Art Reflects Life......

It’s not my fault. Honest.

This morning is 7 February, and I have been awake since just after 4 AM, engaged in my latest writing project.

It’s just a couple of weeks since I decided I would complete my novel, Sacred Places, which I began a couple of years ago. Since more recently completing my first novel, Bela, which had lain 95% complete for almost 20 years, I had finally recently got down to the work of finishing it. It is just at this moment with one of my carers, an inveterate reader, for final corrections and proofing.

And so I have decided recently that I want to be a novelist.

Everybody, so they say, has a book in them. Few have the time needed to write it.

When I wrote my first novel, I was single and able to be sufficiently selfish so that I could get up at six every morning, write for a couple of hours, before going to work and then editing what I had written that morning in the evening.

I did this six days a week for the best part of a year.

For my second novel, I have set myself the task of writing 500 words a day six days a week, so that my average should be about 3000 words a week.

By my reckoning, this should mean about 150,000 words in the course of a year.

That is the kind of selfishness that novel writing requires.

Although of course you can do university writing courses and so forth, I don’t believe there is any magical formula for writing a novel. It just requires the kind of obsessiveness I have described above.

My opening denial stems from the fact that this morning, from about 4 AM, I have been writing about my character Tom visiting Assisi with his girlfriend Kitty, as part of a tour of Umbria, in a sideways connected section of my novel. Assisi, of course, is an important sacred place, and I had known about the earthquake of 1997, which had prompted me to take my characters there.

Imagine my chagrin when this morning, having completed my daily regimen of words, I thought to check on the earlier earthquake by a simple Google search.

Straightaway to discover that this morning’s Independent newspaper front page has the news of a more recent earthquake, from yesterday morning. Six on the Richter scale.

And the entire basilica of St Francis, with its important Giotto frescoes, has been destroyed.

Needless to say, I feel responsible. Who wouldn’t.

But of course it’s only a coincidence, I tell myself. But what a coincidence. I am beginning to wonder if I should be much more careful about the subjects for my future chapters, and I will certainly keep an eye on the press, just in case I seem suddenly to have become the cause of what I write about actually happening.

Now there is a story for a Hollywood movie, but one of course that nobody would believe.

Have sympathy for me, please, as I feel so responsible for the destruction of those magnificent frescoes.