Bruno Stella's Blog

 

I’m writing this blog post as a sort of marker on my writingprogress.

A lot of fun was had writing and illustrating the Lollo andSnollo series of children’s books. It is kind of weird how a person can becomefond of completely imaginary characters and start to wish them well. However,that’s where I’m at. The bear cubs and their friends must live on!

 

While the writing and illustrating and putting on Amazon ofthe series went well, the sales side has been somewhat dismal. In order to keeppouring time and effort into the stories I need to make a return, even if it isminimal.

So the next step has been to turn the books intoread-throughs. I’ve narrated them myself (hopefully my goofy South Africanaccent doesn’t put people off) and learned to use Adobe Premiere so that thesound and illustrations could be joined in a video track.

The videos will initially start out of narrative sequence,with the mini-stories being converted to read-throughs, since they are easierand less lengthy. A good channel name for Youtube etc is Reading Aloud withLollo and Snollo. Well, maybe.

Assuming some sort of positive reaction I may go and do theactual books 1-6 in sequence too. The idea is to link back to the ebook onAmazon and perhaps generate sales that way. I’m going to try to start thechannels today.

Up to now I’ve been kinda naughty and have been buying artsupplies with the excuse that “it’s for the books”. There are a range ofwatercolours, pencils, chalks, fine brushes and pastels begging to be used. There’sa whole box of Rosa Gallery watercolours and another box of multi-coloured Diamineinks champing at the bit. Let’s see if I can make that excuse for buying theminto a reality J

 

 

 I've published the Lollo and Snollo Mini Activity Book 1 on the Internet Archive. It can be downloaded for free at this link:

https://archive.org/details/lollo-snollo-mini-activity-book-1

 It contains a short story on Lollo and Snollo's quest to bake the world's biggest cookie, crosswords, find-the-word games, pictures to colour in as well as mazes. The solutions are included and ought to keep a kid busy for a few hours.

 

 So I'm still in the game. I'm busy on kid's books at the moment, namely Lollo and Snollo. I've always liked bears and bear stories, so this fusion of illustration and fun, no-stress writing suits me perfectly. I've just put up #5, am busy with #6 and have finished an activity book magnet which will hopefully be of some use to draw readers to the main series.

Here's the first book, Lost in the Forest:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BQZ6NX27

From the 23rd (today) till the 26th of April 2020, the first Martin Chalk book will be on free promotion. It's being advertised through sites like Book Barbarian and Genrepulse. I'm interested in seeing what sort of downloads I get and whether the downloads actually translate to read-through sales of the following books.

I have tarted the book up a little. I added a prologue that I feel ties in much better with the end of the book, as well as book 2. That prologue features Jen Naroth, the forger first seen in the free short story Of Horses and Pickled Fish. Some bits with Abrez Logar in them were also expanded a bit and I feel the reader gets a bit more insight into him.

A short story featuring Danrod has just been finished and is going through the editing and proof reading process. I'll plop it on Amazon as soon as I have a viable cover.

 I've recently taken part in an interesting Book Funnel promotion together with other authors. It's an anthology of free upbeat books designed to cheer you up during the coronavirus lockdowns. There are 24 titles to choose from and they range from fantasy to sci fi to romance. Take a look!

https://books.bookfunnel.com/stories-...

I’ve been away for quite a while. 
The question, of course, is what have I been doing? 
The answer is, writing. The much-threatened book “Martin Chalk and the Quest Through Time” has just been published on Amazon, and it’s quite a chonker, clocking in at almost exactly 200k words. I’d originally aimed at 90k, which shows that my ability to estimate the length of a story, even with an outline, needs fine-tuning. 
Martin Chalk and the Quest Through Time is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086J78K3Y
Nevertheless, the story needed that length to unfold properly, and I think it’s a pretty decent yarn if I say so myself. It is a two part book, the first part mainly concerned with Martin Chalk and his efforts to get to the location of the next piece of the Wand of Lemual. In the second part, the reader is re-introduced to the characters of Sir Kethvist, Susanna and Bartak, who were first seen in the short story The Champion’s Prophecy available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VJWPT8Y
Another ‘character’ who makes an appearance much to everybody’s dismay, is Small-Paw, who was introduced in the short story The Skelgar, available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0866D86WH
I’ve also written two other short stories available for free through BookFunnel. 
The first, which is free-free is The Hunger. This also ties into the Martin Chalk story in ways we will come to see later on. It’s a story of a werewolf apocalypse, and how a young man in its path deals with it. The Hunger is found here: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/6yb1cw94hx
The second short story available on BookFunnel is Of Horses and Pickled Fish. It’s a story about the ever-avaricious Regent of Fulldon and his attempts at crooking a fish merchant. Messer Schlei, however, is far more resourceful than the Regent anticipates, with unexpected results. I tried to channel my inner Terry Pratchett for this one, and I’m rather pleased with how it turned out. The forger Jen Naroth makes a cameo appearance, and the short story explains the origin of Martin’s side quest in Sheona.
Of Horses and Pickled Fish is available here : https://dl.bookfunnel.com/2o7b9l4cmm
It requires mailing list sign-up, but I figure anybody that doesn’t like it probably won’t like my other writing and can unsubscribe.

Well, I've been somewhat absent lately.

There's a reason for that, and it's probably best summed up by a Reddit post I just made regarding the third book in the Martin Chalk series:

"Well, my amateur-detective hero Martin Chalk is hot on the trail of the third piece of a five piece wand (super original, I know, but there's more to it than the simple McGuffin) and I wanted to show the rise and fall of a mortal paladin who held the third piece.

The only logical way to condense a life story into a book was to use time travel as a device and to hit the salient points of the antagonist's life. I thought I was so clever, until I was some way into it and things really started to bother me.

For example, how to deal with the butterfly effect?

What about temporal paradoxes? Martin is the cause of something that he'd deeply like to undo, the death of an obviously good and positive character. What's to stop him from going back in time from where he finds out his advice doomed her, and giving her different advice? B-bu-but then he'd have remembered doing that!

What about predestination? If everything turns out as it should, then that sort of implies the lack of free will, which sucks to both me and Martin Chalk, who deeply cherishes causality.

ARGH. And it sort of snowballs from there.

Honestly it probably would have been easier to restart the tale, except for that I'd done some (to my mind) particularly fun and entertaining writing and didn't want to lose that work. This book was supposed to have been finished in April :D It was also supposed to be novella sized and I'm pushing 80k words with a probable 100k in sight.

Iirc JK Rowling banned and wrote out the timetwisters Hermione used, and a jolly good thing it was too. I bet she also regretted messing with causality ;)"





If I manage to keep a rigid writing schedule, then Martin Chalk and the Quest Through Time should be out in a month or two.

Today is my Reddit Fantasy Writer of the Day slot, and it's viewable here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comm...

Hopefully I get some interesting questions and have some fun. :)

Here's a different sort of post related to writing.

I personally find myself more productive when I'm listening to some sort of music.

My poison of choice is heavy metal, but not just any sort will do for writing. Staccato rhythms and rap-like lyrics are straight into the garbage bin. That's because I need to think of my own words without some guy screaming the same phrase into my ear over and over.

I tend to look for stuff with sweeping melodies and grand narratives, while still retaining the energetic guitar work that is typical of good metal. Excellent vocals are a must, but the vocals mustn't overwhelm the music, but complement it. Some sort of unusual instrument, like, oh, I don't know, a violin, perhaps, adds interest to such a band. :)

I've lent an ear to this band from Greece for some time now, and Battleroar's latest offering is Codex Epicus, to be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=700GD...

It fulfils my writing music requirements very well, and is a masterpiece to be listened to at other times as well.

For what it's worth, I recommend them highly.

This has to be one of the hardest things to do.

The Ebook and Indie publishing market is absolutely saturated with titles, and Amazon is bursting at the seams with new books being squeezed into the published sausage like so much mincemeat every day. Newly published books sink like stones. Forget the "I published a book and got drowned in a truckload of money as a desperate publisher recognised my unique snowflake talent and hit me up for a contract" stories. I literally think that winning the lottery is both easier and less arduous.

One of the few things that one can do to try to stand out is to have a book with some (hopefully) positive reviews. That in itself is a very difficult thing to achieve. Amazon (understandably) cracked down big time on the paid review scene, because there's an inherent bias involved in reviewing a book that somebody just paid you for. Amazon wants reviews to grow "organically".

Sounds good.

But what does that mean? It means that people buy your book, and the subject matter within moves their soul and they just have to write a review for you on Amazon. Except for that people won't buy a book with no reviews if there's an equal title next to it with a bunch of 5 star reviews. They'll buy that one instead. So would I.

So, what can one do?

Free KDP giveaways are touted as one of the best ways to get people to read your work and to slowly accumulate those little golden nuggets. That's right. That book you just wrote? Ya gotta give it away for free if you want to be read. But wait! You didn't just think you could give it away and thousands of people would download it, did you?

No. Everybody is doing that, so you have to advertise your free book. Once you get over the fact that you have to pay folks to give your book away to an audience, you come to the next realisation that they don't want your stinkin' book with no reviews, you have to have at least ten or so good ones before you get the honour.

I had a bit of a laugh at the chicken - and - the - egg situation, but its a situation a shedload of authors find themselves in with no easy solutions.