It’s the 23rd of December.
I have mailed my latest novella to my Patrons, and sent an ebook to a friend as a better substitute for a greeting card. The pantry is stocked, the menus decided for the next days. All the bills have been paid (well, OK, most of them), and there’s money (not much) in the bank. I’ve even bought a sack of treats for the feral cats that will come and sleep in the big box we’ve placed outside.
Now I can sit back and relax for a few days.
Read a good book, or three.
Greetings from Krasnoyarsk
And so it’s finally done, and delivered to my Patrons – Guillotine Wind, the first Pandora story, was one of the hardest nuts to crack in my multifarious writing career. But it also features – if I do say so myself – some of my best writing.
And it’s a first in a series!
And it will go on to be part of the Seven Lives Project, and so it will benefit a bunch of stray cats. The cats will dismiss the whole thing like something due to them by divine right, but who knows, some people might like the stories.
Translating myself
Having closed Guillotine Wind, my latest novella, I am now getting ready to post it to my Patrons – and this means translating it in Italian. Because it is good to be my patrons, and my Italian-speaking supporters get my stories in Italian, just as my English-speaking supporters get them in English.
This means a bit of extra work, and the hard part is not translating the text, but conveying the tone and the rhythms. And that is, after all, the crux of translating.
I am always dissatisfied with my own translations of my own stories – there is always something missing.
Case in point – the title of my latest novella: Guillotine Wind.
It’s good, compact and yet intriguing-.
Sounds fine.
In Italian it sucks, big time.
Fact is, what wind, and what guillotine?
Is it Il Vento Ghigliottina… but then it sounds like the wind is operating the guillotine… or is it La Ghigliottina Vento, that sounds simply stupid?
Maybe La Ghigliottina del Vento is better, but it sounds lame, and it’s four words instead of two, and it has the wrong rhythm.
Going the other way around, Il Vento della Gigliottina, would possibly suit a story set in Paris during the Terror, but not a story set in Siberia in the ’20s.
So in the end I just dropped the lot.
In Italian, the new novella will be called Vento d’Acciaio.
Steel Wind – a title I would not use for a story in English, because it was the name of a rock band.
See what I mean about being dissatisfied with my translations?
But I’m halfway through – the Patrons will get their story for Christmas.
Guillotine Wind: the soundtrack
I like to think of my stories in terms of movies – with a cast, shots and camera angles, and a soundtrack. And as I have just finished Guillotine Wind, I thought I’d publish a selection of songs that have been playing in the back of my mind as I was writing.
And so I prepared a cassette.
Just follow this link: GUILLOTINE WIND O S T
100.000 views!
While the world was sleeping and the countryside was silent under the rain, Karavansara reached and surpassed the 100.000 views mark for the year 2019.
This is a huge result – Karavansara received as many views in 2019 as it had in its first three years of operations together – and I am thankful to all the readers for their interest in my blog.
Thank you!
To celebrate this landmark, I’ve created a new blog cover, that you can see above. It is based on an ex libris designed by pulp legend Roy G. Krenkel, and it’s going to be the new look for Karavansara in the soon to begin Roaring ’20s.
A different kind of Jingle Bells
Featuring the Altai band, a very Karavansara-friendly Jingle Bells.
Gaiman reads Dickens
Because it’s that time of the year, you know…
Karavansara 