and loose while I was writing – there is a point beyond which historical adventure has to be more adventurous than historical.
The name change was indeed intended as a signal that my story was fiction, not history.

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