Reading Aloud with Lollo and Snollo

 

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

A lot of fun was had writing and illustrating the Lollo and Snollo series of children’s books. It is kind of weird how a person can become fond 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 of the series went well, the sales side has been somewhat dismal. In order to keep pouring time and effort into the stories I need to make a return, even if it is minimal.

So the next step has been to turn the books into read-throughs. I’ve narrated them myself (hopefully my goofy South African accent doesn’t put people off) and learned to use Adobe Premiere so that the sound 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 easier and less lengthy. A good channel name for Youtube etc is Reading Aloud with Lollo and Snollo. Well, maybe.

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

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

 

Still Here ...

 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

Martin Chalk Book #1 on free promotion

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.

FREE ebooks for download for a limited time only!

 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-for-self-quarantine/6rbpef2q44

A Slew of New 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.