Are we nearly there yet?

You know what writing a novel's like? It's like waking up one morning in London and saying to yourself on a whim "hey, I know what'd be fun: walking to China! That sure would be a great place to walk to." And you sit down with your atlas and a ruler and you say "OK, so it's 5,057 miles to Beijing*, let's say I walk 8 miles a day, with one day off a week, that's 105 weeks, so I should be there in just about two years. Awesome!" And you pack up a bag and set off**.

And inevitably, it doesn't go quite as smoothly as you imagined. Some days you just lope along, eating up the miles, but some days you can barely walk at all, and sometimes, horrible desolate times, you discover you've taken a wrong turn and this whole Yemen excursion was a mistake and undoing it is going to take forever. And sometimes the whole thing seems so pointless you just have to sit down for weeks at a time and eat chocolate digestives and watch daytime TV. (My analogy may be breaking down here.)

All in all, it takes more than three years for you to get past Mongolia, and by that time you're barely the same person you were when you started, and just to make yourself get up and walk every morning you've spent the past 18 months just thinking about the next 8 miles and maybe, if you're brave, the 8 miles after that.

And then suddenly, one morning, you're walking along and you realise that you can *see* China. There it is. Maybe you're on a high peak and you take out your binoculars and yup, there's China. There's Beijing***. And the thing is, by that point you have literally almost forgotten that Beijing is actually real. That there was ever going to be an end to the walking. That there was a point to the whole blooming enterprise. But there it is: the end.

And you walk towards it, and you go "huh. China. I walked to China." And then for some reason people keep asking you about China. What do you think about China? What is the meaning of China? What is the reason for China? How should China be changed to make it a better China? What can we say when we are trying to market China? But the truth is, all you really know now is how to walk, not how to be in China or understand it, or appreciate it.

So all you can really think is "I wonder where I'll walk next."

Do you see what I'm saying?

*Actual distance from my house.

**Warning, please do not attempt this.

*** I do not actually know if Beijing is visible from a high peak far away.

It's been a while

Hello there. I've been writing, honestly. My next novel is so near to being completed I can taste it, and then perhaps I'll rejoin the real world for a while. But in the meantime, I stumbled across a puzzle I wrote while I was working on Perplex City. I think it was deemed unsuitable to make it onto a puzzle card, so I present it to you here in all its glory. Enjoy.

Hmm, I guess if I'm presenting a puzzle I should probably also offer a prize. Well... how about the first person to email me the correct answer to this puzzle gets... a bag of pretzels. And I can throw a signed copy of Disobedience in there too.

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Child Care

It's a shame how few people read small print in contracts. If Andrea Phillips, our Ad-hoc Polymath had taken greater care examining her contract of employment, she'd have noticed the clause under which her first-born child is indentured to work at Mind Candy for seven years. Andrea may not be happy, but Mind Candy is concerned about the most efficient way to gain access to their new employee.

Since Sasha is in New York and the Mind Candy office is in London, she will have to be posted to her employers. Mind Candy is not heartless, however, and is willing to provide for food for the journey to be packaged with Sasha.

Sasha can subsist on a diet of hard and soft pretzels and apple juice for up to three months. Each hard pretzel weighs 5 grams, each soft pretzel weighs 150 grams. Sasha needs 750 grams of pretzels and 1 litre of apple juice a day. Sasha herself weighs 15 kilos. Every day of Sasha's work is worth £10 to Mind Candy. Of course, time spent in transit has no value.

Air freight parcels will be delivered in 10 days, while surface parcels will take 3 weeks. If the USPS charges £9 for the first pound and £2.40 for each subsequent pound for air freight, and charges £13 for the first 5 pounds and £0.80 for each subsequent pound for surface mail, is it more efficient for Sasha to be air-freighted from New York to London packaged in pretzels, or to be sent by surface mail? What is the difference, to the nearest £10?

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.