17 May 2014

Sorry, Site

It's been a source of increasing bother to me that my website, conforming as it does to the design I cobbled together in about an hour and a half in 2004, now looks distinctly dated, as if designed by characters from Neuromancer. Given that I have the first volume of a smart professional new trilogy due out soon, this issue needed resolution... but with over 200 pages at www.infinitarian.com, there clearly wasn't any likelihood that I'd manage to redesign them all, or shunt them to a platform where redesign was easier, any time soon.

Today I unveil my solution, proudly cobbled together in an hour and a half yesterday afternoon: the Devices Trilogy microsite at WordPress, dedicated solely to the new novels, with character sketches, some notes on heraldry and two entirely separate bibliographies. There's also a dedicated blog, which does raise the question of whether I continue blogging here. In the short term the answer's yes, at least about non-Devices stuff, but the jury's out on that one in the long term. I may, indeed, migrate all the content from the www.infinitarian.com site to WordPress, bit by bit.

Remember, Tales of the Great Detectives and Iris Wildthyme of Mars are also due out in the coming months. In the meantime, please feel free to read, comment on and share the new site to your hearts' content.

04 May 2014

Enter the Pendragon

It's a year to the day since I submitted my urban-fantasy thriller The Pendragon Protocol to Snowbooks. Today we finalised the cover design:


The image was created by the outrageously talented Emma Barnes, and I love it to pieces. The way it balances thriller and fantasy, modernity and antiquity is wonderful, and the endorsement from Simon Morden is the icing on the cake.  

Here's the blurb again:

The Circle are the modern-day successors of the Knights of the Round Table. Armed with the latest military hardware and operating from a hidden fortress on the South Bank of the Thames, they protect 21st-century Britain from certain very specific threats – criminals who, like the Circle’s own Knights, have characters from Arthurian legend living inside their heads.

Jory Taylor, the Knight bearing the device of Sir Gawain, has grappled on the Circle’s behalf with mercenaries, serial killers and far-right terrorist cells. However, when he is captured by Gawain’s traditional enemy the Green Knight, he discovers a new side to the myths he lives by – one which, as he learns more about this clandestine world, becomes both threateningly personal and terrifyingly political.

The legends of King Arthur are not the only stories with influence on the British psyche – and some of the others have their own, very different agendas.

A smart, contemporary political thriller and a new kind of urban fantasy, The Pendragon Protocol is the first volume in The Devices Trilogy.

The Pendragon Protocol is out on 1 July from Snowbooks. I'll post ordering details at some point over the next few weeks.