With all my travelling, I haven’t written or edited my book since I came back from the Greek writing retreat with Women Reading Aloud, organised by Julie Maloney. I go every year. On the island of Alonissos, we write to prompts in the morning, but I still managed to work on my novel in the afternoon after I came back from the beach. So why not now that I am at home? Somehow, life got busy.

At least I am doing research. Finding out from various holocaust survivors and from Theresienstadt museum factual details, so that I don’t upset my future readers with mistakes. I am a bit of a pedant myself.

But then, I thought about my favourite author Salman Rushdie. I love the way he writes, his command of language, his educated brain. “Salman Rushdie wouldn’t have factual mistakes in his books” I thought.

But I am reading his novel “Golden House” and on one page he wrote: “they were like two Czech intellectuals in the fog on the Bohemian shore”. Bohemia- now together with Moravia part of Czech Republic-is of course a landlocked country.  Rushdie knows this very well. Perhaps he was referring to Shakespeare. In “Winter’s Tale” the characters get shipwrecked on Bohemian shore.

This is what I found on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter%27s_Tale#The_seacoast_of_Bohemia

Let’s say Rushdie is using poetic license, maybe my obsession with facts and historical circumstances is not important.

After all, my book is about people and their stories.

Still, I am not a literary giant like Shakespeare or Salman Rushdie, so I think I will try to be careful.Summer