Discovery of West Africa - Nigeria

It has been a long trip, but finally, I am back home.
That means that I am ready to tell you something about the journey, bringing you some vibes of Africa; my Africa.
I know that I have promised to keep a sort of daily photo diary posted on my social, but as we left Nigeria, we were transported back in the '80s.
We could not find roaming for our mobile phones and most important no internet.
We were sure to have Wi-Fi on our hotels, but things in Africa never go the way you plan them.
If there is one thing I have learned during my journeys is to expect everything, even the impossible.
Like the hotel promised on their booking pages, there was indeed a Wi-Fi, but it was too slow and most of the times offline, so… well, practically, there wasn't.

But let's go back to our journey.

Our route started in Helsinki, from where we reached Lagos, Nigeria.
From Lagos, we traveled by car following the main road to Ghana through Benin and Togo. From Ghana, we returned to Lagos by plane, and on our way back, we could have a stop in Doha, Qatar.

The first thing you notice when you come to any airport in Africa is what I call Africa scent. The scent made of the earthy iron-rich sand, mixed with the smell of the trees and bushes, food, and other scents I could not identify.

This is the scent I enjoy deeply inhaling it whenever I reach Africa.
Nigeria is located in the Gulf of Guinea. It originated from British colonial rule in the 19th century,  and in 1914 it incorporated the South Nigeria Protectorate and Northern Nigeria Protectorate. Nigeria became a formally independent federation in 1960. It went through a civil war between 1967 and 1970, and after that, the country experienced alternatively democratically elected governments and military dictatorship. At present, after the presidential elections of 2011, it reached a stable political situation.

Talking about the safety of a traveler, besides the local crime connected to drug dealing in the city of Lagos, a particular concern has been raised by the Boko Haram–related violence.

Nevertheless, after a peak in 2014 and 2015, the number of casualties attributed to the group fell dramatically. The Nigerian military, with assistance from Benin, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger, has pushed Boko Haram out of several provinces in northeastern Nigeria. The group retains control over some villages and pockets of territory and continues to launch deadly suicide attacks and abduct civilians, mostly women, and children. In February 2018, more than one hundred students were kidnapped by a faction of Boko Haram known as Islamic State West Africa. They were released a little more than a month later.

The conflict has been primarily contained in the Muslim north, particularly in Borno state, but has displaced millions of people in the region.

The city looks at first glance divided between the "good areas" and the poor ones. Infrastructure is something the Nigerian government seems not really to bother. That is not related to the lack of funds, as Nigeria is one of the wealthiest countries in Africa, but to a wildly spread corruption that avoids the movement and allocation of those funds for the public works.

The good 

...And the bad

Waste management seemed to be the biggest issue, particularly in Lagos, where the municipality appears to be unable to manage the rise in industrial and domestic waste. Together with waste management, the roads inside the city were relatively well kept (Africa-wisely). Nevertheless, the main road to the border was a nightmare. There, without an off-road vehicle, you are in deep troubles.
We spent in Lagos only one night. This decision was made mainly for safety reason. Secondly, because we knew we would have had the time to check the city and the Natural Conservation Center on our way back home.

The most exciting part on this first leg was indeed the road trip to the border, which in normal conditions it would have taken not more than a couple of hours. However, with the actual road conditions, it took about four hours.

Waste management has been a big challenge in the largest cities and the piles of waste stretch for kilometers.

The road is a constant market place and people come to sell and buy everything from livestock to fruits and vegetables or even furniture. A sort of one time stop for all your needs.

The guy you see leaning outside the vehicle is the one who is gathering customers and advice the driver when it is time to stop. He also collects the ticket money from the passengers.

This also included the times we were asked to stop by the border police.

The officers were looking for some money to be cashed at the expenses of the drivers passing by (and in a couple of circumstances our driver just drove by without stopping!). We have also been stopped by some local small criminals looking for some cash, which we quickly gave to avoid troubles.

All in all, people are friendly, and we have not been bothered during our strolls in the city. The stay went on as smooth as we hoped for, and we can call ourselves satisfied with this new challenge.
This has been a longer blog, but I was also supposed to compensate for the lack of blogging last week.
I hope you enjoyed this first part and you will follow me on this road trip for the following weeks.
Stay tuned!

Authors and Marketing... do or die (or?)

I have to be honest, I haven't had the time to make any sort of marketing during this... ok since a few months.
The problem starts with a vicious circle, follow me:

Question: what is a writer?
A writer is a person who can bring to life stories that are only in her mind. The creative power is his/her best ally, and sometimes he/she is blessed with an overflow of ideas that need to be bled literally on the paper (or on the screen, if you prefer).

Therefore the writer writes, and if he/she wants to survive, she also needs to produce something new with a certain frequency (I can't do more than three novels a year).

Now the problem I find myself stuck in is the time factor. In my everyday life my day starts at six am with a merciless alarm clock, within 30 minutes (on summer when I use my bicycle), or 50 minutes (on winter when I walk) I am at work in my office.

My day has not a steady routine, and things can go from the normal 7,5 hours a day to the part take-the-first-plane-and-reach-the-working-site. In that case, it means that all hell broke loose and I will have to stay away from home between one day or a week.

Let's say that my day is blessed and I get out at 15:00, maximum 16:00 I am home.
Take care of the evil bunny and the regular chores, write some more of the next novel and research for it, and we are at 18:30 when together with my husband I enjoy my dinner and evening until 21:00.

At that point, I write some more, plan the next cover and blurb, check what's going on on the social, prepare some new banner ideas posts for the following day, and it is already 22:30... time to go to sleep, if I want to wake up the morning after and be effective at work.

The only time I have to learn something about marketing is during the weekends when also my brain needs some recharging, and I am, threrefore, less effective.

My question is that you don’t learn to be a marketer in a couple of days or neither in a couple of years unless you are going to learn it full time. Full time is a luxury I don’t have, and if I have to start really to learn marketing, using the few minutes a day, it will take me other 20 years.

Do I have 20 years in my life to dedicate and learn marketing? Yes.
Is it worth it? Probably not because marketing is something that evolves with the time.

20 years of learning the basics and I will find myself with outdated knowledge I have no use for.
Moreover, I would like to sell something before 20 years.

So should find a marketer who has experience with new authors who are starting their journey, so they do not have an established readership. I need someone to take me from where I am to a steady and constant organic sale.

I believe that few of us, indie authors, are able to manage to learn marketing strategies and succeed to gain readers and sell a discreet amount of books. We are not all the same, and particularly I am the worst marketer in this world. It is just not my cup of tea, I can write, and that’s what I do, but at a certain point, I would also love to reach a wider audience.

The dilemma of an indie writer goes on….

The Wandering Writer's corner... news

It's a grey day here in Finland, and I am approaching to finalize my luggage for the next wandering back to Italy. At the same time, I just got the confirmation that very soon my next novel "Deadly Deception - The Devil's Deal" will be released from the editor, and soon enough I will be able to publish the final book of the trilogy.

Writing a series can be fun, but there are some points, which are common to the process of writing that reach the extreme in the case of a series.
-The characters: The biggest challenge for me was to be consistent with the characters, some appeared in the first book and returned on the third, or met, sadly, their demise but they gave still their contribution to the story. I had so many times to go back to the first book and check the names of the people involved in the story and connect them with those who appeared only in the third book. Personally, it was messy enough to make me forget about the idea of making a series longer than just trilogies.
-The storyline: If it is somewhat challenging following a plot during one whole novel, when it comes to a series, it might get frustrating. Being a pantser myself, rather than a plotter, I had, for this trilogy, to write down the storylines of all the previous books and plan carefully the storyline of the final one, to make sure that each event could connect with the previous in a flawless manner (I will continue to have nightmares about the fear of not having connected facts).
-The characters talking in your ears: That is one of the best and worst, they all want to have their spotlight, and they have their own idea on how to get to it. Sharing is not a word in their vocabulary and many times I moderate their arguments. Whether this is just a joke, there is still a foundation of truth. Characters are the multiple and unabridged reflections of our inner selves; fears, hopes, dreams, desires, likes and dislikes. The duty of a writer is to give them space ordering them into characters with different personalities. It is a little like the story of Pinocchio. Geppetto was unaware of the troubles of creating Pinocchio, but in the end, he managed to turn that little piece of irreverent wood into a well-behaved boy. Something like this happens with writing a novel, and it gets stronger when dealing with a series.
Regardless of this, I have enjoyed so far writing this first series, and I believe I will take the chance to write more of them in the future. Although, I might take a break from them with at least a couple of other novels.
So, you might wonder whether there is already a date for the next release, and unfortunately, I have to say that there isn’t. I aim to publish it between the end of this month and the end of May, but if you keep following me, I will keep you all updated!
Stay tuned and have a great weekend!