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Friday 8 April 2016

I'm looking for a literary agent or, better still, a publisher!



                                                                                   



NOVEL IN PREPARATION: The Grand Oligarchs of Qinsatorix
Author: Thomas Hoskyns Leonard      Literary Assistant: Stephen Maver
In collaboration with members of the Edinburgh All Comers Writers Club
Genre: Political satire/Science Fiction
Proposed readership: Intellectually minded adults of a humorous disposition
Projected length: 80,000 words
Projected completion date: 1st November 2016
Please contact me for sample chapters on

E-mail: leonardthomas70@googlemail.com

                                                                   



EXCERPT


                              CHAPTER 1: THE FISH ROT FROM THE TOP DOWN

      I, the Nameless Ghost, have recently started writing a dead serious scholarly treatise which recounts a mind shattering saga of yore. While I am no longer of religious persuasion, I am living, in Anno Domini 2523, in comfortable penury with Saint Zebedee Seagull and his barking cat Apocalypse on my rocky early retirement islet in the Sea of the Marmalade Dogs in Central Europe.   My story begins over a century ago in Trystonia, the main landmass on our sister planet Qinsatorix:

The sixteen-year old Prince Adam of Eden stuck another pin into his dead sea trout.
      I must have missed the plot, he mused. Please tell me, unholy Messiah! What is the plot of my miserable life? And why are the reeking fish still swirling around my head?
      Adam, the Prince Infanta, was the splutteringly handsome, Anglo-Icarian younger son of the King Emperor and Queen Empress of Qinsatorix, a planet in the Aton star system. While intensive simulations on the Gatarmass pseudo-random number generator indicate that this planet is in some parallel universe in another dimension, the location in hyperspace of this universe relative to ours is still unclear to astrologers and astrophysicists on Planet Earth. Indeed, the pilots of European mega-ships travelling from Earth through the Shepherd of Orion black hole remain totally confused (after they've negotiated the Black Hole of the Thinking Sphinx at the far end of the Wittgenstein wormhole) until they are beamed in by the Star Nav invigilators on Qinsatorix.
      During the last two hundred thousand years or so, numerous Icarians have space-warped to Earth and back, without the benefit of mega-ships, by transposing via the Mankowitz-Teller waves. During their trips to Planet Earth, the Icarians gleaned and utilised a huge amount of knowledge, captured thousands of well-educated humans, and space-warped them back to Qinsatorix.
      The various transpositions and mega-ship voyages over the ages between Qinsatorix and Planet Earth were only made possible by the trifestium metal lining of the Wittgenstein wormhole, which was, according to legend, installed at the behest of the mighty Aleph Two. This gravity-resistant layer significantly reduces the mass of people or mega-ships travelling through the wormhole at velocities exceeding the speed of light.

During the month of Julius of Anno Domini 2418 the Inner and Outer Moons of Qinsatorix rotated in 'opposing confluence' on opposite sides of the planet. During this period, the golden-skinned Prince Infanta behaved even more childishly than usual, for example by ruffling his curly ginger hair extremely compulsively, repeatedly sniffing under his right armpit, and tickling his obloid much more frequently than was considered courteous among the aristocracy.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Thomas Hoskyns Leonard (the Bayesian statistician Tom Leonard) is a well-published retired Professor of Statistics who has taught at the Universities of Warwick, Wisconsin-Madison and Edinburgh and is best known for his treatise A Personal History of Bayesian Statistics, which was named John Wiley's hot article of the week during February 2014, and for Bayesian Methods, An Analysis for Statisticians and Interdisciplinary Researchers (with John Hsu, Cambridge University Press, 1999), one of his two advanced text books. In April 2014, Statslife, an online publication of the Royal Statistical Society, published an illustrated version of his invited talk to the Society about Bayesian history, and John Wiley published an interview with him subtitled The Life of a Bayesian Boy in Statistics Views during May 2014.
      In 2012 and 2013, Dr. Leonard self-published two novels on his website, entitled Grand Schemes on Qinsatorix and In the Shadows of Calton Hill. As a co-founder with the Scottish poets Scott Forster and James L.S. Carter of the Edinburgh All-Comers Writers Club, he has , since 2011, composed about eighty poems and written a collection of short stories, as well as encouraging a number of successful writers and poets. He enjoys performance poetry, and sometimes reads his poems to the Blind Poetics group in Edinburgh
      Dr. Leonard is also a public health campaigner, and the administrator of the Facebook group Mental Health Discussions Edinburgh which boasts over 1000 members worldwide. His blog averages over 14000 views a month, and addresses many diverse topics and issues. These include treatments for mental health conditions, social issues, Statistics, Eugenics, Psychiatry, mind control and MK Ultra, the oligarchs who may or may not rule the world, science fiction, poetry, literature, flash fiction, spirituality, chess, history, politics, Scottish crime, and Scottish places of interest. Dr. Leonard averages over 1500 games of international blitz chess a year on Chess.com, and actively debates social, political and spiritual issues as part of an advocacy group in his church.





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