User:Gerard J Roffey

Gerard James Roffey (born 1954) is an Australian writer. For 32 years he was an IT professional then owned his own Mortgage Brokering business. He became a bus driver in 2018, and retired in late 2020.

Career
Gerard Roffey was born in Sydney, Australia in April 1954, growing up in picturesque Woronora. Gerard was educated at St Patrick's College, Sutherland.

During the early 1970's, Gerard worked in the IT department of an Australian commercial bank. He travelled to New Zealand in 1975, where during that time he worked at two companies in their IT departments. In 1980 he moved to Melbourne, Australia. He later joined an IT professional services company rising to General Manager Professional Services, which he left in 1999 to pursue an IT contracting career until 2002 when he diversified as a sales representative for a local real estate agent for a year. In 2003 he again diversified his career into being a mortgage broker, starting his own company in 2008. He ceased mortgage brokering in February 2020, but before this time he became a bus driver, finally retiring in late 2020.

Personal life
He has been married for over 35 years to his wife Deborah. They have two sons, Carl and Dean. They live in Melbourne.

In 1998, Gerard started what was then the internet's first online review site for Australian caravan parks.

Since 2021, Gerard and Deborah have been touring Australia in their motorhome.

Becoming a writer of fiction novels
Gerard's first foray into fiction writing began in 1994 when his children were very young; Carl was around 2 years old and Dean was still a baby. Even though his first novel, A Timeless Adventure, was started in 1994, written on a lowly AMD 486-DX33 Personal Computer running Windows 3.1 with a "whopping" 174 MB disk drive, it wasn't finished - polished, edited, and proofread - until 2014. Even then, it was amended here and there, whilst he wrote the succeeding two novels for it to become the Tilbert trilogy.

Even then, the three novels were not published until after the mammoth 984-page Where On Earth was completed.

Initially, he decided to only provide eBooks through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. The three Tilbert novels, plus Where On Earth, were published in 2015. Also during 2015, he published a further 9 works: a stand-alone novel and a novella; the four-novella Marvin series; and 4 short stories. Apart from the Marvin series, which were wholly written in 2015, the other works had been undertaken during 2014. By the end of 2015, the Tilbert trilogy and Where On Earth were released as paperbacks.

2016 saw two additions to the Tilbert series, with The Beginning and The Author's Notes & References. The The Author's Notes & References explains how the Tilbert series was written, and also details every character throughout the series and every peculiarity and place within the series. Such things as buildings and military uniforms are minutely detailed, as well as the historical background of the story's time period.

2016 also saw the release of a stand-alone novella, plus the Bossley series of novellas, which follow on from the 2015 release of The Centurian Courier.

2017 was the year Gerard released his first children's story in the form of a novella. A fantasy novel was next where the story uniquely spans two millennia. To wrap-up the final half of that year, two fantasy novels were released, both based on a fictional Micronesian island - the first is a murder thriller, and the second is a romance novel involving characters from the first novel.

2018 saw a hiatus in Gerard's writing while he concentrated on improving the already published works. Only one new work was published that year.

2019 and 2020 was another hiatus in new works while further enhancements to certain novels was undertaken. At the end of 2019, a novel that follows on from the Bossley series was released.

In 2021, the Marvin novellas were combined into one novel, cleverly called Marvin, The Novel.

2022 saw two stand-alone short stories added to Three Short Stories and that book's name amended to Short Stories. Also, another Marvin novella was produced, as well as a novel about Marvin's son.

2023 saw him enhance all four Marvin novellas, plus add a References section to the combined Marvin novel.

List of short stories, novellas, and novels
All available as eBooks. (PB) denotes also available in paperback. Page Count is based on a 5" x 8" paperback.