Today is a bright warm spring day in Poland and I'm still talking in the past with my blog. Strange how a blog can become as much of a friend as a novel to the writer.

The great advantage of doing things in tandem like writing a blog at the same time as writing a novel is that by 'dissipating ' a lot of stuff that I would have written in the novel, I'm actually keeping it on course.
What I mean is this: many people when they write novels end up with a six-headed hydra; too many themes, an embarrasmment of riches, however you like to loook at it. In other words, you need to decide which threads to cut out, to pare down, and so on, so that your patchwork can be conistent and not too episodic. So by taking out some of the anecdotal, vignette stuff which is true
and applying it to the blog as it happened, or as you saw it happen, you remove the non-need to create a new thread which you then fictionalise while writing a novel. Do I sound as if I'm talking nonsense, or does this make sense? It makes sense to me.
For example: I planned to have a carnival scene in the novel, probably set around Kastoria, because there's already another scene set in Agrigento during the Folkloric Festival - and I wanted to link the two festivals. But actually that distracts from the main themes of the novel, and instead of the emperor in Amadeus commenting on Mozart's opera that it had 'too many notes' you could say that my novel had 'too many carnivals'.
My novel, for those who might be remotely interested, is really taking shape - the hero and his fiancee after a series of bizarre (or not so bizarre) adventures are finally getting to the core of the mystery, with all its allusions to fantasy. This post-modernist stuff is such hard work - all I want to do is to write a popular novel, but I end up writing a novel that reflects and comments on popular literature, or metafiction to use the posh term. Don't let that put you off, if it's published. I really want this one to sing!
Oh, and that's another point. It's much easier to write a novel set in Italy and Greece when you're not in either country. And in case anyone reading this is not reading properly, I repeat what I say at the beginning of this: I am in Poland at the moment. The Pope has died, and a new one has replaced him. The Poles have started to recover from the shock, the near -hysteria has been so beautifully described by Karlien in her blog. Though it has had an influence on the atmosphere at the moment, espeically in the classes I teach and in the streets and pubs, and the lovely Polish people, this is having no influence on my writing at the moment. I think so much has already been said about the Pope that I can add nothing new to the debate, especially now that the shockwaves are subsiding. In the meantime, the protagonist of the novel is trying to work out the uncanny behaviour of the Man of Honour. Are the rumours about him true? Ho, ho, ho!.....