Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Tag Archives: things to come


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An odd plan

I’ve been putting some order in my library.
I was tired of book piling up on chair and on the floor, so I bought a new Billy bookshelf from IKEA, and started filling it up.

And as I was moving books around, I dug out my copy of Kim Newman’s Video Dungeon, that collects some of the reviews Kim Newman wrote for the video section of Empire Magazine.
And as I browsed it, I realized it includes a (brief, sadly) chapter called High Adventure that features – you guessed it – adventure movies.

And I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to start again my Tits & Sand and Indiana Clones/Raiders of the Lost Franchise posts, using this list to dig up some forgotten movies?
Indeed, I already covered a few in the list (the 1925 version of She, for instance), but many others remain to explore. I might even supplement the list by adding titles from the chapters about Criptids and others.Now all I have to do is find the actual films in streaming, and then I’ll begin.
Watch this space.


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The CAS re-read, an introduction

Six months ago, on my Italian-language sword & sorcery cinema podcast, Chiodi Rossi, together with my co-host Germano, we did a special episode selecting our favorite Conan stories, and, after re-reading them, we discussed them. We are both writers, I am also a translator and Germano is an editor, so we used our passion for these stories and our professional experience to try and say something new about those stories.

The experiment was fun for us and, thankfully, also for our public, so we decided to do it again – and we are currently setting up an episode about Clark Ashton Smith, going about it just like the last time – we selected a bunch of stories we like, re-read them, and will chat about our impressions and insights on our podcast.

[incidentally, about ten days ago the largest Italian publisher released a second thousand-pages collection of CAS, everybody hereabouts is talking about it, so we will not be particularly original. On the other hand, this had been planned for two months now, and we won’t do a plug for the new book… it’s just a coincidence]

Just like I did for the Conan stories, I will prepare a series of English-language posts based on our chats, and publish them here.
We’ll be recording in our virtual studio during the weekend.
Let’s see what happens.

Once again, watch this space.


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Write or Die

As I think I mentioned a while back, one of those “memories” that Facebook serves us daily to make us feel miserable (that’s my explanation of this “feature”) made me aware of the fact that in 2019, by the 15th of August, I had submitted 55 short stories and articles to various magazines and anthologies.
By August the 15th 2020 I had only submitted 33.
That scared me as hell.

It was a sign of the HUGE amount of time I had wasted (so to speak) to follow the ghostwriting job from Hell that, as I mentioned a few days back, ended this September, with me not being paid.
I was also scared because a drop of 40% submissions could be a sign I was losing my ability to write a lot, and write fast – and by doing so, manage to pay the bills.

So I sat down, and started writing.

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The Process

The idea for this series of posts came to me after viewing a video by an American jazz musician, music teacher and vlogger I follow (Adam Neely, you find his videos here), and from the reading of an article I found while following up on some of Adam’s contents. The article is Music Theory and the Epistemology of the Internet; or, Analyzing Music Under the New Thinkpiece Regime, by William O’Hara, published in 2018.

Both the video and the article made me think about how information on creative/artistic pursuits is represented online. I was in particularly striuck by Adam Neely’s description of his “working musician” videos as “heist movies” in style – videos in which, just like in, say, Ocean’s Eleven, the preparation of the “heist” (the performance) is as entertaining as the “heist” itself, and leads to a deeper understanding of the process that goes into the work.

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Playing along the Frontier

So you are working not on one, not on two, but on THREE big huge projects, each on of them with a deadline ticking. One project is fun, another is just what you always wanted to write, and the third you hate every minute of it but is paying the bills, so bend on that oar and push!
What do you do, then?
Simple, you invent a fourth big huge project just for yourself.

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Things to Come, #5

As I’ve already mentioned, I’ll devote the next three months to try and grow my Patron page. I want to offer more benefits to my patrons, and possibly lure more Patrons.
In all fairness, I’d love should I be able to pay my mortgage with Patreon – and that means work harder, offer more quality and more perks to the brave souls that feel like gambling a few bucks every month on my ability to deliver.

For this reason I’ve decided to add a new tier to my Patreon page, a higher pledge level, well above the already heady heights of the 10 Bucks Lounge – something that I will cal the Writers’ Workshop, because this new tier will be writer-oriented.

The Writers’ Workshop hits you for 25 bucks per month, for a minimum of two months. That’s a lot of money – so what do you get?

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