on the life of a new author...

you've gotta think about the future

I've had two articles in newspapers in the past few days, one looking backward and bemoaning what we're about to lose, and one excitedly looking forward to the future of books. I do think it's possible  to hold both those positions at once. You don't have to give up on technology in order to believe that the past has valuable things to teach us. And you don't have to stop enjoying old-fashioned pleasures in order to find time for the more high-tech ones.

I guess this would also be a good time to say that, from May, I am available for hire for both high and low-tech writing projects, as well as ones that meet somewhere in the middle. If you're looking for a writer who understands both ends of the spectrum, you can email me at myfirstname.mysurname@gmail.com

***

I seem to be doing something of a reverse Omer this year, counting down seven weeks to Passover rather
than counting forward to Shavuot. So, as it's now just under six weeks to Passover, here's a thought. What is chametz? It is that which rises up without our having to do anything to make it. We just leave it alone, and it accumulates. Personally, I sometimes feel this way about the detritus in my home. So while I'm doing Pesach cleaning, perhaps this is a good time to collect a bagful of things that have somehow arrived in my house without my quite meaning it, and take it to a charity shop. Or, if you want to get something back in return, check out bookmooch. Hurrah for places where high and low-tech book experiences meet.

I really didn't mean to say that no one in Manchester wears clothes

It's the kind of thing that just comes out when everyone's joking, and you're being recorded, and you're trying to be funny and it just sorta doesn't work but *anyway*, here's my appearance on the Guardian's marvellous Sounds Jewish podcast. More things like this, please: British Jews behaving as if it's OK to talk about Jewishness! Careful, if we do this too much the goyim might notice we're here.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/series/soundsjewish

***

And in other things one might like to listen to... Passover is only seven weeks away. A sense of dread and anticipation is settling over Hendon, people are shifting bookcases and vacuuming curtains to get rid of any last trace of chametz, and smallish boxes of not-specially-nice biscuits are going on sale for £20 each.

So, as an antidote, how about having a listen to this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/1357_slavery_today/page3.shtml

Passover's about freedom from slavery. Why don't we all forgo one of those boxes of biscuits and give the money to an anti-slavery organisation instead?

Unaccustomed as I am

I went to a wonderful Women Novelist's salon a little while ago, which is the sort of event that always makes me feel that I am Actually a Real Writer, and perhaps not Just Pretending. Much of the chat revolved around horrible evenings giving readings to unappreciative audiences. From what I can tell, I've been lucky: I haven't had any really awful experiences, but I expect they await me eventually.

I also recently had a chat with a friend who's trying to arrange a big education event.
"Can you imagine," she said, "I tried to invite Mr Very Well-Known Writer to speak at my charity event, and he asked for £20,000! For one night!"
The thing my friend failed to understand was: this isn't a way of asking for a lot of money. Really, it's a way (a very English way) of saying "no". Let me break it down for you.

Writers are by nature usually people who are capable of enjoying time in our own company. We often prefer imaginary people to real ones, and get childishly attached to our own chair, our own desk, our own routine. If we'd wanted a life of glamorous foreign travel and meeting new people, we'd have become management consultants.

Admittedly, there are times when it's dead exciting to be asked to speak anywhere. It's the Real Writer thing again: even accumulating horror stories makes you feel more writerly. But then, time goes past and the new novel really does need to be worked on - there's nothing, after all, that makes you feel more like a writer than writing.  And you do reach a point where you've frankly said all that can be said about the old novel not once but many times.

But still you get invitations to do things. I love getting these invitations. Every single one still fills me with happiness that someone actually liked my book enough to ask me to speak. But, *accepting* any invitation means time away from writing, or away from spending relaxing time with friends, or with a book, or at the gym, or with anyone or anything that doesn't ask me the same questions about my book that I've heard so often before. (It's no one's fault - those are the questions everyone wants to know the answer to. But it does get tiring.)

So, I think to myself: is this an interesting event? Will there be interesting people there? Is it somewhere fun? And, more personally: am I really in a mental place where I'll be able to enjoy doing this, or will I, however fun the people are, be longing to get back home? I'm *very much* more likely to do it if it's come via my publisher and has thus already been vetted. If it's far away and would entail staying over, it depends on when it is, what else is going on at that time (I'm not going to do anything over the Jewish holidays, for example), how much I want to go to the place and how much I desperately need to spend concentrated time with my next book.

So it's when I get invitations to speak in places that are far away, that are at inconvenient times, that would mean at least a week of disruption (and it is a week, at least, with planning, packing, unpacking, exhaustion, organisation, re-entry into normal life) that I find myself thinking, in a rather cowardly way: "I don't want to have to say no. It's a privilege to be asked. But... I don't want to go. So how much money would make it OK to spend time doing things I really don't want to do, going places I don't want to go, realising that my novel was growing cold again? How much would make it really OK?"

And so, though I've never asked for £20,000 (or anything in any way like it), I can understand that that's when you do it. Perhaps Mr Very Well-known Writer regularly gets £20,000 a night. But perhaps he asks for it because he knows it's ridiculous, that no one would ever pay it, and that this lets him get back to his tricky next chapter. And if someone turns out to have much deeper pockets than he expected... well, at least he knows when he's on the plane facing the jetlag that he can pay for a writing holiday somewhere sunnier to make up for it.

Once you start looking for these things they're everywhere

So according to the Guardian Angelina Jolie is "too famous" to convince as Marianne Pearl in the new film "A Mighty Heart". In fact, the Times agrees. I haven't seen the movie, don't know if it's good, don't know if Angelina's performance is great or rubbish. But this strikes me as an astonishing thing to say. Surely the whole business of being a film actor is to become, and remain, famous?

I wonder why one never hears that Russell Crowe is "too famous" to convince as John Nash. Or that George Clooney is "too famous" to portray Fred Friendly in Good Night and Good Luck? Could it be because  we expect male actors to build careers, to take on a wide range of roles, to be judged by their acting skill and not just their looks? But female actors must forever be the ingenue, enchanting us with their youthful beauty and then vanishing from the scene to let some other similar-looking woman take their place? 

Watching a movie of course involves as much suspension of disbelief as watching any other type of theatre; we have to decide to forget that we know that face (just as we decide to forget that we're in a darkened cinema, that music doesn't usually suddenly strike up at emotional moments, that people aren't actually 2D... and so on). One would imagine it wouldn't be harder to do that for one actor than another - unless they were doing a bad job, which neither of these articles suggests.

Now, fame implies power, at least in the world we live in.  Perhaps it's that power that these journalists are responding to. What they're saying is not that Angelina Jolie is "too famous" to play this role, but that she is "too famous", full stop. A powerful woman? Unbelievable.

-------

And another thing. Why are there no East Asian leading men in Hollywood except in kung fu movies? There are white leading men (including Jewish leading men, the hidden minority), obviously and, since the groundbreaking work of Sidney Poitier in the 1960s, black leading men. There are a few Hispanic leading men, and some with Native American backgrounds, but why no one with ancestry in China or Japan or Korea or the Philippines or, or, or...? This is one of those things which, having thought of it, I now can't believe I never noticed before.

Could a good enough Doctor make you live forever?

A warning: this post is spoilerific. Don't read it if you haven't seen the last six episodes of season 3 of the new Dr Who. Go and watch them instead, they're good.

A further warning: this post treats Television as Art. Because that's what I happen to believe is (sometimes) true.

A final warning: this has got very long. I entirely accept that no one but me will read it. Don't feel bad.

***

It's been quite popular among old-school Who fans to rubbish much of what Russell T Davies has done with the past three seasons of Dr Who. I've heard a lot of moaning, anyway, such that I've begun almost to believe that the fact that I've enjoyed it *so very much* just indicates that I'm easily pleased. Especially by the Doctor getting his first ever gay snog and so on and so forth.

But, I've watched the last six episodes of season three through about five times now and I'm willing to say it: I think they're literature, investigating one of the great themes of human art: immortality. Seriously. Bear with me for a moment.

Why is immortality interesting? Because, really, this is what we desire. At least, some of the time, at least we think we do. Death is the single unanswerable fact of human life. It's going to come for all of us eventually but how we wish it weren't.

There are so many stories which investigate immortality. It is one of the great Stories of literature. It is the concrete block under religion. From the Homeric gods, to belief in reincarnation, from vampires to zombies, from the World To Come to the geek rapture we ask ourselves over and over again in stories: what would it be like if we didn't have to die? Would it be better? It seems like it'd have to be better. But would it possibly be worse? Could we even call ourselves human anymore?

Doctor Who is allied to the new images of immortality which emerged in the 20th century - stasis and cryogenic freezing, robot bodies and genetic "perfection". But the Timelords are also different. They look like humans but they're not humans, and they're not humans-turned-immortal. Like vampires and like angels, they are an immortal race. Like gods. 

So I make a case, particularly, for the last six episodes of season 3 of New Who as forming a complete arc investigating this question.

Doctor Who is a god. That's what it means when you don't die. He's a god and he has avatars and walks on Earth in a body at times but that body isn't *him*. You know, just like Krishna and Jesus.

So, in Human Nature, like a god he discards his divinity for a time and walks among men. He even falls in love - the pleasure which humans tend to reserve for themselves in stories of Immortals, the pleasure we somehow feel is part of mortality (why is that? Why is love linked to death? Freud would probably have a thing or two to say about it). But it doesn't work. Like a god, like Zeus or YHVH Himself the Doctor's love is destructive, corrosive. It burns those it touches.

And in Family of Blood, like a god, he gives up his mortal pleasures to provide the salvation which can only come from an immortal being. There's such a beautiful moment at the end of the episode, where Martha and the Doctor have travelled forward in time to attend a Remembrance Sunday service. One of the young men they encountered 80 years earlier is now an old wheelchair-bound man; he looks at the Doctor as the Vicar speaks the words "they shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old". This is the Doctor's tragedy. He doesn't grow old, he doesn't die. But because of that, he is on the side of death already.

After all that deep and potent thematic content, Blink has a much lighter touch. The Doctor's mostly in it as a peripheral presence, a helper from the sidelines, stranded away from his Tardis. But, Blink remains (among other things) an investigation of mortality. The Weeping Angels don't kill you, they "let you live to death". In a sense, they do nothing, just move people a few decades back in time. In another sense, they do everything. Dalek-style extermination is almost banal. "Living to death" is, of course, what we all do and all the more powerful for that. The episode contemplates the fullness of a human life over and over again: is it a tragedy to die now rather than later? Even if you've already lived a long life?

And then there's Utopia. Now we're at the end of the universe, where the Doctor must face the death even of the indomitable human race itself. As a stand-alone episode Utopia has its problems. Like Mission to the Unknown (and *oh*, let's have another ep with none of the regular cast in it. At any point. Can you imagine a TV show having the guts to do that these days?) it's a feeder episode in a longer narrative. It has beautiful touches - ChanTho is great - but it doesn't quite cohere. Thematically, though, it's dead on. Like God, the Doctor has the long view. He'll always have a human companion or two but eventually there will be no more human race at all. It's reminiscent of that most devastating scene in the Time Machine: not the Morlocks and the Eloi but the further-than-that future

"I looked about me to see if any traces of animal life remained. A certain indefinable apprehension still kept me in the saddle of the machine. But I saw nothing moving, in earth or sky or sea. The green slime on the rocks alone testified that life was not extinct. A shallow sandbank had appeared in the sea and the water had receded from the beach. I fancied I saw some black object flopping about upon this bank, but it became motionless as I looked at it, and I judged that my eye had been deceived, and that the black object was merely a rock. ....

From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over."

Can there be any meaning in a world without a future? This is a question about individual human life - none of us gets out of here alive - and about the whole human race. And if the Doctor is the thematic opposite to the individual, mortal, human, then the Timelords are the thematic opposite to the whole inevitably mortal human race. And so it transpires, in this episode which deals with the end of humanity, that the Timelord race isn't *quite* as gone as might have been supposed.

[As an aside, it occurs to me that New Who, particularly Torchwood, has taken great pains to state that there's no afterlife, that when we're gone we're gone. But. If Dr Who is a god (which he is) we still have the old religious get-out, that our lives are eternal because they continue to live in the mind of The Eternal. If the Doctor lives forever, if he always remembers you, if, for no obvious reason, he Loves All Humans, then in a way you go on forever too.]

So. The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords. They are awesome, is the first thing, and get better the more you watch them. Either that, or they contain some kind of brain-altering signal which just makes you *think* they're getting better and better. Eh, who cares, it's all about the experience, right? But, the Doctor has a dog bowl that says Doctor! And, he and the Master have the hottest phone sex ever! And the Master's wife is so beautifully, subtly played, just try watching it through keeping your eyes on her face whenever she's on the screen. OK, but also, thematically...

Would it be OK to be immortal if there were other people who were immortal too? Fundamentally, it seems to me, this two-parter says "yes, as long as you could persuade them to stay with you. But that could be a lot harder than you think." All phone sex jokes aside, the Doctor and the Master want each other. They are each other's only solution to the Problem of Immortality - that, because they will not grow old as we that are left grow old, they will forever be alone. Interestingly, they each want to do precisely the same thing to each other. The Master puts the Doctor in a cage. The Doctor wants to imprison the Master in his Tardis - he is the only person for whom the Doctor would consider giving up his wandering.

Among other thematic elements which I haven't properly sorted through yet: the Master's weapon against the Doctor is not his most favourite tissue compression but *age*. The fundamental proof of the grotesqueness of his immortality. And the revelation of the identity of the Face of Boe as another grotesque immortal. And the ring, and what it signifies, and the nod to the Ring of Rassillon. Must come back to this.

And then of course there's the return of the human race. Utopia, the Way Out of the end of the world turned out to be a U-turn. Is that OK? Resoundingly no. Would it have been better for them to stay at the end of the universe and die? Probably not. Are there any answers to this question? No. There aren't. And this is where these six episodes are glorious. They are a full investigation, a probing analysis from about a dozen different angles, of what it means to be mortal, of what it could mean to be a god. And of course they give no easy answers, because there are no easy answers. That's what art means.

I find I have *so much more to say about this*. Anyone know of a Dr Who conference running in the next year or two?

Pride and Publication

I was writing a response to Guy's post at Vex Appeal (which is a response to a post on the Penguin blog which is a response to a news story about a bloke who sent out Jane Austen chapters under his own name to see what'd happen) in the comments, but it got a bit long, so I thought I'd put it here instead.

OK, so, confession. I also had a bit of a sense of humour failure listening to that guy on the Today programme. OK, he's done a funny thing. It *is* funny. (Although quite obviously Jane Austen's novels wouldn't get published today. For one thing, she wouldn't *write like that* today. She *invented* the free-indirect voice, for goodness' sake. She'd be producing some astonishing innovation in form that everyone would end up using, not just historical pastiche.)

But, getting back to the point, the guy said about the most annoying thing it's possible to say to anyone involved in books. "It's a Catch-22 situation; you can't get a publisher without an agent and you can't get an agent without a publisher." Which is *just not true*. Getting published is difficult, because it relies not just on how good you are, but also on whether your work is saleable (a completely different phenomenon; it's possible to be very very good, but for no one to be interested in buying your work. Sad but true.) But, if your work is good, you'll probably eventually find an agent to represent you. (Probably. Nothing is certain.)

Fundamentally, this guy seems pretty typical of a certain kind of person one does sometimes encounter at literary events. They've tried to get published and failed and now believe that the system is corrupt and that only insiders get anywhere. Which... isn't true. This guy wasn't sending out bits of Jane Austen because he thought it was funny, he was trying to prove a point; that publication is impossible, no matter how good your work is.

The thing is, it's probably easier for him to believe that than it is for him to believe that his novel isn't that good, and he should put it aside now, call it his "training book" and start work on a new one. It's hard to accept that work we've done is rubbish. However, it's one of the most important skills of doing good creative work. As is the ability to take criticism. Which one gets the feeling this guy really hasn't mastered.

In summary: if you're trying to become a published writer, don't spend your time trying to woo agents or publishers, or trying to prove to them that they're rubbish, or worrying about the literary "in-crowd". Spend your time *writing*.

One down

Am I the only person who noticed that BBC Radio 4 made a sort of ARG last week? In the Woman's Hour drama slot, which may well be why it hasn't been picked up more. There was a crossword with daily clues which related to the unfolding story. All they needed was a phone number you could call to provide the solution to the mystery yourself and it would have been all the way there. One thing - they keep mentioning websites in this story, but don't say what the urls are. The alternate reality gamer in me believes that it *must* be possible to work out the urls from the story but maybe I'm just overthinking.

Expectations

People keep saying to me (well, a couple of people): you should blog more often. And I say: about what? And they say: well, anything. And I say: isn't that likely to come out sounding rather trivial? And they roll their eyes and try to explain the point of blogs. I don't quite understand, but I'm trying. So, in that spirit:

Is it me or have things changed at Yo Sushi? I know it was never the height of food sophistication or the most authentic experience in town. Still, I seem to remember that when I first went (circa 2000) they did have people actually making sushi in the chefs area. Perhaps I've just overlaid my memory with other, better, sushi I've had since, but in my memory my first time at Yo included the flashing knives, the slabs of fish sliced thinly before my eyes, the swift and expert formation of rolls.

At the Yo I went to for lunch today, most of the staff seemed to be engaged in comparatively skill-free activities: taking pre-sliced sashimi from boxes and portioning it onto dishes, slicing cling-film wrapped pre-rolled futomaki into discs, counting out pre-made maki onto plates. Only one woman was actually making sushi, and she had to consult a copy of the menu to see what she was supposed to be making. Yo is increasingly seeming like the McDonalds of sushi.

Am I imagining it? Was it always like this, or has Yo's aggressive expansion created room for these economies of scale, depriving diners of the theatre of sushi-making? I always liked the conveyor belt, but I can't say I'm fond of this production line.

However, a thing that entirely exceeded my expectations for drama and theatre lately was the BBC's latest Classic Serial - No Name by Wilkie Collins. You can find it here for the next few days: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/classic_serial.shtml. It's just brilliant: funny and racey and exciting with one of those wonderful empowered Victorian heroines everyone loves since Tipping the Velvet. I predict that BBC TV execs will have been listening to it too, and No Name will be a BBC1 Christmas drama in two or three years time. 

Presume not that I am the thing I was

Very many things have changed for me since I published my novel. My life sometimes seems completely unrecognisable to me. It can be quite unsettling. So I hoped that I'd manage to keep some things that were important to me just the same; but life doesn't always work out how we hoped. One of the things I most wanted to keep in my life was this game I've been working on for the past three years: Perplex City. It has been, I think it's fair to say, the best job I've ever had. Like all good things, though, it's come to an end. Not forever, they say, but indefinitely enough for me and the other members of the Perplex City team to have been told our services are no longer required. Endings are hard, even endings that are called "indefinite postponement". So, if you've come here looking for thoughts about the book, apologies - I just want to take a little bit of time to mourn Perplex City. To think about what it's meant to be involved in it.

It's funny, but I've always been a bit invisible in the Perplex City world. I think I thought that the *writer* of a game that tried to pretend it wasn't a game *ought* to be invisible. I haven't taken part in the fan forums or appeared in public as a spokesperson for the game. When I wrote that I knew where the Cube was buried, several of the players decided I was probably making it up. But, despite my invisibility, Perplex City has been important to me.

It has been a real privilege to work on something so groundbreaking, so innovative. It's been exciting, stimulating and rewarding to be able to pursue so many different projects. From graphic novel writing to puzzle design, from episodic fiction to live writing improv (who even knew such a thing was possible?) Perplex City has pushed me in dozens of new directions. To say it's been an education is to say too little. I have heard the chimes at midnight.

But most of all it's been the people. We'll all say this, I expect, in different ways. Perplex City hasn't just been a place to work, for me, it's been a community; and coming from where I come from, I value community more than most. It hasn't been so easy for me to be part of the Orthodox Jewish world this past year, and Perplex City has been my safe place. I have felt held by it, sustained by it, even while so many other parts of my life swirled and dissolved. I have never ever worked somewhere where I've made so many real friends. I never even knew it was possible.

When I left Freshfields to write full-time I always imagined that my ideal life would be one of pure writing; endless days of concentrating on my own work. And that life is great, really it is. I just never imagined I'd actually find something even better. I think we all feel - Adrian and Andrea, David and Jey, and me - that this has been a once-in-a-lifetime experience. We've been so lucky; so many people never get to feel this passion. It's worse, when something you truly loved is over, than if you didn't really care. But it's better to have cared.

So, if anyone happens to know of a ground-breaking geeky game mixing skills from role-playing games, treasure-hunt books and video games with a stonking narrative who happen to be in need of a writer then... ah, I could be the bitter curmudgeon sitting in a corner saying "yeah, this is fine, but it's not as good as Perplex City".

but no one's yet asked whether I write with a pen or a pencil

My paperback's going to be published next month, so I'm back into readings-mode: going places, reading from my novel (which I finished almost two years ago now, I've pretty much forgotten what it's about, all I have is the memory of the other times I've described it), answering questions. Which leads me to this rather uncharitable but psychologically necessary act: a list of the bizarrest questions I've been asked in the past year. I may come back and add to it if more return to my memory, but for now my top favourites are:

• As an author, do you call for more compassion in the world? (A: Yes? I expect so?)
• How has your childhood affected the person you've become as an adult? (A: See the works of Sigmund Freud.)
• Out of 10, how many marks would you give yourself for this novel? (A: Out of 10, how many marks would you give yourself for that question?)
• In what ways has being Jewish influenced your personality? (A: It's made me more miserly, conniving and inclined to control the world through the twin weapons of communism and capitalism, obviously.)
• (Not so much a question, but anyway....) I liked the story, but your book had too much detail in it! I got bored reading about all these details of Jewish practice! You should have put less in! (A: Um. Skip over those bits then?)