Today I wanted to share with you a couple of projects. These have recently sprung up on the new Kindle Vella program and I find well worth the time to talk about. They are quite interesting ideas and both deserve highlighting.
For those unaware, Kindle Vella is a new idea from Amazon modeled after some other free fiction sites as a way to offer serialized fiction for cheap. how it works is that you get a new piece of story on a constant basis determined by the author. In essence, this is a way to give short fiction and the old style of serialized storytelling that was lost with the death of the pulps a shot in the arm. Potentially, that is. Will it be successful? Who knows. But it is worth talking about.
Unfortunately, and this is the biggest flaw with it, the service is only for America right now, which means writers and readers outside cannot contribute in any fashion as of now. For those who have sizeable audiences in the rest of North America or the world, they might think twice about limiting their reach. That limitation might change in the future, assuming the service lasts that long. In this day and age there is no way to tell.
Nonetheless, there are two new projects currently running on Vella that I wanted to highlight for you here. Should you have access to the service, be sure to give them a look over. You are guaranteed to have a good time.
The first up is The Perils of Sasha Reed by gonzo author Rawle Nyanzi. I heard about this one quite a bit from the author himself before he put it out, so I can tell you it is a passion project with a lot of love put into it. He wanted to create an old school-style serialized pulp story with a woman main character who uses her womanly charms to deal with the peril assaulting her. Very much a more traditional take on classical-style adventure tales. You can tell from the set up in the description just how much trouble she is going to be in:
"Pit girl Sasha Reed has a problem: every dirtbag on the planet wants to kidnap her! Her new subspace storage technology has attracted the attention of mutants, mad scientists, and the worst scum the Earth Sphere has to offer. Join Sasha and her gun-toting race car driver boyfriend as they deal with all sorts of peril in this short story series!"
Strap in for a fun time, ladies and gentlemen.
You can find Rawle Nyanzi's The Perils of Sasha Reed on Kindle Vella here.
Nextup is a different sort of story by author and bard in everything but name only David V Stewart called Bright Children. Unlike Mr. Nyanzi's Futuristic mayhem, Mr. Stewart's is a more classical Mythic approach to his adventure story. If you have read either author before, you know just how different they are!
Here is the description for Bright Children:
"The sun, like the goddess who rules it, is dead. The children of the gods, long divorced from their blessed origins, carry on in a world of darkness, aided by the last gift of their forebears: the light of magic. Aphella, a gifted student of the old magic, carries on in her town, surviving, but never prospering. When Frey, a mysterious traveler, enters her hometown, an immutable, eldritch force enters, too, and she is forced to go into the darkness to and draw the thing away..."
Once again, you can find Bright Children here on Kindle Vella.
If you know the author's other works, then you might want to know that this takes place in the same world as his Water of Awakening and City of Silver books, though in the distant past. How does it tie in to the grand scheme of things? You'll have to read it to find out!
Glad to be here!
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