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.