Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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The guy you love to hate

Parabellum Serenade is at the halfway point, and there is a believable prototype of a cover, and the plot is thickening. What I like about this story – maybe I already mentioned this – is the way in which all the pieces are falling together in the right place without me having to do any major effort. I only have to type the story as it unfolds.

My modus operandi is as follows: I devote half an hour before falling asleep and about another half an hour after I wake up to stay under the covers and run through my head the scenes of the novel, like they were a movie. Usually the post-wake up session orders and cleans up, and adds detail to the pre-snooze ideas. Then I only have to sit down and write down the scenes I saw. Revising what I wrote yesterday, I do a first clean-up and some minor adjustments.
And the story grows.

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Heroes & Villains

The Keep, (1983, F. Paul Wilson, publ. NEL, 0-450-05455-1, £1.95, 379pp, pb)OK, I’ll start this suggesting you a good book, because … hey, because it’s a good book, and because it’s only right that you can get away from yet another one of my rants with something good.
The book is F. Paul Wilson’s The Keep, a vampire story with a Lovecraftian twist, pitching a Wehrmacht unit against a creature called Molasar, during a long Carpatian winter, in World War Two.
It’s really good.
There was also a movie, directed by Michael Mann, that was quite good but got butchered before distrinution and then sank into oblivion.
But check out the book.

The Keep came to my mind yesterday as I got involved in a conversation in which I was asked if I ever raped a corpse.
Yes, sometimes things get weird hereabouts. Continue reading