1.  Ereaders are all so ugly, apart from the fancy expensive one.  I have enough white and grey plastic in my life already thank you.  And the fancy expensive one is way too fancy and expensive. 
2.  Why should I buy a piece of hardware that restricts where I can purchase content?  I do not want to buy all my books from that online bookseller.  I do not want to have to have a whole pile of different ereader apps on my fancy smartphone according to where I buy my content. 
3.  Why should I buy a thing that restricts what I can do with the books I buy, that won’t allow me to lend books to friends?  That’s just stupid. 
4.  Ereaders cost too much, even the cheaper ones cost too much, and I’m paranoid that an EVEN BETTER ONE will suddenly appear, and I’m tired of buying things that become obselete within months - days - of purchase.
5.  All the companies involved, especially the fruit one, and the one-breasted warrior woman one, are way too annoying with their attempts to rule the world. 
6.  I want to pay for content, i.e. STUFF TO READ, not the platform to read it on.  I know, I know, a book is a platform too, and, given that most writers get less than 10% per book sold, you could argue that I’m already paying more than 90% of a book’s price to get the gadget (in this case a book) that delivers the content (the words the writer wrote), and that, in the case of a book, it’s insanity to buy the same gadget over and over again, when you could buy just one gadget and get each new set of content delivered straight to that instead.  I’d be happy to do that, apart from numbers 1-5 above. 

The truth is I really do want an ereader.  I love the idea of a device for reading, a device that holds all my books in one slim well-designed piece of kit, a device that allows me to annotate and search and read, read, read.  But the device I want, that allows me to buy books from wherever I want, whenever I want, to share them with whoever I want, to read how/when/and why I want (whether that’s alone in a corner or social media’d up the hoo-hah), in whatever format I want (which, ahem, includes Flash) DOES NOT EXIST.

That’s my Monday beginning of September rant for the year. 

When I was a kid in BC the last week of summer holidays marked the time when I went off with my mum to buy school supplies.  School supplies are hugely satisfying to anyone with a stationery fetish, myself included.  Pens, binders, paper, notebooks, notepads, pencil cases, folders, rules, etc etc etc… delicious.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered that kids in London don’t need to buy school supplies!  The annual September Stationery Festival (thanks to @trudymorgancole for that) doesn’t happen here.  You don’t really have to buy kids anything before they start school here, provided their shoes and clothes still fit them.  One of the many tiny yet odd differences between my childhood and that of my kids. 

and my desk after I spent an entire day and a half clearing it. 

So now I have a desk like the people in movies and on tv!  Yay!

If a publisher or journalism outlet ever again deems me worthy of a commissioned author’s photo, I will foreswear the book-lined library backdrop in favour of a mobile phone mast or wifi hub, I swear. 

Two conversations have got me thinking, yet again, about the future of publishing, even though of late I’ve been trying to tell myself to stop thinking about the future of publishing:  one with Anna Lewis of completelynovel.com via e-mail, the other with Antonia Byatt of Arts Council England.  Publishing, as we know it today, will surely collapse due to multiple factors too complex to go into here.  The only important question left, really, is HOW TO CONNECT READERS TO WRITERS.  In a world where writers may have to become their own brands, forms of curation – whether that is prizes, or book clubs and reading groups, or the websites and blogs that we rely for personal recommendations – will be of huge importance.  The traditional role of publishers - gate-keeping - will become more akin to curation. 

In my bad-tempered way I do wonder what will happen to the big conglomerates with their huge overheads.  But, to tell the truth, I don’t really care what happens to them, and I am certain that readers don’t care about publishers either.  Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely thrilled to be published by them, that’s not what I’m saying.  What I care about, on a highly personal level, is being able to write what I want to write, being able to publish that writing in some way, and for that work to be able to find its way to readers other than my siblings.  These three things – write, publish, be read – matter more than anything else to me as a writer. 

I do want to be able to make an income from this activity as well though like most writers I will never expect to be able to live by writing alone. 

As a reader, what I want is access to good writing, to long-form sustained prose narratives as well as work that experiments with form, content, and media.  At the end of the day I don’t really care how that good writing is delivered to me, whether it is via the printed page or via digital files on a screen of some kind.  But I want to be able to find the writers I want to read, even if I’ve never heard of them before.  Which leads me back to my original upper case statement a few paragraphs back:  the only important question left, really, is HOW TO CONNECT WRITERS TO READERS.

Any publisher who isn’t addressing this directly and urgently will be in trouble soon.  And I don’t mean in trouble with me. 

And that’s my prediction for today.  I’ll go back to admiring my tv-lawyer style desk now.

Whenever I go to Bratislava, the National Theatre flies me in and out of Vienna, but I’ve never actually been to Vienna, so this time I left Bratislava a day early and spent twenty-four hours in Vienna.  My student Leo Thompson lives there, and he took me on a tour of the city on the back of his motorcycle, which was great fun.  I managed to cram in two art galleries and a walk around the city centre; I found Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust memorial sculpture in Judenplatz hugely moving.  It is ugly and squat and very very affecting. 

But a highlight for me was the Kunsthistorische Museum; this museum has a number of Velazquez paintings.  Not Las Meninas, of course, which is in the Prado, but it does have a series of three paintings of the Infanta Margarita Theresa, the little princess at the centre of Velazquez’s great painting.  The portraits of Margarita Theresa depict her aged 3, aged 5 as she is in Las Meninas (wearing the same dress, but with a much more solemn expression), and then aged around 8; once painted, these pictures were sent out to tour the royal families of Europe as a way of showing off the Infanta’s potential as a future wife.  This series of portraits astounded me. 

And now I’m home again. 

I wonder what the circumstances were for this young man.  Was it simply that he wanted to leave Romania but couldn’t afford the airfare, and had heard that you could stowaway inside a plane by climbing up through the landing gear?  Or was he desperate to get away from something?  How desperate and/or ill-informed would you have to be to consider stowing away on an airplane like this?  Did he think he’d be able to climb inside the airplane?  Or did he think that he’d be able to tuck himself away behind the landing gear and ride all the way to the plane’s destination without getting inside the plane.  He was so lucky in so many ways with this journey - only 97 minutes, flying at much lower altitudes than normal - what can that 97 minutes in the air have been like? 

All fascinating stuff for me and my project Flight Paths, and the new book I’m currently attempting to start writing. 

The same day I read about this, I also happened to read an essay by Arthur Schlesinger Jr, ‘History and National Stupidity’.  You can read the beginning of this 2006 essay online at the New York Review of Books, though I came across it in a book of collected NYBR essays called ‘The Consequences to Come:  American Power After Bush’. 

Schlesinger’s essay is remarkable - short, pithy, and very moving.  In it he discusses his own book about American President Jackson, ‘The Age of Jackson’, which Schlesinger wrote in the 1950s, in relation to a new book about Jackson and the causes of the Civil War by Sean Wilentz.  Schlesinger pithily and mercilessly lays bare the problems with his own book which, as he explains, was a product of a certain time and place, as all books - history and fiction - inevitably are.  Schlesinger says ‘I was hopelessly absorbed in the dilemmas of democratic capitalism made vivid for my generation by FDR and the New Deal, and I underplayed and ignored other aspects of the Age of Jackson.  The predicament of slaves, or the red man and the “trail of tears”...the restricted opportunities for women of the period… were shamefully out of my mind.’ 

Schlesinger begins this essay with the following statement:  ‘History is not self-executing.  You do not put a coin in the slot and have history come out.  For the past is a chaos of events and personalities into which we cannot penetrate.  It is beyond retrieval and it is beyond reconstruction.  All historians know this in their souls.’

This is why history is fascinating.  This is why each generation reconstructs the past anew.  This is why there is room for yet another book about D-Day, and yet another book about power and money.  This is why my attempt to write the ‘true’ story of Sally Naldrett, a humble maid, made homeless and jobless by the employer to whom she had devoted her life, is a worthy topic for fiction.  And, as anyone who stoops so low to actually read fiction that deals with historical subjects knows, this is why fiction can sometimes be the only way to tell the truth. 

To date the publication process of this American edition of ‘The Mistress of Nothing’ has been so interesting.  The attention to detail over the manuscript itself was like nothing I’ve ever seen before.  The ms went through two stages of copy-editing, the first for typesetting and Americanisation of the text, the second for proofing, and that in itself was an eye-opener.  And these Advance Reader’s Editions (in the UK these are called ‘bound proofs’) are lovely - it’s a very very nice bound paperback edition of the book, ‘not for resale’, full colour front and back covers - the only thing to distinguish it from a rather nice trade paperback edition is the slightly cheaper paper.  I can’t wait to see the actual hardcover edition!!!  It is going to be a thing of beauty! 

Pah to audio enhanced mutlimedia ebooks!  What was I thinking?  These Advance Reader’s Editions smell lovely!