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?)

Ghettoplotz

OK, so I'm coming entirely late to the party here but may I just mention the extreme awesomeness of Ghettoplotz? Saw them for the first time last night and was blown away. What they do is hard to describe. Apparently it's a "live klezmer-house dancefloor mashup project", which doesn't really communicate the bizarre perfect rightness of combining Oseh Shalom with Madonna's Hung Up in front of a backdrop of magpie-picked images of Jewish life. They rocked. I loved it. And if there's a sexier sight than three fiercely intelligent, hot girls with Jewish hair rocking out on stage to Chassidic chants mixed with house music, I haven't seen it. They made me proud of my curls.

Sunday, December 24, 2006 at 10:45 PM

So, I've been to quite a few "holiday" parties lately, many of them parties where I literally knew no one and had to stick my hand out and introduce myself, which can be quite good fun when the mood is on you. One such was the Guardian Christmas party last week (very good party, thanks for having me :-) ), at which I was surprised to find that, when I stuck my hand out, some people did say something along the lines of "oh, you're that girl who wrote that Jewish book". Which is certainly a pleasant sensation. I haven't yet been doing this long enough to have got tired or feel typecast, evidently.

Anyway, at the Guardian party I met a couple of people who said, after getting names out of the way, "you know, I'm Jewish myself but I never talk about it". Or words to that effect. In fact, I've had this a lot, not just this year but since I started writing the book. At UEA, three people in my MA Creative Writing class 'came out' to me as being Jewish. They always did it privately, always a little uncertain. I've had it since: famous writers at literary events mention in passing that their mother is Jewish, or their mother's mother. People who've interviewed me for newspapers come out with it at the end of our conversation.

These aren't secular Jews, comfortable in their identity but uninterested in their religion. They aren't even non-identifying Jews who think that Jewishness is simply unimportant. These are people who know they're Jewish (or know their mother was Jewish, or their grandmother) but don't know what to do with that information. They don't know what it means, or where to place it in their landscape. Often, I feel that the subtext of our conversation is the desire for an answer to that question: what does it mean to be a Jew? Which, it has to be said, I don't have an answer for.

The number of these people I've met makes me wonder whether the census survey vastly under-reports the number of Jews in Britain. None of these people would ever put their religion or ethnicity on the census as 'Jewish'. If they know that their mother's mother was Jewish, and I say "oh, well you're definitely one of us then" that's generally greeted with suprise. But pleasure too - the pleasure is obvious and immediate.

I feel privileged, actually, to hear these people's stories. They're stories which are, by their nature, lost from the mainstream robustly Orthodox Judaism I grew up with. One person had been teased in the playground about being a 'Jew', but his parents denied it - only when they died did he discover the truth. Many people come up with a behaviour or a speech pattern of the Jewish parent or grandparent and say "is that Jewish? is that what it is?" And sometimes I can say "yes, feeding you till you thought you might pop is Jewish", and sometimes I can't.

I feel lucky to have enough knowledge that Jewishness isn't so opaque to me, and happy to be able to explain these people to themselves in whatever marginal way. But often, in retrospect, I feel slightly uncomfortable. I'm not an arbiter of Jewishness. I have, it must be obvious from the novel, deep-seated and intractable problems with Judaism, at the same time that it is a part of my heart. It makes me feel that we should be doing more, though, to reach out to anyone who wants to be a part of our world. To say "yes, you are a Jew" more often, to give information without attempting to push observance. The only organisations that are really doing this kind of outreach now are the fundamentalist groups, trying to make all Jews in the world Orthodox. Which is their thing, and fair play to 'em. But I wish there were someone doing something more simple: just saying here we are, Jewish, come and find out what a world of different things that can mean.

I know it's really winter when...

... I've done all my Friday shopping and am already making chicken soup by 9.30am.

Windy day in Hendon this morning; walking on Brent Street I saw two men lose their kippot in unexpected gusts. In both cases, they clapped their hands to their heads and stared plaintively up as the little black discs whirled off and away to seek their fortune who knows where? It's sights like this that I stay in Hendon for.