MARCH
- lukebellmason
- Apr 3
- 9 min read
Q2
The end of March marks the conclusion of Bellmason Books' second quarter, and I'll have to admit that I have not been as active in this space as I was in Q1; mainly because I'm still in the process of moving house. The Quanta-B Tales is our first book and I'm still using it to learn about marketing and self-promotion.
In March, for my birthday, I decided to offer the book for free for one week, and I asked everyone I know to put a review up on Amazon if they could, as there were currently none. This proved to be a great success, though I hated having to spam everyones DMs. In March we recieved nine more downloads, though they were free so don't generate any income, it's great to see more people are reading the book and I did get several reviews, however...
Some of the reviews have now been blocked by Amazon, and doing a little digging it seems that the site has updated its policies to try and curb the proliferation of fake reviews, and in the process cleared out some genuine one. I have added some of the reviews from Amazon to this site, but if you've posted a review and it's been removed could you please raise a ticket with the Amazon help centre and they will look into it.
For Q3 I am going to be running another marketing campaign (once I get some more money together), and I have big plans! One of my ideas was to hire a well known celebrity (one who's very close to my heart) via Cameo and have them voice an ad to be uploaded to the socials. If I can get this together it will hopefully be a major boost to my sales.
I'm also planning a redesign of the cover as the current one doesn't quite convey that this is a sci-fi novel (see last month's post on the excellent seminar by W. A. Kelly). Later in the year there might be some news on another book that is going to be published by Bellmason Books, so stay tuned.
EASTER EGGS
It's Easter! So I thought I would share with you some of the Easter Eggs I put into The Quanta-B Tales. For those who don't know, video games, movies, tv shows and books often have little in-jokes or references put there by the author, mainly to amuse themselves during the many hours it takes to create something like a book, tv, movie, etc. If you've read Ready Player One you will know all about Easter Eggs, but I did learn from this book that the first Easter Egg was borne out of frustration by a programmer working at Atari, who refused to credit him for his creation, so he hid his name in a secret room. (This claim as being the first Easter Egg is contested by the way, but I won't go into it here as it's a rabbit hole you don't need to go down right now).
In The Quanta-B Tales there are multiple Easter Eggs, which were put there purely for my own amusement. There are probably more than you think, but a few of them have been found already by keen eyed readers. Here's a few to get you started;
The Merchant's Tale: "This part of the station was a holdstock, where I kept all my long-term investments."
This is a refernce to Robert Holdstock who wrote the novella The Dark Wheel which came with the original Elite video game. Without this book I don't think The Quanta-B Tales would exist, and the Merchant's Tale is very loosely based on some of the themes in that book. The tale started out as an unofficial sequel to that story, and the reader could easily scrub out some of the names and replace them. I did take some liberties with the concept of the Dark Wheel, which was the inspiration for the Circle of Nine.
The Knight's Tale: The Meeting. While the ship name of 'Palamon' is a direct reference to the original Knight's Tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, I wouldn't exactly call it an 'Easter Egg' (I feel like the term gets misused a lot these days). There is reference to a rather more obscure book hidden in the story though, which is Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats.
In the meeting on the station the Knights all gather for a conclave to discuss the situation and decide what to do. The way the meeting is run is governed by the methods described in de Bono's book, which advocates a system of parallel thinking for groups, where each person speaks from a particular viewpoint, before moving on to the next person. (The hats are metaphorical by the way, and everyone 'wears' theirs at the same time). The white hat represents facts and information, excluding emotion and opinion, which come later under the red hat. The black and yellow hats deal with negative and positive aspects separately and the green hat deals with new ideas.
The Atomic Bomb Considered as a Hungarian High School Science Fair Project: I have had great fortune to have known several Hungarians in my life and the more I delved into the cultural and intellectual history of Hungary the more questions it raised. There is a belief amongst many that they are in fact aliens, sent to Earth to accelerate our development into the nuclear age; a theory that is supported by a study centered around Budapest in the late 19th century. There were so many exceptional people born around that time and in that area that it seems to exceed the limits of mere coincidence that they should all later come together in the 1940s to work on the Manhattan Project.
To give you some idea, the group consisted of project founder Leo Szilard, H-Bomb creator Edward Teller, quantum physicist Eugene Wigner and inventor of the modern computer John von Neumann. It turns out that all of these men were all taught at the same school by a man named Laszlo Ratz. There other figures around the time like Paul Erdos, Dennis Gabor and George Soros, to name a few, but I would recommend reading the article as it goes on to largely debunk this theory as fantasy, while still somehow illumating a fascinating period of Hungarian history. I would also recommend the episode of In Our Time on Paul Erdos, which goes more into the factors around Hungarian society at the time; suffice to say that the more I read into the subject, the more fascinated I got (and the less writing I was able to produce).
In The Quanta-B Tales I hid a number of Hungarian references, mainly because my Hungarian friends would read the early drafts and ask me why they were there. The names of the other Knights in The Knight's Tale all come from a list of Hungarian names; Lekatos, Hanvath, Molnar, Wulid, Garlas (I learned also that in Hungarian 'W' is pronounced as a 'V' and 'S' is pronounced 'Sh', especially at the end of a word. Other examples include Gyár the factory planet in The Pirate's Tale, the Fekete in the Mercenarie's Tale and the planet names in The Scout's Tale. I also put a section in The Interloper's Tale that references the Science Fair article (there's also more Easter Eggs to find in this chapter).
Generally I thought about the idea of Hungarians being from another alien race that existed before humans and made the names of some things and planets reference this, like Gyar, which means 'factory' in Hungarian and the names of the planets in the Scout's Tale.
The Miner's Tale: The Miner is the son of a playright. This idea was so silly that I just had to include it in the story of the Miner because every time I thought about it, it made me laugh, and I knew very few people would ever get the reference. It comes from a Monty Pyton sketch which is a simple role-reversal idea, but it plays out so perfectly. The ridiculousness of a old and grizzled working class man compaining about writer's cramp while his son tells his mother about tungsten-carbide drill bits just seems to work somehow, and the Miner's Tale I had struggled for a while to come up with a middle part to the story.
I knew that Rellin Suln was maybe not quite the same as the people he worked with, and wondered what had brought him out to the asteroid fields in the first place. I figured that he was running away from something and imagined a rich kid growing up on an affluent planet, dreaming of being a miner while his father wrote and produced plays. It all just seemed to fit.
The plot of the story is discovery, and that's what happens in the first act when Rellin finds the asteroid that will make him famous. What he discovers after that is more interesting though, as he realises he isn't trying to get rich, like the other people he works with, and his dream is now over; he can no longer mine.
I always say in interviews that The Miner's Tale is based on a true story, and it is, as it mainly describes my experiences in the game Eve Online. The resolution to the tale is also based on the account of a player of Eve Online who spent months and months planning an elaborate scam that would make him billions upon billions of ISK, only to discover when the heist was over that he enjoyed the actual planning and set up more than the successful conclusion. In the end he got bored with the game and having all that money meant he didn't really need to do anything anymore, but before he left he decided to find some unsuspecting noob and transfer his entire fortune into their account.
That's enough Easter Eggs for now, why not let me know in the comments if you found any <others>.
PROCEDURAL GENERATION
I have a lot of ideas for books, but I am too lazy to write them. I have often dreamt of a machine that could do all the hard work of coming up with the actual story, and leave me to write the narrative. For those of you who may not be writers the difference between story and narrative is quite subtle, but very important. For example, the story of an F1 race might consist of nothing more than a bunch of data that tell you which car was fastest, which had the slowest lap and which won the race, but the narrative would tell you that Max Verstappen was the world champion in 2024, who’s team had a meltdown in 2025 and all their top people left so that he lost the world championship to Lance Stroll in 2025. Story is objective, based on the facts of what happened, while narrative is subjective and depends largely on interpretation and opinion. There are more books about F1, and other sports, that are of the latter kind than the former, for the simple reason that there are as many opinions as there are people, but there is only one set of facts.
Sport is an interesting subject to write about because it’s unscripted narrative (unless it’s wrestling), but how do you write about fictional sport? The narrative would have to be based on events which were created by the writer, and would feel fake somehow. So what if there was a way to create a whole season of futuristic F1, aka the Aleph League, that wasn't scripted? That is what I have been trying to do for the last month, by using proceduaral generation.
The first video game to use procedural generation was Elite, which managed to achieve the impossible by cramming a whole eight galaxies full of planets, each with their own economy and government, into a mere 48 kilobytes of memory. This feat was achieved by assigning each planet to a set of coordinates, which in turn generated a numeric code that assigned that planet a name, economy, government type and description. The trick was to have a list or table of possible types and then pull that information on demand when it was requested.
For my purposes, I have set up a spreadsheet that uses the ISO 6346. For context, I was a truck driver for most of my working life and handled containers on a few occassions, learning about the interesting little trick that they use to check the number is correct. The input for each pilot contains the letters of their name, the race track number and the sector and lap they are currently located at, which gives an output of a single digit from 0 to 9. This then provides their velocity for the next turn, with other stats added in. The running total of all of their turns then generates their progress through the race, relative to the other pilots.
Once you start adding in checks for the reliability of the ship, handling of the corners and collisions with other vessels, damage and destruction ensues; all of this is before I've added weapons into the mix. The idea is to create something that's totally unpredictable, and yet has nothing to do with random numbers. In theory, a reader could go into the spreadsheet and look at a particular instant to see the stats of where every ship was at a given moment, as every set of inputs give the same output. I have also decided to write the book as I go, having no idea how it's going to end, though I reserve the right to add a bit of creativity to the background of each pilot and all that behind the scenes stuff.
Maybe I will write it for NaNoWriMo (yes, I know it doesn't exist any more), and if I do I will post the chapters, as well as the spreadsheets for each race, one this site.
HAPPY EASTER EVERYBODY!
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