The Shakespeare Folio
This was my first novel. It was published through Insomniac Press in 2017 both in physical and ebook formats.
“Dangerous characters, razor-sharp humour, machine-gun dialogue, and suspense rolled into a dark little package, a 400 year old package — this is The Shakespeare Folio. Frank hates his job. He needs more excitement, more action and more money. He puts together a gang of like minded men with criminal skills and hard edges to steal one of the most valuable books ever written. Reminiscent of Elmore Leonard”s noir classics, The Shakespeare Folio, resides at the intersection of hard-boiled suspense and literary history.”
This inspiration for this novel came when, during my time at York University in Toronto, I visited the Thomas Fisher Rare Books library in downtown Toronto. While there, I was able to see a number of rare books including first editions and an original Shakespeare Folio. The head librarian said that when it was last auctioned, it had fetched a price tag of six million dollars. To me, a student working part time, I figured, well, how hard would it be to steal this thing? It’s a library. This was the genesis. I had worked construction previously, and figured if some fellas fell on hard times, maybe they could devise a plan to steal something like this Folio. I wrote the story over a couple years, with a lot of downtime in between writing sessions. But it was finally done, and through one of my Professors who was heading up Insomniac Press, I got it published.
https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/the-shakespeare-folio/9781554831890-item.html
Cottage Country: A Haiku Collection
This small collection of haiku poems was my first attempt at self publishing. I wrote 34 haiku, all with matching photographs I took and using Amazon’s self-publishing service put together this little collection. I designed the pages, layout and cover myself and published physical and Kindle versions.
Inspiration: In September of 2021, I went on a week-long trip up in North Eastern Ontario to a cottage with a group of friends. I had just finished playing through the video game Ghost of Tsushima, in which there were mini-games where you wrote haiku. That experience fresh in my mind, I sat and looked over the lake, trees, sky and all my surroundings, finding nature scenes that inspired me to write. I took pictures of the scene, wrote the haiku, and in a simple photo editing app, overlaid the haiku on the picture. Several months later I decided to make it into a book. I used InDesign to design the pages and put it through the Amazon self-publishing program.
Video Game List Author For CBR.com
In April of 2022 I began freelance writing list articles for the video game section of CBR.com. I both pitch ideas and select from a pre-approved list and then do the necessary research and write the article. I use the Emaki website to write, format and submit my articles. I find images online and create some that are used in the articles as well.
Below is a link to my author page which shows all my published articles
Chris Eyles 