This is a wonderful story and I want to share it with you. Last week, late at night, our neighbours came in and asked for our help. They had found a bird of prey lying on the ground outside their wood store. The likelihood was that it had been chasing a martin or a pigeon at dusk, and had flown into some telegraph wires. Either way, it was stunned. I got our cat basket from the shed and put the bird in it. I at first assumed from its colouring that we were dealing with a female sparrow-hawk. The bird simply looked at me with the detached gaze all birds of prey seem to have, as if it was saying to itself, ‘Well, whatever you are going to do to me, get on with it.’

I left the bird in its basket in my upstairs study, facing out towards an open window, so that it could hear the call of its mate. I also put a scallop shell filled with water into the basket. I left the bird lying down. When I returned in the morning, it was standing up. This seemed to me a good sign. So my neighbour and I took it downstairs and placed it out of the pen and onto the sward, hoping it might try to fly off. It was soon clear to both of us that the bird was incapable of movement. It could open its wings to their full extent, but then simply pecked forward onto the grass and lay there, looking at us. It was then I called my friend Tim, a professional falconer, who lives a couple of miles down the road.

“That’s not a female sparrow-hawk,” said Tim. “That’s a male hobby. Much rarer. There are only about 2000 breeding pairs in Britain. And he’s damaged his wing. In fact he may have broken a small bone in it. I’ll take him straight to the Hawk Conservancy Trust’s Bird Hospital.”

Last night, Tim called again. “He’s fine. He’s a mature male. He’s flying around his cage. Kim at the Trust has done a wonderful job on him. All he had was a bruised wing joint, probably from flying into the wire whilst in hot pursuit. Now I need to bring him back to exactly where you found him, and let him free. He’ll need to meet up again with his family.”

Tim arrived with the bird at 1pm today. As my neighbours were away for the weekend, Tim and I took the bird out to exactly where he was found. At first he wouldn’t leave the basket, so we gently tipped him out onto the sward. He looked at us, twisting his head almost completely around on its axis. Then he hopped a few paces and took off - straight up into the sky, like a dart. Within thirty seconds he was hundreds of feet directly above us, clearly checking his whereabouts - we could actually see him jinking here and there in the wind eddies, searching the nearby woods and above the lake with his eyes. “He’s looking for his mate,” said Tim. “Let’s hope she’s still here.” For a precious few minutes, he seemed to be performing, up there in the air spirals, just for Tim and me - higher and higher he went, until we had difficulty making him out any more. Then he stooped and disappeared.

Tim and I stood there for a while, watching the empty air. “Wasn’t that something?” he said. “In a few weeks time he’ll probably be heading back to Africa.” Yes, I thought. And taking something of us with him.

I recently found myself speculating on how differently authors approach the art of writing. Some prepare their work to the enth degree before even starting to write - others, like me, have a vague idea of where they are heading, but are prepared to take more of a risk on the ride. The second modus operandi still calls for some extreme powers of organization, but these are mainly mental, not pictorial. Most of the creative writing classes one reads about recommend thorough preparation before embarking on a novel. I’m partially pro this - one must, needless to say, do one’s preparatory reading and preparatory thinking to avoid being coated in rotten eggs. But nothing quite prepares one for a character who forces him or herself into one’s book and changes everything. This can only happen when one is open to serendipity. And the only way to be open to serendipity is not to know entirely where one is going with a thing.

It happened to me just the other day. There I was, happily writing along, when a character trotted in from left base and insisted on considerably more than a walk on part in my work-in-progress (the third and final part of my Nostradamus Trilogy). I didn’t cavil. I didn’t even rail against the Fates and reverse over him. I simply let him in. When that happens, the character begins to inhabit you. It happened with Alexi Dufontaine in the first novel in my trilogy, The Nostradamus Prophecies. One minute he wasn’t there, the next minute he was. And fully formed, too. I simply had to write him into being. I’m praying the same will happen with this new character. Who’s called Amoy, by the way. And why Amoy? His mother named him after the sauce. Now how the heck do I know that? Isn’t it great being a writer…

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.