Pixie-Led | The digital home of author & photographer Chris Elphick

Wednesday, 6 November 2024

I have wanted to be a published author for as long as I can remember, certainly since I was 7 or 8 years old. Whilst having articles published in newspapers since the 1990s, my first novel, Crawley, was not published until May 2017. Edn™ followed in May of the following year. My third novel, Lore, hit the Amazon shelves just 3 short months later.

Pixie-Led & Berserk! were added to my oeuvre in 2019, followed by Solstice in 2022 and Vampires from Hell in 2023.

Earlier this year I published Cold Comfort, the first draft of which was written back in 1997, before being locked away in a drawer, not quite forgotten, for over a quarter of a century.

Familiar will be my 9th novel and will be published in May 2025. This will mark the 8th anniversary of the publication of my first novel. It will end a busy 8 years of my life writing creative fiction.

As you may or may not (probably the latter) be aware, I have become less enamoured with novel writing of late. To be honest, it takes a lot of work to write a novel, and unless you are one of the Stephen Kings or Graham Mastertons of the world, the monetary returns are not worth the blood, sweat and tears that come with the business.

As such, in May next year, my novel-writing days will officially lie behind me. Having 9 novels to your name is something to be proud of. And I am. But I am 59 next year, and my heart is set on retiring from the full-time cut and thrust of employment as soon as possible. To do so, however, I need to make all my creative endeavours earn me some serious coin. More of which soon (more likely than not in my New Year's Resolution 2025 post)...