Well, the cat’s done it again. This morning, at 6 o’clock, I was awoken by a terrible scream out in the hall. My wife had trodden on the remnants - spleen, gall, etc. - of a mouse that Beachy Bede had left just outside our bedroom door. In bare feet, needless to say - her, not the cat, who’s always in bare feet, so to speak. I suppose he means these gifts he brings her as signs of affection, but the headless rabbits underneath her desk and the vestiges of corpses buried beneath a thin covering of moss on our lawn are beginning to tell. She now calls him ‘the assassin’. Stories of his exploits are bruited far and wide by the stud staff, who regularly see him pouncing on unsuspecting creatures out in the fields. ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’. There we have it. He even caught a racing pigeon the other day, but decided to reprieve it, and simply left it sitting in our upstairs hallway, feathers everywhere. I carted it out to the Pink Barn, gave it some food and water, and turned it loose. I suspect, after a little soul searching, that it flew back home, a luckier and a wiser bird.

Books, though. Books. How are The Nostradamus Prophecies doing, you are doubtless asking yourselves [or maybe not]. Well, anyway, they are doing very well, and Atlantic have doubled the reprint run, which must be a good sign. India have reordered [bravo!], Asda have made us one of their Christmas selections [doesn't Christmas come early these days!!] and Switzerland are comparing me to ‘an upmarket Dan Brown’. I wonder if Dan Brown ever thinks of himself as downmarket? I shall suggest he asks the Swiss, who always have elegant taste in these things…

The cat has just leapt up onto the old computer box which houses my mouse, missed his footing, snatched at mouse, rug, box, and, on his way down, my leg, and left me staring at my morning’s work and wondering how much of it he has managed, inadvertently, to erase. He usually approaches my writing desk using the long route, i.e via a pile of books, then behind a bookcase, across a side table, and onto the mouse box [specially designed by me so that I would not get repetitive strain syndrome by having to reach forward all the time]. Instead, I now get repetitive cat syndrome, because he loves to lie there, as near as he can get to me without actually being on my desk - which he knows is verboten - and then resting his paws on top of my notebooks, and occasionally giving my left arm a clean, when he feels the urge. Today he decided on the disastrous shortcut. Bedlam ensued. Even my wife came running in with some homeoplasmine to tend to my cuts. The cat, needless to say, was fine, and returned to his underchair basket, dignity miraculously intact. I didn’t actually lose any work - I think - so all’s well that ends well. But it serves to remind one of the essential unpredictability of life. Felix ille tamen corvo quoque rarior albo. ['A lucky man is rarer than a white crow.' From Juvenal's Satires. Sat. vii, l. 202].

More great news - The Nostradamus Prophecies has just made it into the paperback fiction bestseller charts, and we’re up to number two in The Bookseller’s Heatseekers List. We had exceptional sales in WHSmith Travel, in Tesco’s, and in Waterstone’s, and we’re now very comfortably into five figures. I have to admit to a certain amount of relief, as one never knows whether a book will take off or not. Well, at least we’ve taken off - whether we manage to cross the Atlantic Ocean without nose-diving is another thing entirely! But, speaking of the Atlantic, I’ve just heard that Thomas Dunne Books, headed by one of the US’s most well-respected senior editors [literally as well as eponymously], is to publish The Nostradamus Prophecies in the US next fall [that's autumn, to all you English readers out there]. I’m truly delighted, as I’ve been a fan of Tom Dunne’s for many years, and he came perilously close to publishing my first novel, The Music-Makers, ten years or so ago. When I say my first novel, I actually mean my first published novel, because, like all writers, I have five or six others lurking in my bottom drawer…some of them actually rather good. Others, well, less so. Let’s call them ‘part of the learning curve’, for want of a better phrase. Anyway, ‘onwards and upwards’, as my editor at Atlantic, Ravi Mirchandani, likes to say…

Great news from The Bookseller, where The Nostradamus Prophecies has broken into their Heatseekers Top Ten. The image this conjures up of the book as guided missile is a titillating one, and leaves this author at least fantasizing some sort of crossbow contraption at his study window, from which he fires copies of his books in a 180 degree arc in the fond hope that some passer-by will catch one and be seduced into reading it. There. I’ve obviously got far too much time on my hands.

I was up in London on Sunday, visiting friends, and just had to go to Charing Cross Station to see if I could catch sight of one of the four posters of the book they apparently have on show. Lurked down in the tube section for a while, and saw nothing. The Mexican friend I was with insisted that we continue with our search, although I was all for giving up in embarrassment. A very kind gentleman at the Information Office then opined that he thought book posters tended to be out on the main platforms. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll take you down there.” So we followed him [I, dreading that there would be no poster there, and that both my companions would write me off as a total fraud], and, hey presto, once through the barrier, the first of my four posters revealed itself. The kind man from the Information Office waited patiently while Daniel took my picture in front of the poster [sad, or what?]. Then we shuffled off back to our wives, exhausted, but happy. Three cheers for the railways and their pleasant staff!

Here, for anyone who fancies finding out a little more about the book and its author, is the new Youtube link for the micro site video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUQft9oBuDU