I thought I'd write an introduction for my currently serialised piece.

First of all, it's very different to anything else I've written, which tend to be surreal, very personal stories based on my own life experiences. I'll start posting those after I get done with this one. As you can probably guess, this one has very little to do with my life experiences! Unless you count being glued to the telly-box everytime a Bond film came on during my childhood...

For King & Country started out as a commission for a friend who was publishing tranny pornographic fiction books back in the 90's. He wanted a spy thriller in the mould of the Pierce Brosnan James Bond films. Hi tech, action packed, with superficially dramatic characterisation.

i sketched out a story outline and wrote the first chapter (which you might have just finished reading) and most of the second chapter, but he went out of business so the book was never completed. In the initial version, Jane was called "Fiona" and all the direct Bond references had been removed and replaced with fairly unsubtle copies. So 'M' was called "C", Q Branch was the "Special Projects Division", Bond was Jack Blunt, Agent C7 etc etc. It was originally called "On His Majesty's Secret Service".

The main setting and intended resolution were also very different — the story being set in a mafia and terrorist ridden former Soviet Republic (much like the movie Goldeneye) rather than a futuristic and decaying Japan.

I came to rewrite and complete the story in 2000 as I felt it needed finishing, and published it on my own website (now defunct). At this point, I relocated it to Japan (I'm Japanese) and restored the proper Bond Universe nomenclature as well as renaming Fiona Michaels as Jane Masters, which just seemed more of a "female Bond" name. When I pulled down that version of my site and replaced it with my weblog in 2004, the story didn't really fit into the more serious writing I was doing there so it lay unseen for a while, then appeared last year on Fictionmania with minor rewrites and now here, again, with minor tweaks.

I don't claim to know anything about the espionage community or how the military operates. So apologies if my lack of research shows as it often does. Also, the Bond world I depict isn't directly drawn from either the books or the films, many of which I love very much. It's more of an amalgam in my head of my retained impressions of those slightly different universes.

At about 43000 worlds, it's a slim novel and it has many flaws, but I'm pleased with it on the whole. It's unashamedly written as a pornographic diversion. It gets pretty explicit later on, and I will flag those chapters accordingly.

For a while espionage media seemed to fade out of fashion, but now we're in a bit of a golden age again, with the fantastic Bourne movies, Spooks on the BBC and of course, the superb reboot of the old franchise itself with Casino Royale.

I'd also urge fans of the genre to go and check out the excellent old BBC serials "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" and "Smiley's People", based on the John Le Carré novels and starring the marvellous Alec Guinness. Also highly recommended is Greg Rucka's series of graphic novels called "Queen & Country" after which this story was homagefully renamed.