The Second Key

I’m often asked how long it takes to write a book and I have to restrain myself from answering, ‘How long is a piece of string?’ There is so much more to a book than those hours that a writer sits plying the craft in glorious abandon. But I’m not talking about those nights one can’t sleep because a particular plot line isn’t working, or a character just isn’t developing. I’m talking about the deeper influences, that long before one puts pen to paper or finger to key, mould the thoughts and feelings that will one day surface as the epiphany I spoke about in my last blog.

I was born in Brazil where Catholicism mixes easily with magic and the occult. Some of my earliest memories include lying in bed listening to the sounds of the Macumba drums while my grandmother told me stories of the martyred saints; they include hearing whispers about people who attended these magic rituals in order to debunk them but returned forever changed. My atheist father was always looking for conspiracies and rejected all religion and superstition with a passion. Conversely, my mother was a religious seeker and exposed me to a cornucopia of faiths. At one stage, I had a mother who was not only sanctioned by the Catholic Church to conduct exorcisms, but who was also, incidentally, a Freemason. Interesting!

As you can expect, this mystical milieu did have an effect on an impressionable child: I was very afraid of churches and anything atavistic for a long time, but it did have the effect of stimulating my curious nature and opening my mind. It is not so hard to see how all of the above would come bubbling out of me when I began to research and to write The Sixth Key: a book about the occult, corrupt priests, heretics, black magic rituals, conspiracies and secret masonic societies.

As Sherlock Holmes would say, ‘Elementary, dear Watson!’