Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Are you by any chance the guy that…?

Yesterday something happened that had never happened before to me: I was discussing a comedy sketch with a friend on her Facebook profile, and one of her contacts joined the discussion. It was all very civil and amusing, until this new person I did not know suddenly went…

No, sorry, wait a minute, are you by any chance the guy that wrote The House of the Gods?

And I could only confess that yes, I am the guy that wrote The House of the Gods, but I did not do it by chance, it was premeditated. I did it on purpose.
She went on to say she had greatly enjoyed my novel, and we sort of became Facebook friends and all that.

It’s the first time I am identified by a total stranger as “the guy that wrote the book I liked”, and it’s strange, and funny, and sort of feels like a milestone.
This writing thing is really starting to go the way it should.
Another fifty years, and I’ll be a household name. And beyond that (fanfare) brand recognition!

But I am just being stupidly flippant – it was good, and it saved an otherwise average day.


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Yet another Valerie

What’s with me and the name Valerie?
I do not know – but I know a lot of Valeires have turned out in my stories through the years. Indeed, the female lead in my very first “good” work, back in 1989, was called Valerie. And maybe it was the Quarterflash song of the same name, but I doubt it.

Anyway, Valerie Trelawney debuted in society this morning, as my Patrons in the Five Bucks Brigade received the third story in the Seven Lives project – a short called The Case of the Inkmaker’s Daughter. The character will have a more public debut later in 2020, when a second story, celled The Case of the Manchester Mummies, will be published in a big fat anthology together with the work of many writers that are better than me.

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The ’20s – building a reading list

I need your help to build a reading list of history books about the 1920s.
Now, let me explain…
I was told, back when I was in the Air Farce, that we cannot learn anything from history, and that history is just a collection of facts put together by the victors, and has no value.
I do not think so. I did not think so back then, and I do not think so now.

I have been joking about the fact that in a few days the ’20s will be here again: flappers, charleston & foxtrot, and adventure await…
That’s what we normally associate to the ’20s – The Great Gatsby and all that.
But the ’20s also saw the rise of populism and totalitarianism (read the news, recently?), social and financial crisis and the headlong rush towards yet another war.

So I decided I’ll put together a reading list about the 1920s, to see if something can be learned from history, and to be prepared – and what the heck, it could always serve as research for future stories.

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The first writer that really scared me: Algernon Blackwood

Some things stick in our minds for decades.
I was eleven years old or thereabouts when I got my copy of the Italian version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghost Gallery, a collection of horror stories (not all of them dealing with ghosts) aimed at a younger audience. Having been raised on Scooby Doo, and an avid reader of The Three Investigators, the idea of a collection of ghost stories was pretty exciting – and I got the book for Christmas that year. It was 1978.

Now this was a case of wrong expectations – the spooky stories in the book were none like Scooby Doo or the Three Investigators, and if a couple were quite humorous, like the three entries from Robert Arthur, none of these stories had the rational solution and the real culprit behind the haunting being shown for a very human bad guy.
This was, probably for the first time in my life, the Real Thing.
These were scary stories.

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