Our Lady of Perpetual Coincidence

Last week I posted about a new novel, and I’ve been working on it since then because I don’t want to undergo the humiliation of a stuck ticker. It’s one thing if I miss a day and don’t write anything at all, but once I have a ticker (as I’ve said before) I must feed the ticker daily. Otherwise, you’ll know.

I only did 400 words on Sunday, but then I cleared 2800 words on Monday and another 2000 on Tuesday. Wednesday wasn’t as good. That’s okay. I was doing research instead.

I mentioned that part of the novel is the search for a relic that was looted from an Italian church during World War II. When I started planning the novel, I had no idea whose relic it might be. I messed around with a few ideas, but it was vague. I wanted someone not a household name. I wanted it to be someone from about 700 to a thousand years ago. The church it was looted from should be in northern Italy.

But that was all research stuff, and I told myself it would work out. Instead, I went to work on the characters: the MC was a hard-headed midwife who is eminently practical and a good care-giver. I loved her a lot even from the beginning, and once I decided she was a midwife, a lot of details about her solidified. I’m having fun with her.

I’d been planning for about three or four days when abruptly I remembered I had enrolled in someone’s blog comments and asked her for a patron saint for the new year. (The church’s new year, that is.) The idea is that someone randomly draws a saint’s name for you, and that’s your patron for the year because the saint chose you. I went back to check and discovered I’d been chosen by Saint Peter of Verona.

Who? No idea. So I looked him up, and lo:
1) He lived in the 13th century
2) in Italy
3) and was murdered in a northern Italian city
4) and there are a lot of relics of him.

Plus, he’s not well known. Awesome! Maybe he did choose me, I thought, because his name would have been drawn before I’d come up with the plot for my novel and thus before I would have had need of him. But of course, God is pretty smart and probably knew I’d be looking for someone.

On Wednesday, in order to write the next scene, I did a little more research on Saint Peter of Verona, more than just his Wikipedia entry and a couple of web pages, and discovered one more thing. He’s not just the patron of inquisitors.

He’s also the patron of midwives.

God looks out for fools, drunks, the United States of America, and me. And also, apparently, does Our Lady of Perpetual Coincidence.