About the author
Derek Bellerose
Stories that stay with you.
A little about Derek.
Derek, known as DJ by his friends, was born and raised in the U.S., specifically Springfield, Massachusetts. At 12 years old, his family moved to Orlando, Florida, and he spent the next 18 years there. At 30, he met his husband on vacation in Miami, and three short months later he left Orlando to live the city life in Atlanta, Georgia. There, alongside a career in finance, he pursued his passion for photography.
Fast forward another 15 years and he traded the American South for a canal-side apartment in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, where he currently resides with his husband JR and their pup, Rhett. Moving abroad gave him the time to sit down and write his first novel, Aethera: Shadow, Fire, and Thread, which follows a photographer who steps through a tear in reality and discovers she can see the threads that bind everything together.
Before the fiction, there was the camera. Through his travel photography and YouTube vlogs, The Wander Guys, Derek spent years learning how a single frame can hold an entire feeling, and that eye for light and place runs straight through his writing, where the world itself is as alive as the people moving through it.
He is also an entrepreneur to the bone. Under the banner of Belle Media he runs a portfolio of creative businesses that keeps his passport full, and he writes honestly about the messy reality of building a location-independent life in his newsletter, The Freelance Empire.
When he isn't writing or plotting his next venture, you'll find him wandering Amsterdam in search of good coffee and better light, usually being thoroughly bossed around by Rhett.
Discover Aethera