Fantasy Writer Takes Inspiration From Dickens

Online, July 31, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Writer Andy Coughlan has taken inspiration from the way Charles Dickens published some of his greatest works, and published his fantasy fiction novel in weekly installments on a web site.

The novel, The Elementalist, is the tale of Barin Elicerio, a man who is falsely accused and found guilty of a very serious crime. As a master practitioner of controlling the elemental forces, he barely escapes with his life and is forced to return to his home village and banned from ever practicing his arcane skills again.

While Barin has no choice but to accept the verdict, events soon catch up with him and he begins to learn the true reasons for the false accusations. Before long he is embroiled in an adventure to stop his world from being destroyed.

'I wrote the story a couple of years ago,' Andy explains, 'and then moved on to other projects and forgot about it. It was only by chance I stumbled across the files on an old hard disk and realized that the content wasn't half has bad as I remembered.'

So Andy set about creating a web site for the novel. 'It made no sense to me to keep it hidden away. I remembered reading about how Charles Dickens used to publish his novels and I realized that The Elementalist had an episodic structure that would lend itself perfectly to a serialization.'

While many people write novels, most aren't happy to put them online for nothing. Such concerns don't bother Andy. 'I'm very much an advocate of sharing material and the whole ethos behind the Creative Commons license. I have a good career and novel writing isn't the only thing I want to do with my life, so I'm more than happy to give it away. I just hope someone enjoys it as much as I did writing it.'

'I realise that Dickens had a bit of a head start in that the magazines that published his novels in had a pre-existing readership, but with Social Media and web marketing strategies, there are no excuses for not building up a reasonable readership.'

By day Andy works as a Marketing Communications Manager for a FTSE 100 company, but he is also a keen filmmaker and is preparing to shoot a short film with British Comedy Actor, Mark Benton. Andy hopes to use the short as a vehicle to promote a TV show concept he has developed.

The Elementalist will be published in weekly installments at http://theelementalist.co.uk

Part one is online now.

Andy Coughlan publishes a blog at http://andycoughlan.co.uk