King And King To Be

Introducing my new baby - my first novel, a fantasy: King And King To Be. It has published today on Amazon for the Kindle and other eReaders.

I wrote this mainly during the 1980s and then it got put aside when I got immersed in computers and learned a new career which has taken me to where I am now.

The book took on the role of "retirement project" but with the advent of ebooks and the ease of self-publishing now I've taken it up again over the past few months and edited and proofed and edited again several times until I'm struggling to find the mistakes that are probably still in there!

The product description reads:

Britain in the Dark Ages. But a Britain that has been forgotten by history. A Britain where elves, fairies and goblins still reside, feared and mistrusted by Men.

As a dark force threatens to conquer the kingdoms of Men they turn to the elves and a wizard for help. Together they seek for the one person who could save the Britain of the sixth century. A man called Arthur. A man who was born and lives in the twentieth century...

A startling first novel by J D Burke combines fantasy with half-familiar legend and a hero who struggles to accept the fate that he once thought was either a story or that belonged to someone else.

A huge thank you goes to my cousin, graphic artist, Catherine Metcalfe, for the fabulous cover. The brief I gave her was "Stonehenge, a sword and some idea of magic"... I cannot fault her interpretation.

To all those who read it years ago and gave me encouragement, a thousand thanks.

To anyone who goes out and buys it (including those who rushed out today on the first day) a thousand more thanks.

Large version of the cover: at Amazon of course! Oh and Flickr also!

Links to buy the book at: amazon.co.uk or amazon.com

Book Publishing

Just to bring you up to date on a couple of projects.

I'm currently involved in putting together a book about Blackpool. Commissioned by a publishing company it will be a collection of old postcards with modern views taken from as near the same viewpoint as I can get.

There are several old postcard views of Blackpool on the pages of this blog but these will be ones that I haven't published before and hopefully a good many may not have been seen since they were sent through the post some hundred years ago!

There's no end of old postcards available of Blackpool two of which are shown below. These will not be in the book...

I love these old photos with a certain amount of artistic licence! This is a daylight shot as can be easily seen from the shadows of the railings etc. The festoons of lights on the upper Promenade are if in scale, around the size of footballs...

But here's the same photo with a bit more paint...

There just weren't enough light bulbs on that other one so the company artist has added a few more strings, some flag poles to dangle them from and for good measure a string of them around the grassed area where in reality they would have been broken within ten minutes or so...! I'm indebted to Chris Wynne of Shrewsbury for the kind loan of many postcards from his collection.

The book will contain around 90 photographs in 45 pairs and will probably be published somewhere in time for Christmas. Keep looking in for more news.

The other project is another book - this time a novel. I wrote this in the late 70s and early 80s but had put it on the back burner to be something of a retirement project.

However with ebooks bringing publishing within reach of everyone I've dusted it off and tightened up a few bits. The book is a fantasy take on the King Arthur and Merlin legends, the older of which contain much by way of elves and enchantments and lots to get the teeth into! Arthur in this book is a little removed from most people's idea of who Arthur was or may have been! It will be called King and King To Be.

I'm currrently waiting for cover art to be completed and then it will make an appearance, at first, for the Kindle and then hopefully... who knows?

As there have been a few literary John Burke authors - one writes history titles and another wrote film and TV scripts and adaptations amongst other genres, I shall have to adopt pen names. Non-fiction under the name John D. Burke and fiction as J.D. Burke.

Wish me luck!