Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Tag Archives: writing prompts


by 3 Comments

Four Cities

It is all my friend Claire’s fault, of course.
She just posted about this interesting writing prompts website, and in particular she mentioned the prompt about describing your city as a person.

I did some attempt at it on Claire’s page, but then I thought I’d like to expand on that.
Leaving Castelnuovo Belbo out of the picture, if you please, because after my first attempt at Claire’s, I am sure it would be just an exercise in necrophilia.
And because it’s not my city, or town or village or hole in the ground.
I’m just living here, but I do not belong. Thank goodness!

As I mentioned in the past, I am a two-cities kind of guy.
A girl I knew once said it’s because I am a Gemini.
But I really have four cities, so maybe I’m a Gemini with Gemini ascendant, who knows. Or maybe it’s just superstitious rubbish, and I’m in fact one of those “city slickers” Joe Jackson mentioned a long time ago…

We think we’re pretty smart
Us city slickers get around
And when the going’s rough
We kill the pain and relocate
We’re never married
Never faithful not to any town

So here goes, my web-exclusive Four Cities, an exercise in impromptu urban fantasy.
Enjoy. Continue reading →


by 6 Comments

Writing with Pinterest

piniconAs I mentioned a few days back, I’m exploring Pinterest as a tool for writers.
And as we know, the Pinterest nation is 70% women – this already makes Pinterest attractive, but let’s not talk about looking for a girlfriend…

For the uninitiated: Pinterest is a social media and tool based on the pinboard metaphore.
You collect items of interest around the web, and organize them in graphical, themed pinboards – providing images, videos and sounds, text (Pinterest allows for 500 characters comments), links.
You can share your pins, collaborate on pins with other pinners, and “steal” pins from other boards.

An early attempt at putting together a writing-oriented pinboard was the Mock Elizabethan board I manage together with my friend Chiara.
We both share a passion for the Elizabethan Era, and it seemed a fun project collecting weird and unusual modern Elizabethan references in one place – as a game, but also, who knows, as a source of inspiration for future writing project, maybe even the joint project we’ve been talking about for years now, and still haven’t found the time to get going.

Continue reading →