Subliminal photo taken after reading The Humans by @matthaig1

I was staring out of the window towards the emerging daylight. I could see a trace across the sky, probably a plane inbound to Heathrow. The moon lurked below the tree-line and some kind of satellite was twinkling towards me. Kind of "that's all you'll get with this amount of street lighting around".

I took a picture anyway, and then later I noted a similarity with the cover of a book I've just been reading. Just finished actually. The Humans, by Matt Haig.

It's an enjoyable and humorously written narrative about a killer alien sent to earth to tidy up some loose ends associated with recent prime number theory discoveries. They are the sort of discoveries that could give the earth extra powers.

If it sounds too much like a Doctor Who and the Daleks plotline, it is much more a story of alienation and then the discovery of love.

Our narrator, who assumes we are also from another world, gives us his perceptions of the strange planet earth, whilst he matter-of-factly goes about his amoral mission to remove the solution of the Riemann Hypothesis. He's been made into a surrogate of a Cambridge Professor - the one who'd originally solved the Riemann Hypothesis. If you are wondering, Riemann came up with the zeta function for predicting the incidence of primes in a defined integer number space. Something we all need, apparently.

As well as the moon and stars, the book's cover has a picture of a dog and a squirrel. If the math above sounds like dog-speak, the story still works with many discoveries relayed to the reader as simple observations:

An early one:

“I picked up these books and realised they both said ‘£8.99’ on the back. The interpolation of the entire language I had done with the aid of Cosmopolitan meant I knew this was the price of the books, but I did not have any money. So I waited until no one was looking (a long time) and then I ran very fast out of the shop."

A little later:

“Humans, I was discovering, believed they were in control of their own lives, and so they were in awe of questions and tests, as these made them feel like they had a certain mastery over other people, who had failed in their choices, and who had not worked hard enough on the right answers.”

Of course, things develop as our narrator becomes fascinated with the human condition - no more or I'll start to spoil it.

And I'm still wondering how the cover art became something I emulated in a photograph the next day, without realising the connection?

authorised triangular post

It's still technically 'pre-publication' but I received a consignment of promo copies of "The Triangle" yesterday.

It was actually quite unexpected. I was working at home, the postman had come and gone and about five minutes later there was a loud knock on the door. The delivery driver was already unloading boxes and I wondered what I had mistakenly ordered.

A moment later, I realised that the three large boxes and a smaller one dumped in the hallway were early copies of the novel.

Now what?

Its another month or more before the book gets to any catalogues and I believe the first public appearance is actually at the Miami International Book Fair in Florida.

I've been contacted by the marketing representative, but am thinking that I'd prefer to exploit some sort of guerilla approach to getting the book known about. I'm also still realistic, that this is mainly a bit of fun, but its worth seeing what happens as the next stage plays out.

I'll progressively contact some of my blogging accomplices and amusingly a couple are modifying their twitter icons to add a triangle to the corner.

In the meantime, if you are one of the bloggerati and would like a complementary preview copy, comment me/ email me and we'll see what can be arranged!