My new book, The Mayan Codex, has just come out in the United Kingdom. This is an exciting moment in any author’s life, especially when the book in question is the fulcrum on which a trilogy of books must turn. I am even now writing the third and final instalment of the trilogy, and attempting to tie together all the loose ends I have purposely left hanging in the preceding 1000 pages. 1000 pages? It makes me tired even thinking about it…

Last month, in Frome, Somerset, I was kindly asked by the local Librarian, Wendy Miller-Williams, to give a lecture on Nostradamus’s Greatest Prophecies, under the aegis of the annual Frome Festival. I was a little chary at first, as I don’t normally give talks. But I did my homework, and turned up on the night ready and raring to go. My wife had constructed a Power Point Slide Show for me, so at least the audience would have something to look at other than me. The evening started at 7.30. My enthusiasm rose. I was soon shooting off at all sorts of tangents, stimulated by intelligent questions from the floor.  It was considerably after 9 pm when one lady in the audience politely stood up and said that she really hated to break up the evening, but she did unfortunately have another appointment to go to. I then realised that I had got so carried away with explaining Nostradamus and the Maya to a responsive audience, that I had happily gone nearly 45 minutes over schedule. Normally I never wear a watch, but just for this evening I had borrowed a large-faced watch from my wife specifically to avoid this sort of shenanigan - the only problem was that, not being used to watches at the best of times, I never actually looked at it. Ah well. There have to be some advantages to being a writer, and living according one’s own chaotic schedule…

Perhaps I could pretend to have forgotten to look at my watch when the deadline for my next novel arrives? No. Maybe not.

Writing novels is correctly viewed as a solitary task - which it mostly is. But occasionally one can get a little too close to one’s own work - a little too solipsistic. This recently happened to me. I managed to write myself into a corner in my new novel, and couldn’t quite work out what I had done wrong. But something was wrong. That much was for certain. Usually, I hurry to my desk in the mornings. But recently I had been finding just about any excuse to put off the evil day. What was amiss? Why was playing Scrabble on Facebook taking precedence over writing a novel that, hopefully, hundreds of thousands of people around the world might actually crave reading?

Cue my ‘Reader’. In my case, I have an old friend - a woman - whom I rely on to read my work-in-progress and cut through the bullshit. To tell it how it is. To catch me up when I am at my most elusive, and remind me of who and what I really owe allegiance to - i.e. my readers. It’s extraordinary how blinkered writers can become when they feel solely in charge of a world they imagine, with some justification, that they have created. In the worst case scenario, they become tyrants, convinced of their own righteousness. They bring in totally unsuitable new characters on a whim. They follow meandering little by-ways, vaingloriously losing sight of the main thoroughfare, which could and should be the entertainment of their readers.

I had been guilty of just such a solipsism, and this was why I was having trouble with the new book. I had, as Dante so perfectly encapsulates at the beginning of his Inferno, been suffering from a similar sickness to the author when he writes: ‘In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.’ [trans. John D. Sinclair]. Okay. You may rest assured that I’m not comparing myself to Dante. And I do believe, like Rick in Casablanca, ‘…that the problems of three little people [one little person, in my case] don’t [okay, doesn't] amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.’ But one can’t always rely only on oneself. Dante needed Beatrice. Rick needed Ilsa - and then, when she proved illusory, he needed Captain Renault. I need my Reader. And now my Reader has put me right I need my Writer. And aaargghhh - that’s me!

Welcome to the world of literature….

I was looking out of my kitchen window last night when I saw my cat, the Bede (a.k.a. Beachy Bede, which means Cat Bede in Mexican, the Bede bit being after the Venerable Bede, great English historian, etc.) behaving strangely. First of all he stood up and arched his back. Then he fluffed out his tail. Then he sank back to the ground and sort of squatted there, concentrating all his attention off-stage (i.e. out of my sight, beyond the window extremity). Now, it was pretty obvious even to me that something was up. I watched, transfixed. Suddenly a young fox (definitely this season’s crop) entered right. The fox walked as close to the Bede as he reasonably could without risking an eruption - the Bede, for his part, lay flat against the ground, his gaze fixed on his adversary. “There’s going to be a fight,’ I said to my wife.

But no. The fox edged around, pretending, for all the world, as if a large black feline was not lying three feet away from him, watching his every move. The Bede, too, glanced around a little, as if, well, that’s not really a young fox strolling across the sward in front of me, and I’m just squatting out here as part of my customary evening constitutional. How odd, I thought to myself. Then it hit me. Both predators were affording each other ‘face’ - they were acting as if there were a physical - and not merely notional - Chinese Wall between them. In this way, each could go about his business (despite the inevitable overlap - both having a marked predilection for young rabbits) without needing to trigger an actual conflict, which might injure one or the other, and mess up the hunting to boot. It was sort of like being a neutral observer at the border crossing between North and South Korea - or conducting smuggling operations up and down the Straits of Formosa, and wondering how China and Taiwan had managed, for so long, to keep out of each other’s hair.

And how do they do it? What motivates them? Enlightened self-interest, that’s what. Watching my cat and the fox was a perfect lesson in transnational diplomacy. Just pretend the enemy isn’t there. And then hope and pray that he never catches you with your pants down…..

Like many people, I was caught up in the charivari surrounding the volcanic cloud from Iceland, and found myself inadvertently visiting Boston (which happened to be on my return route from Puerto Rico) for an unexpected, and, conceivably, extended stay. This became an absolute delight.

I’ve always adored serendipity, and this visit was most serendipitous. For a start, our travel company, Silversea, behaved impeccably, putting us up in a grand hotel in Boston (the Fairmont at Battery Wharf), and ensuring that we felt secure at all times, in the certain knowledge that they wouldn’t abandon us to the whims of the Fates. This freed us up to enjoy Boston in all its glory. So, after marvelling at the treasures in the Fine Arts Museum on our first, truncated day, on the second (and in order to avoid the inevitable snarl-ups caused by the Boston Marathon and Patriots’ Day) we hired a car and headed down to Plymouth and Cape Cod, in majestic spring weather. Then, on the third day, we visited Concord, making a particular pilgrimage to the Emerson House, and to the site of Henry Thoreau’s hut at Walden Pond. At night we ate our meals in Hanover Street, at the Daily Catch, say, with a follow-up coffee at the sublime Caffe Vittoria.

Eastern New England was an eye-opener for me, as, until then, I had only really investigated the Western End, around Stockbridge and Lenox. I loved walking the same streets Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, and Emily Dickinson had walked, and seeing where the driving force for US democracy had been born. On our last day we visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, happily coinciding with Children’s Day, and an enormous line up of children and their parents, all intent on visiting one of the world’s most eccentric and eclectic collections. Mrs Gardner had added a codicil to her donative bequest insisting that all little girls called Isabella would be allowed free entry into the museum in perpetuity, and I couldn’t help wondering whether Harvard and Cambridge parents had purposely named their offspring Isabella to save their kids the $12 adult entry fee, as there were untold numbers of Isabellas in the line, all happily grabbing the party bags that had been put aside for them. It was a nice conceit of Mrs Gardner’s, and a nice reminder that not everything has to be homogenized and equalised in this naturally most unequal of worlds. Never give a sucker an even break, to quote W C Fields (in the guise of Otis Criblecoblis)….

We finally got back home via Dublin and Aer Lingus, not a great deal the worse for wear, and having enjoyed a visit to a place, Boston, which, sans the volcano, we may never have contrived for ourselves. Deus gubernat navem (God is the pilot of the ship).

From time to time in one’s life, things happen which have no logical explanation. Such a thing happened to me last Thursday night, whilst I was on my way to Brockenhurst to hear a lecture by a screenwriter friend of mine.

I was approaching the village of Teffont in my car. It was about 6.15 in the evening, and dusk was falling. I was about two hundred yards short of the village when I heard, quite clearly, inside my head, the words “The next thing you encounter on the road will be a danger to you. And if you do not pray, it will be an even greater danger.” I slowed down through Teffont, and prayed inside my head, just as I often do, thanking God for the Grace He has shown to me and to my family, and for all the blessings He has heaped upon my head, and which I have so clearly done nothing whatsoever to deserve. Then all thought of danger disappeared. I was, however, being considerably more cautious than I normally would have been - on a road I have driven on a thousand times - as part of me was assuming that the danger, if any, might come from another car. So I didn’t accelerate up the hill and out of Teffont as per my usual custom, but took it more slowly - more cautiously. This meant that I was doing 40 miles per hour when I came up to the first piece of forest, rather than the 60 miles per hour I might normally have been doing. Then, as I entered the forest, a deer broke out onto the road, maybe twenty yards in front of my car. No danger there. But I immediately sensed that a second deer would be following the first, and that it would inevitably hit my car, so I braked sharply. A second deer did indeed burst out of the undergrowth, missing the front of my car by no more than six inches. The deer slipped onto the ground and then reared up again and ran on, while I sat, conked out, in the middle of the road, ABS lights flashing, and my engine quite dead. Not a scratch on me. Not a dent on the car. And no other vehicles anywhere to be seen. If I had not had the total premonition two minutes before, driving into Teffont, I would, at that moment, have been smashed up at sixty miles an hour on the side of the road, with a deer through my windscreen, with all that that might have entailed.

And it was a TOTAL premonition. Categorical. As if those words I had heard in my head had leached into me in some way. And two minutes, at the most, had elapsed between the premonition and its enactment, with the interim taken up by my prayer. I swear to you on my eternal soul that this is exactly what happened - both timing-wise and fact-wise, I am making nothing up. I’ve never before in my life had such a categorical warning, with such a categorical - and INSTANT - enactment. The mere thought of it fizzed through me for the next hour or so, and I am still having odd flashbacks to the event.

The nearest I can get to a historical perspective occurred with my great grandmother, who was psychic, just as my grandmother and mother were - and just as my grandmother on my father’s side was, but in a more negative fashion, perhaps, as my father always held her to be a witch, having been born in Cornwall, inside the Madron-Marazion-Zennor witches’ triangle. Anyway, my great grandmother on my mother’s side definitely wasn’t a witch, but she was certainly psychic, as, one day, just as she was going to take her entire family, by boat, from Germany to England, she looked down into the pan of her lavatory (I kid you not), and there saw an image of a boat sinking. She immediately cancelled the trip. I don’t suppose it will come as any surprise when I tell you now that the boat that she and her family were meant to travel on sank, during that voyage, with the loss of all hands. There. I told you I would tell you a story with no logical explanation. Both are true. But I’m afraid I can only vouch for one.

From time to time every author has readers’ letters forwarded to them by their publisher These vary alarmingly in content, and I thought it might be amusing to delve a little deeper into  the ‘readers’ letters syndrome’. I had one of the very best sort last week. It came in a sealed envelope, and with a covering letter which began: ‘Will you kindly forward this (polite!) letter to Mario Reading.’ It went on to say - in relation to my recently published The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus, that ‘this is the best edition of the Centuries with interpretation that I have seen by a long way - he has actually solved Nostradamus’s method’. Now, as far as a sweetener goes, this technique definitely wins the Kewpie Doll! I could hardly wait to open the letter. And it didn’t disappoint. The gentleman concerned was obviously deeply read in the prophecies, and was kind enough to say that my book was ‘the book I could say I have been waiting for for fifty years. I think that your publisher and you yourself in the Introduction if anything understate your case. You write of a major breakthrough - in effect you have solved the problem of how to interpret Nostradamus.’ He went on to make a few extremely well-thought out points, and also to make a suggestion regarding one of the Undated quatrains that I shall certainly take into account when and if we bring out an updated edition. This, if you like, is the ideal readers’ letter, and I immediately wrote a handwritten reply to the correspondent concerned.

I’ve also had the other kind, however. These letters can vary alarmingly in content. I had one letter [six pages long] which was allegedly written in English. But I was damned if I could make out a single word of it. When next I saw my publisher, I asked him if he could make head or tail of it. He couldn’t either. All we knew for certain was that there were a number of rather curious (and possibly diabolical) symbols drawn on the torn out frontispiece to the foreign language edition of one of my books. And no return address. For which I was extremely grateful.

And then there are the ones from students who want me to write their exams for them - one or two have been very nice tries. A lot of flattery first, and then the punchline, usually consisting of a list of questions the student concerned would like answered ASAP. And most of the questions are already answered in the book - only they couldn’t actually be bothered to read it themselves, and presumably reckon that, as the writer, I might conceivably know what I am talking about. A likely story. One or two are genuinely affecting, however, and are obviously from High School kids, often in the USA, saying things like ‘This book is meaningful to me in many ways you might predict and interpret from reading my letter… I truly will not disregard or forget about this book.’ Such letters always get a reply from me, as they are written with obvious sincerity, and a clear desire by the correspondent to reach out and connect with the writer. This is very precious.

Then there are the letters telling me that if I get in touch with the correspondent, I might learn something to my advantage. These are nearly always elliptical, and presumably are meant to act in roughly the same way as chain letters used to - or those e-mail forwardings that warn you that unless you send on the e-mail concerned to a certain number of friends within, say, three days, you will be doomed. These I don’t answer. And neither do I answer the ones where the correspondent wants me to publish, under my name, the upshot of their research into my subject. I mean really….

The strangest one I ever received was ‘From the Spirit World, with love’. This was a genuine first for me, and the letter concerned was beautifully handwritten on seven sides of foolscap, and purported to be written by my guardian angel. It was actually a very sweet letter (if slightly prescriptive), and I certainly took it in the spirit in which it was clearly intended - i.e. friendly, if rather odd. This one again didn’t have a return address, and I somehow feel, in the case of such letters, that the correspondent does not actually want a reply - the actually writing of the letter is enough for them. They are reaching out in some way, and this is probably the real purpose of the communication.

And lastly there are the Amazon critiques, which act in the same way as letters, you might say, in that the reader/writer presumably expects that the author concerned will read the critique one day, without, needless to say, either obtaining or deserving the right of reply. These are, for the most part, benevolent. Most rational people will feel that it is only worth putting pen to paper when you particularly like something - and thereby wish to share it with others. But then there are the naysayers, too. The ones who feel empowered by their ability to criticise something without actually having to identify themselves. Although in the clear minority, I’ve encountered a number of these. Some are, oddly, competing authors who appear to believe that by trashing a competitor’s book online, suitably forewarned readers will smoothly move on to their own, competing title. Amazon is very quick to excise these, just so long as one is able to prove, to everybody’s satisfaction, the source of the slander. Others are harder to fathom, and seem to be genuinely malicious. It’s unsettling to imagine a tontine of disgruntled readers sharpening their virtual quills and then darting in, like Barracuda, to exsanguinate whichever unsuspecting writer they have chosen as their victim that day. I mean, why bother? Haven’t such people heard of Karma? That by fomenting good thoughts, a greater good is done?

Well. Maybe not. Either way, it’s a strange world out there. As for me, I’ll take the rough with smooth - simply because the smooth, as is the way of things, eventually benefits everybody, whereas the rough only inspires callosity.

I finished writing the second novel in my Nostradamus trilogy two months or so ago. It will be published in the UK by Corvus (a new imprint of my regular publisher, Atlantic – Corvus, in Latin, means a raven) in August 2010, under the title The Mayan Codex. Over the Christmas and the New Year period I have been completing two other books for Watkins (my non-fiction publisher), one of which is illustrated, one not. Now I am winding up to starting the third and final part of my fiction trilogy, and it occurred to me in the run-up to actual lift-off (and somewhat belatedly, you might say), that the process of writing fiction and non-fiction is so fundamentally different that they may as well stem from entirely different constellations in the mental mindset.

Non-fiction is a largely intellectual exercise. You work things out – set yourself problems – happen upon clever wrinkles that give added value to the book – allow research to lead to further research – pursue right brain serendipity with the enthusiasm of a catechumen. And all the time you are adding and adding to an existing snow-pile of material which you know, through long experience, will eventually satisfy most, if not all, of your contracting parties.

Fiction is another matter entirely. You get an idea. Then another idea. You flesh out a character or two. Then a character you didn’t rate at all, and meant to spend little, if no time on, muscles his/her way into your plot and threatens to hijack all your carefully laid plans. You are perpetually being hoist, in other words, with your own petard. The novel, and its meanderings, is never far from your thoughts. Every single thing you experience while writing it is potential grist to the novelistic mill. You open your mouth like a basking shark, filtering plankton, and only really close it when the novel is done and dusted and perched on a shelf marked with your name. It lives in the mind of its creator, in other words, like no non-fiction book ever can. It becomes a part of you. And when its parturition is over, it still reverberates with a strange sort of afterlife, forcing you, every now and then, to revisit it and check if its okay.

That’s why I hate starting work on new novels – and why I love writing them.

It’s odd how these things go. Many years ago, in France, when I unexpectedly survived a three-month terminal diagnosis for cancer, I started thinking about why I had been saved. Better people than me had died - I’m thinking in particular of a chemotherapy-ravaged little girl with leukaemia who used to tour all the wards in the morning with the hospital cleaners and visit us old crocks (I was 39 going on 80, so I qualified). She used to delight us with her antics and high jinks, and those of us pretty much unable to leave our beds - we were either too weak, too much in pain, or too beaten down by the drugs they were attempting to cure us with - used to look forward to her visits unconscionably. She was one of us, you see - one of the chosen - although, in an ideal world, she shouldn’t have been. She should have been out playing with her school friends, or making plans for the holidays, or thinking of ways to change the world for the better. Even then I didn’t figure myself for anything special (still don’t), so there had to be another reason why God had spared me and not her. Maybe I wasn’t really needed where He was? Or maybe He had other plans?

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about it again recently (I’ve been ill, on and off, for nearly 22 years now, which concentrates the mind wonderfully - two cancers, a heart attack due to chemotherapy damage, septicaemia, what have you) and I’ve decided that the only reason God bothers to save anyone is so that they can serve Him. Call me stupid, but it took me quite a while to work this out. The others - the fallen ones - He takes to His bosom, and those of us left behind have to work our way somehow in this world and pay what we owe. How we do it is between us and God. But do it we must, because otherwise we are betraying all those who have gone before.

All right. I may be sounding a little fey here, but listen up. During the course of my life I have saved four people from drowning - not because I am any great hero (I’m not), but because I’m strong (God again), and I have been in the right place at the right time (usually showing off, or doing something equally stupid). I’ve also saved one man from being shot outside a night club in Paris, and two people from choking via the Heimlich Manoeuvre - the last of which occurred just two days ago. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to think that there may be some sort of pattern emerging here.

The most haunting thing of all occurred last summer, when I was visiting friends in Holland. We were at the Zuidersee Museum (the Inland Sea Museum), and I suddenly saw my name (Redding - an alternative spelling - same name) above a wooden boathouse. “Why’s that there?” I asked. “Oh, it means ’saving’ in Dutch. It’s the Royal Dutch Lifesaving Society. KNRM.”

It’s silly, I know, but I suddenly felt as if someone had laid a hand on my shoulder and pushed me out into a circus ring as some sort of involuntary volunteer. And yes. I’m compensating. It’s clear, isn’t it? For years I’d blocked all thoughts of the little girl, because I’d wanted to save her and couldn’t. I even used to get nightmares about it - of pulling young girls out of the mud, or from bogs, or from the sea (and yes, you’re right, I may have been trying to reclaim my anima too). Frankly, if you’d asked me at the time, I would happily have given my life instead of hers. Again, not bravery, but simply logic. I’d had a fair run. Wasted most of it. Made my peace. I was actually happy to go. But it wasn’t my time. That will come - sooner, probably, rather than later, but that’s as things are. We can’t kick against the pricks. But in the meanwhile I shall try my best to live up to the name I have inadvertently been given, by writing and saving. Because it’s clear to me - and it gets clearer every year I live - that we’re here for a purpose. There’s no such thing as free will. Best live with that, and not fret.

I woke up this Christmas morning dreaming of a 100 lb salmon. It wasn’t actually me who encountered the fish, but someone else. This man told me that he had encountered a true 100lb salmon, and had then lost it. He had a number of blurred photographs showing what appeared to be a humungous fish, nearly the size of a small shark. By a clever sleight of the unconscious, I then transferred this story onto me, and the next thing I knew, I was playing this enormous fish, and shouting to my friend, Michael Mann, that he must take a photograph of it when next it leaped. Thus go wish fulfilment fantasies. I had a lovely time fantasising about playing the fish, but didn’t actually have the metaphorical balls to land it. It wasn’t really my fish for a start, bearing in mind that I had seconded it from another - okay, let’s face it - aspect of myself. One might probably call this the ‘wannabe’ aspect.

I did once catch a 47 lb salmon on the Lochy, whilst conducting out-of-season broodstock fishing for the hatchery. The fish took me nearly an hour to get into the net, an event both witnessed and aided by fellow fisherman Humphrey Stone, who had the good sense and presence of mind to insist we measure the fish three times. So I do know what it feels like to have a mammoth fish on the end of one’s line, and then let it go. Being a sometime writer about dreams [The Watkins Dictionary of Dreams 2007], it also occurred to me that something must have triggered the dream. Then I remembered that at Christmas Eve dinner at Michael Mann’s house, I had briefly seen a book about super-large salmon - thus both his and the salmon’s appearance in my dream.

Fish, in dreams, also tend to have mystical connotations, and Michael and I had had a discussion, that same evening, about Ramesh Balsekar’s book, Enlightened States, and we had also read a number of poems to the room-at-large, which included Eliot’s Four Quartets and The Magi, Edward Thomas’s Roads, and Rumi’s quite extraordinary poem which starts ‘What can be done, O Believers, as I do not recognise myself…’. Add to that a visit to Midnight Mass in Tisbury Church, and it’s hardly surprising that my dream thoughts had veered towards the mystical. What was wonderful about Rumi’s poem was that it so perfectly echoed the way I feel about God. Namely that all dogmas are misleading - all theology flawed - all religions expedient. God, as Rumi says in another of his poems, is only in the heart ['Finally, I looked into my own heart and there I saw Him; He was nowhere else.']. This tallies perfectly with my own religious convictions, that may be summed up in four simple words: ‘There is only God’. All the paraphernalia and brouhaha of organised religion seems to me a perfect way of distancing oneself from God. The Midnight Mass service was all very well, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. But God is found in the heart and nowhere else. One doesn’t need church services to conjure him up. One simply needs to love and thank him. And my great fish, of course, was God.