Woke up this morning dreaming of a dog I’d once owned twenty years ago. She looked beautiful and in her prime, and I was very pleased indeed to see her again. Which I can’t say for a blog I wrote last week recounting the theft of my wife’s handbag in Amsterdam, together with its miraculous return [we found it in a rubbish bin in the local park, four hours later, on our way to the British Consulate to get a temporary passport – everything intact bar the money and the mobile phone]. The blog took me two hours to write, and then it disappeared into the ether somewhere, never to be found again. Serves me right for not preparing it first on Word [which I’m doing with this one – forewarned is forearmed]. I now realise that I have just told the whole story in about thirty words and five minutes, so there must be a lesson in there somewhere.

We’re now on 28 foreign rights sales for The Nostradamus Prophecies, with Denmark, Indonesia, and Catalonia coming on board. I’m particularly pleased about Catalonia, because I have many friends in Mallorca, and at least this way I’ll be able to find out if the translation is up to scratch. Atlantic are also arranging for me to do an author video for the British launch, which should be fun. Look out, too, for a poster campaign in a bunch of London and South-Eastern railway stations in the last two weeks in July – I’m secretly hoping I can snaffle one for my literary archive [although not from the stations, of course – talk about shooting yourself in the foot].

All in all I’m rather looking forward to July and August, therefore, especially if this wonderful weather continues. Why is it that the British complain when it’s too cold, and then complain when it warms up to 30˚, which is about the temperature of an average day in the Lot in May/June? It’s been touching 46˚ in India recently. Now that’s hot. The sort of heat in which you have to walk along with your hand in front of your face to stop your eyeballs frying.

Two more countries to add to the burgeoning foreign rights list for The Nostradamus Prophecies - China and the Ukraine. This takes us to 22 so far. My agent, Oli Munson, obviously has the bit between his teeth! I admit to feeling just a little bewildered. My editor at Atlantic, Ravi Mirchandani, wrote to me the other day saying that WH Smith Travel [they run all the WH Smith airport and railway station bookshops] have designated my novel as their ‘Read of the Week’ for the last week in July [which just happens to coincide with one of the busiest weeks of the holiday season]. He mentioned in his letter that I might reasonably take this as ‘good news’. Something of an understatement, I felt! To know that thousands of busy commuters and holiday makers will magically have access to my new book via the WH Smith travel outlets is exciting beyond measure. I can already imagine myself lurking around Waterloo Station praying that someone will actually buy the book while I am watching - or maybe see someone on the underground, or on a train, reading it [I have yet to taste of such an experience]. All the more important, then, that I get on and finish my follow-up to The Nostradamus Prophecies, which is taking its final shape as we speak. I have all my characters in place for a grand denouement - now all I have to do is pull off the denouement. Phew. I’m feeling weary just thinking about it…. Writing anything is hard graft - and writing the follow-up to what might very well prove to be a runaway success [fingers firmly crossed here, and resolutely no painting of devils on walls] is harder graft still. Novelists set up expectations at their peril. Readers expect results, not to mention instant gratification. And novelists have to provide that instant gratification, and even surpass it, or face going under. Sometimes I look back with nostalgia on my non-fiction days, when most of the novels I churned out came winging their way back in the post, complete with rejection slip, and I was forced either to write non-fiction or face starvation. I now have the inestimable privilege of choice, and I am truly grateful for it, and to all those readers, editors and publishers who have accorded it to me.

I’m happy to report that Portugal has just checked in as our twentieth foreign rights market for The Nostradamus Prophecies. To say I’m over the moon would be under-egging the pudding - I’m freaking delighted, as our American cousins have now taken to saying when they want to suggest a swear word without actually mouthing off on it. It’s a little like drinking cha [okay, tea] out of an empty cup - something I remember from James Clavell’s Shogun, and a stunt which I have been trying to achieve, without notable success, for the past twenty years. Teabags are so much more convenient (if marginally less spiritual).

Went To Holland to see friends last week, and ended up in Cologne, as one does, marvelling at how the Cathedral survived the wartime bombing while everything else around it was pounded into dust. Snuck into the local Mayersche bookshop to see if they had any German copies of my novel, Die 52, still on their shelves. They did. Lots. Treated myself to a very large pretzel on the back of that little discovery, rather spoiling my appetite for lunch.

If the truth be told, I am still reeling from Atlantic’s decision to go big on my novel this summer. It’s a dream come true, really, and I’d be truly delighted if any struggling writers out there took even a little heart from the fact that someone who was himself a struggling writer for something upwards of twenty years - until his first novel’s publication in 2001 - finally seems to have made it into the, if not the big time, then at least some sort of time.

Last Thursday I was kindly invited to a Village Writers’ supper in Brockenhurst, in the New Forest, by the gathering’s unofficial organiser, Susie Joiner. The Village Writers meet once a month over a capacious dinner to read work-in-progress and to comment on each other’s writing. I was very impressed by the dedication and palpable love of good writing of all those who attended, and also by their skill in the work they read out. There is an awful lot of talent hiding its light under a bushel in the oddest and most unlikely corners of this country, and just waiting to be tapped by publishers who sometimes replace good judgement with commercial expedience. I, needless to say, was called upon to pay the piper by reading some of my own work-in-progress. I have to report that everyone was most kind, and didn’t lay into me as they might well have done, given the circumstances. Such gatherings are an excellent nursery for budding writers, and the criticism, when given, is often of the highest order. So I’d like to say a big thank you to Susie and to all the Village Writers for their tolerant forbearance. May you keep writing, keep striving, and keep the faith….

I’ve just returned from a two week research trip to Mexico. I didn’t have to pass through Mexico City, fortunately, but spent most of my time either touring certain sites in the Yucatan in search of material for my new novel – a follow-up to my thriller The Nostradamus Prophecies, due out in the UK in August, through Atlantic – or tapping away at my computer on a remote island on the Gulf/Caribbean coast called Isla Holbox. And speaking of computers, my trusty old laptop finally bowed out after five or six years of sterling service, about ten days into my trip. I had suspected this might happen, and was neurotically backing up all my material every hour or so on my swizzle stick, so when the expulsive moment finally came, I was more or less ready for it and only lost an hour or so’s revision. Spent the last three days of my trip writing up all my material by hand, which felt pleasantly nostalgic, as this was exactly how I started out in the writing game twenty-five years or so ago – writing initially by hand, and then having the whole thing typed up by a secretary. Computers changed all that, and I am now an adept three finger typist, and wouldn’t really fancy going back to the old ways – however I do keep diaries and notebooks, all hand written, with copious drawings interleaving the text. I’m on to about my 50th book now, and feel that writing by hand, at least in terms of day-to-day thoughts and observations, triggers a certain part of the brain that typing cannot reach.

But back to my Mexican trip. Returning through Gatwick Airport last Wednesday, I was rather expecting to be met by people in quarantine gear, possibly carrying riot shields. In the event, two ladies in what looked like builder’s dust masks met us off the plane, but didn’t really know what to do with us, so they let us through, and we all traipsed out into the real world, trusting that no one had inadvertently sneezed on us in transit at Cancun airport. All’s well so far, I’m relieved to report.

Unexpected good news was awaiting me at home, in the form of the front two pages of the May Day edition of The Bookseller. Both were taken up with massive puffs for my new novel, including a complete run-down of Atlantic’s intended publicity campaign before the August launch. It’s hard to describe the feeling one gets at such a time. Years and years of work have gone into the production of all my books, and this particular novel was sold in something like twelve foreign countries before it even secured a UK sale. So it’s totally to Atlantic’s credit that they have now recognised the true potential of the book, and are really putting some weight behind it.

It’s a heck of a long way between this, and the completion, by hand, of my first novel, back in 1983. That novel, and the three that followed it, are quietly locked away in the ubiquitous writer’s bottom drawer. My fifth novel, The Music-Makers, had a brief outing after publication in 2001, before the publisher went into liquidation, scuppering any further sales. My sixth novel, After Barbarossa, won an Arts Council Writers’ Award in 2004 [its title then was The Honourable Soldier], following which it failed to find a buyer for reasons that still baffle me to this day. Perhaps it was the fact that it was a love story, written by a man, and set in the Second World War, in Russia, Germany, and Occupied France? My main protagonist, I am proud to say, was a tank officer from the Waffen SS, and his love interest was a French peasant girl who had never even seen the sea – you see, I don’t like to make things too easy for myself. I’m still confident that that book is going to take off one day, and I’m sure that my agent, Oli Munson, will be getting around to offering it once again to a slightly more amenable market if and when my two Adam Sabir novels are the successes we all hope they will be. Ah, the writer’s life. Hard to stomach, hard to beat. 

Two literary outings this week, which is rare for me - I usually spend all my working time indoors in my study, and not talking to a soul. On Tuesday, History Channel asked me to go up to London to appear in a documentary they are preparing on Nostradamus and the Third Antichrist. As I am just about to write a new book for Watkins on the Third Antichrist, this seemed too good an opportunity to miss! I’ve done a few of these documentaries before, so I knew roughly what to expect, but one is nevertheless always a little apprehensive [fear of making a fool of oneself, probably]. The whole thing went surprisingly smoothly, however, with a intelligent chap called Toby interviewing me, and the very nice Eric doing sound and lighting. One never quite remembers what one has said during the course of a concentrated, strobe-lit, two hour interview, but I don’t think I repeated myself too much - the proof, of course, is in the pudding. The documentary will air around July time, and, in the interim, my material is in the hands of an editor I shall doubtless never meet. Let’s hope he/she is a benevolent type….

Yesterday, I attended the Dorset Writers’ lunch at Ferndown Golf Club [Reading, you jet-setter, you!], and thoroughly enjoyed myself meeting fellow toilers at this most mixed and varied of all trades. Apart from a series of frozen plum duffs, all went well, and we happily swopped seats and compared notes. It is at these sorts of dos that one learns all sorts of snippets of information that one might otherwise miss [ensconced dryly at one's desk]. I have now been forewarned to check on the so-called Google settlement and to make sure that any books of mine they intend to digitise [digitalise?] are accurately represented. Quite frankly, I’d rather Google wouldn’t digitise anything at all, and just leave us toilers of the written word alone…we’re quite happy lurking in our garrets and popping up from time to time when least expected. But life isn’t like that. So I shall doubtless be doing as all writers should be doing a.s.a.p., and checking the fine print….

Good news from Germany, where my novel, Die 52 [UK title The Nostradamus Prophecies, and due out here in August], appears to have sold 60,000 copies in its first six weeks since publication. This is way beyond what I expected, and an enormous credit to my German publishers, Blanvalet, and, in particular, to my editor there, Urban Hofstetter, who believed in, and backed the novel 100%, from the very beginning. The German sales are particularly satisfying as I have German ancestry on my mother’s side, and I know how happy she would have been, were she still alive, to hear that Germany had been leading the van insofar as my book sales - and the tempo of my book’s publication - were concerned. Now all my attention is focused on the UK launch by Atlantic, in August, although another sentimental part of me is also eagerly awaiting the French sales figures for Les Propheties Perdues de Nostradamus [Editions First/First Thriller], which came out a month or so ago. A good part of my childhood was spent in France - Provence in particular - and the country and its people are very close to my heart. I was enormously cheered, for instance, by a spectacular review of the book from the excellent Critiques Polars [here's the link http://www.rayonpolar.com/Polars/Polars_texte.php?table=r&nom=READING&prenom=Mario&titre=Les+proph%E9ties+perdues+de+nostradamus ], which says, amongst other things, that ‘Mario Reading seizes hold of the historical figure of Nostradamus to present us with one of the most unexpected protagonists in thriller history, in a book bursting at the seams with multiple and satisfying surprises.’ That’s the stuff. Bring it all on….

Very little shocks me in the normal course of events, but today, when I walked into my local newsagent, I was rocked to the core of my being. There, on the racks in front of me, I saw a copy of Britain’s The Sun newspaper, with a headline, in bold block capitals - JADE’S CRY: I’LL BE DEAD IN A MONTH. Alongside the headline was a photograph of former Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother contestant Jade Goody, completely bald from the effects of powerful chemotherapy, and with an expression of such extreme grief on her face, that one could only compare the image she presented with that of Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting of The Scream. I can only assume that Antonella Lazzeri, who wrote the piece, and Sun editor Rebekah Wade, who presumably okay-ed it, have neither of them suffered the effects of terminal cancer during the course of their lives. I, on the other hand, have. Jade Goody [now Mrs Tweed] is, I understand, the mother of two sons. She has terminal cervical cancer which has moved to her liver, bowel and groin. She is 27 years old. I was 38 years old when I received my terminal diagnosis, in 1992, in Toulouse, France, after two years of pretty much unimaginable misery - and I, too, was the father of a young son. Jade Goody will have gone through a similar traumatic period, much truncated - her cancer was confirmed only in August 2008, after two previous scares back in 2004 and 2006 - but equally traumatising.

Without having experienced the utter certainty of imminent death, it is hard for anyone to comprehend the enormity of the situation one is forced, unwillingly, to inhabit. I was lucky enough, following my one month terminal diagnosis, to respond, almost miraculously, to the extreme treatment [surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy] that my French doctors, with little else left in their pharmacological armoury, threw at me. I gather that, in Mrs Tweed’s case, such a miracle is unlikely to happen, and that she has just now entered a palliative care hospice, on a two day trial basis, in order to spare her sons the agony of watching their mother go through the process of dying. It is easy to be clever after the event, and to revel in moral outrage. But in this case such moral outrage is, I believe, justified. Confucius wrote that ‘To be trustworthy in word is close to being moral in that it enables one’s words to be repeated. To be respectful is close to being observant of the rites in that it enables one to stay clear of disgrace and insult.’ In the next few weeks, Mrs Tweed must come to terms with the terrible reality which has been thrust upon her. To do that she will need all her strength. Dying is an intensely lonely experience. In my case, I was fortunate enough not to be a celebrity - in other words no one, apart from my closest family, interested themselves in my going. I was thus able to call upon natural reserves I never knew I had - reserves that had not been depleted by the forced externalisation of emotion caused by obsessive media interest - in order the better to make my soul. It is, quite frankly, irrelevant, whether or not Mrs Tweed called any or all of this publicity down upon herself - she deserves, just as any person in extremis deserves, our protection. Human beings sometimes behave inappropriately, even self-destructively, and allowance should be made both for Mrs Tweed’s age and for her condition - it is impossible to think clearly and rationally when suffering invasive treatment and under an imminent sentence of death.

I was lucky enough to be allowed to go home for one last weekend before my final return to the Institut Claudius Regaud in Toulouse. Unable to walk without a stick, and having lost forty percent of my normal body weight, I was hardly in a position to go walkabout. However something drove me to start down, before dawn, to my favourite meadow below the woods that surrounded my house. I knew that I would never be able to get myself back up the hill again, but I left a note for my still sleeping future wife as to my whereabouts, and departed on what I suspected might be my final adventure. When I reached the lower field, the mist was just rising from the damp grass, and the dawn was breaking. I limped through the knee-high grass, breathing in, for what I felt would be the very last time, the precious scent of meadow sweet. It was at this moment that I felt a presence behind me. For some reason I continued walking, unwilling, or unable, to turn around. Slowly, the presence at my side began to overwhelm me, and I felt a sense of the most unutterably perfect friendship. At that exact moment, stumbling through the sunlit meadow in my dressing gown, my collar turned up against the early morning chill, all fear deserted me, and I realised that I was not alone, and that the presence beside me was that of God. I suddenly knew without knowing that this presence was perfect, and total, and that whatever happened to me, whatever subsequently came to pass, would be all right. I offered myself completely to God at that moment, inexpressibly grateful for the comfort of His presence. I did not need to turn to see Him - He was everywhere, He was everything.

That experience changed my life. On my return to hospital, I slowly recovered from my illness, to the astonishment of my doctors, my family, and myself. I realise now how lucky I was to have been allowed the space and the peace to find these things out about myself - to explore my relationship with God, and to understand that only by total abrogation of the Self - that only by complete submission - is salvation possible. I was quite happy to die by the end. I almost welcomed it. Mrs Tweed must be allowed the same courtesy. I refuse to criticise the people who are benefiting from Mrs Tweed’s agony. People do things. It is their nature. But I would like everyone to stop for a moment, and imagine themselves, if they can, in Mrs Tweed’s place. To wonder what is appropriate behaviour towards a person who deserves our support. Confucius again [using D. C. Lau's translation, as before]: ‘It is only the most intelligent and the most stupid who are not susceptible to change.’

Twenty years ago, whilst I was busy writing my third or fourth unpublished novel, and maybe my 250th unpublished poem, and my 30th unpublished short story - and therefore still languishing in that great Unpublished Writers’ Limbo in the sky (I was probably on about my 150th rejection) - I walked into Tim Waterstone’s brand new bookstore in Bath. There, laid out in front of me, and covering an entire table all of its own, was Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent. It wasn’t the sight of that book in particular that fired my imagination - as I remember it, Stephen Hawking also had a table to himself, bulging with copies of his A Brief History Of Time - so much as the smell and feel of the environment within which that table sat. The freedom suggested by that table’s existence. The single-minded dedication of the bookshop staff to the sale and promulgation of exactly what lay on that table. I stood in front of Scott Turow’s pile of books like a dedicatee at some ancestral shrine, and thought: ‘One day I would like to walk into a bookstore and see an entire table like this dedicated to my own work’. Reality, of course, set in almost immediately, like a wave striking the outside of a breakwater at far too acute an angle, and drenching the hitherto notionally protected walker underneath [me]. I realised just how stacked against me the odds really were. There are hundreds of thousands of books published worldwide every year [946,000, at last count]. And of these, maybe a few hundred get a table all to themselves. But for every book published, there are probably 100 that go unpublished. So call it 1000 tableworthy books out of 100,000,000 wannabes. Long odds, surely? And then another thought occured to me. My God - the person who wrote this book is never even going to see this table. Here is a shrine (one, presumably, of many similar shrines dotted around the country), groaning with his work, and he probably doesn’t even know it’s here. He’s not even British, for pity’s sake - he’s American. There are probably tables dedicated to his work all over Europe and the US. Hundreds of tables, each with its very own staff of sorters and sellers and dusters and unpackers and repackers and corner adjusters,  and all of them working, even if somewhat indirectly, for him. I walked out of that bookstore a chastened man, I can tell you. In fact I came pretty near to giving up writing altogether. What was the point? The chances of making it were infinitesimal. But something stopped me. 150 rejections wan’t that many, after all, in the greater scheme of things. Why not make it 500? Or even a 1000? So I decided to continue in the Writers’ Purgatorio for a little while longer. And this morning, twenty-one years later, I had a telephone call from an old friend in Holland. He’d just been to the great Mayersche bookshop in Aachen, on an outing to Germany with his wife. They’d been browsing the cooking section, actually, when his wife wandered off to see the rest of the five storey store. Suddenly, she called him across to the fiction section, near to the instore elevator. “Bert. Come and take a look at this. You won’t believe it!” Reader, you’ve guessed it. She was gazing at an entire table dedicated to the recently published German edition of my book, Die 52 [UK title The Nostradamus Prophecies, and due out over here in August]. My friend, out of the kindness of his heart, called me on the phone immediately, expecting, I suppose, that I would already know all about my Mayersche table, and that he would simply be offering crackling to a rather vainglorious pig farmer. But the realities of international publication meant that I knew nothing whatsoever about it - in fact I didn’t even know my novel was in German bookstores yet. Just like Scott Turow probably knew nothing about his table in Bath, back in 1988. And the moral of this story? To all you would-be writers out there - hang on in there. Never say die! It doesn’t matter how many times you are rejected. If you believe in your work, and if you have the sense to take good advice to heart and to do something about it when you get it, you are in with a chance. Imagine an audience for yourself in your heads, and write for it. Never, ever, write for yourselves. That way lies perdition. Communicate. Reach out. Connect. You’ll make it in the end.

Over Christmas, the UK’s BBC1 television channel showed a brand new adaptation of John Buchan’s perennial The Thirty-Nine Steps. The original had first appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1915, and was published in book form later that same year by William Blackwood and Sons. I admit that I was pretty excited by the prospect of a new version of Buchan’s page-turning masterpiece hitting the small screen – I had collected Buchan first editions as a young man, and had always admired his descriptions of natural landscape and his way with a story. Perhaps this time along the BBC would have the good sense to return to the original book, which has been selling a steady ten thousand copies a year for the past five or six decades of its nine decade existence, rather than attempt a politically correct revisionist rehash. After all, if Charles Bennett, Alma Reville [Alfred Hitchcock’s wife], and Ian Hay could pull off the masterstroke of bringing the sublime Madeleine Carroll into Hitchcock’s 1935 filming of the story without prejudicing its Buchanesque spirit, then surely the BBC leviathan would have sufficient nous to call in a scriptwriter who actually felt equal affection for the original material, rather than someone for whom it represented little more than a commercial chore. Somewhat predictably, I was wrong on every count. Whatever BBC producer was chosen to baby The Thirty-Nine Steps along obviously fell prey to a severe dose of aspirational Billy Wilder-ism  - I’m thinking, of course, of Wilder’s wonderful The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), towards whose cutting-edge novelty this production only vaguely aspired. The BBC’s problems began because producer and screenwriter both palpably lacked both Wilder’s genius and Wilder’s sense of humour. Instead of a cracking yarn, we got a turgid, quasi-feminist recombobulation of what had once been a great work of adventure. Little by little, our erstwhile hero, Richard Hannay - marvellously played by Rupert Penry-Jones, who would have been perfect casting in an honest production of the book - lost all heroic semblance in favour of a quite stunningly unbelievable and modern-seeming suffragette. Oh dear. Not being a grumpy Wiltshire Colonel, I will draw a partial veil over the continuity howlers, which did, however, include the impossible [in 1914] use of a pair of synchronised machine guns in a bi-plane. Even the cars were of the wrong vintage because, I gather, cars of the period weren’t deemed ‘fast enough to maintain tension’. Well, one maintains tension by the use of imagination, not by hardware! Next time the BBC wants an adaptation of a John Buchan story, may I modestly suggest that they come to me.    

Coincidences and unexpected meetings in everyday life deserve documentation, if only to cast nasturtiums [pace Tom Stoppard] at the rule, posited by Henry David Thoreau in Walden [1854], that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ Well, even if they don’t, I intend to document this particular one. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin….

Yesterday morning I went to my local station to catch a train for London. As is frequently the case these days, the waiting room/ticket office was closed. So a rag, tag, and bobtail army of grumbling commuters soon wove its way through the station car park, intent on squaring up to the dreaded AUTOMATED TICKETING MACHINE. Now these ticketing machines have an odd by-product - they bring people together. Rather as in wartime, they act as the common enemy, against whom all may pit themselves, calm in the knowledge that they are facing a morally acceptable and universally recognised foe. As I approached the front of the skirmish line, I spotted a friend of mine, who was obviously also intent on travelling to London for a day out with her daughter and baby grandson. “Oh,” she said. “Where are you off to?” “I’m off to have lunch with my agent,” says I. At that moment, the man next in line to me in the queue says, “Who is your agent?” Well, I’d never met this chap before - never even seen him around - but the Blitz Spirit, engendered by my proximity to the AUTOMATED TICKETING MACHINE, burgeoned within me: “Oli Munson, at Blake Friedmann,” I answered. ”Well I’ll be damned,” he said. “Blake Friedmann are my agents too. I’m with Isobel Dixon.” We exchanged a few words, but the pressures of time, and the ineptitude of man in the face of machine, soon cut short our meeting.

Two hours later, I arrived outside the Blake Friedmann offices in Camden Town. A dark-haired woman was leaving the building. “Oh, are you Eva?” I said, thinking she might be our new contracts manager, whom I was due to meet that morning. “No,” said the lady. “I’m Isobel Dixon.” Well. You could have knocked me over with a feather duster. I explained how I had run into one of her authors, out of the blue, that morning, 100 or so miles away as the crow flies. “That must be Christopher Nicholson,” she said. “His novel is coming out in the New Year.” Faintly bemused, I clattered upstairs to find that Isobel had already phoned ahead to make sure an Uncorrected Proof Copy of Christopher’s book, The Elephant Keeper [to be published in 2009 by Fourth Estate], was waiting for me at the front desk. That afternoon, fortified by an excellent literary lunch, I settled down to wile away my trainbound homeward hours with Christopher’s new book - and it grabbed me from the very first sentence. There, I feel better, now, for having told the story. Odd meetings do happen - and life, although desperate at times, can also throw us the odd serendipitous curveball.