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# Author becomes an open bookThey say that the greatest stories are about the human heart being in conflict with itself, but Vella-Bardon also thinks that stories about conflicting cultures make for great tales.> Growing up I wanted to write an epic story arc, but in my mid-20s I realised that I didn’t just want to rehash the old fantasy series trope“Writing a novel about the Spanish Armada landings in Ireland appealed to me because you not only had two but three conflicting cultures, which included Counter-Reformist Spain, Reformist England and late medieval Ireland. Discovering the differences between these cultures was addictive and I could not stop coming up with ideas for the pentalogy.”Vella-Bardon originally intended to write a stand-alone novel, but as the old cliché goes, “the tale grew in the telling” until he found that he had written a book of over 460,000 words. Given that the average work of fiction is 60,000-80,000 words, he decided to publish it in different instalments.His publisher is the London-based press called Unbound, which is an imprint of Penguin-Random House, the world’s largest publisher. Unbound is also the UK’s leading crowd-funding publisher and its writers must sell £4,000 worth in presales within three months before the traditional printing process can kick in.“After my novel was launched on the Unbound platform in May 2017, I was braced for a long hard slog to make this crowdfunding figure, but it was reached in less than six days!”, Vella-Bardon says proudly.Patrons from around the world who pre-purchased the novel, thereby allowing it to be published traditionally, are listed in the paperback. These include a number of supportive relatives, friends from all over the world and also a few unknowns.The book is dedicated to his wife, Donna Madden, a corporate lawyer in funds management who was born in Ireland and moved to Sydney from Glasgow as a young girl.“She pushed me to chase my dreams and supported me through thick and thin when I still formed part of the great unpublished. She often lifted me when I was down and provided me with hope and guidance when I could not see a way forward and was crushed with disappointment. Put simply, I could not have done it without her,” says Vella-Bardon.The second part of The Sassana Stone Pentalogy, entitled A Rebel North, will be published in the UK by Unbound next year. After that it will be the turn of the next three instalments in this series and then Vella-Bardon will start another series which he has “had on ice for too long” and which centres around the building of Valletta following the Great Siege of Malta.He, in fact, would like to follow in the footsteps of Spanish bestselling author Arturo Pérez-Reverte, whom he calls his “role model”.