Delirious thoughts from a jumbled brain

I have my usual summer hay fever at the moment, combined with a nasty cough and a few spadefuls of antibiotics.

So what follows isn’t really a logically sequenced e-mail. If anything, it might be like the precursor to something useful – a collection of raw materials, in effect. But that’s the hopeful way to look at it. More than likely, what follows is just the ramblings of a delirious brain and sooner or later I will start telling you that I am the lost king of Sardinia and have the power to sprout feathers.

So, I’m not going to be too strategic here. I am going to spill out what I have and you can pick amongst the debris as you will. Deal?

OK. Then here we go:

1. Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse is – yeugh

I mean, obviously, I have never experienced it first-hand. And I could never see myself wanting to wear those ridiculous goggles. And maybe I’m not of the metaverse generation anyway. But have you ever seen a screen grab from matters multiverse nonsense that makes you want to explore further? It looks like a corporate waiting room, dunked in Really Bad Art, then extruded through some Hunger Games style dystopia.

It isn’t only me who thinks that way. The firm has been losing stupid amounts of money on it and the popularity of the service still seems rock bottom.

2. Jane Austen’s metaverse is – yum

The art of fiction is obviously lovely and has none of the problems associated with the metaverse. But it does share some characteristics. You are an altered you in an altered world. It is a game that plays with and relies on an altered reality.

I suppose it is true that, in Zuckerberg’s metaverse, you mostly role-play as you, rather than Jane Austen’s Emma or Melville’s Ishmael or JK Rowling’s Harry Potter. But that doesn’t seem like a key difference. After all, when you enjoy a Jane Austen novel, it is because you choose to identify your hopes and fears with those of the heroine. So, in effect you are choosing to role-play as an avatar in somebody else’s meta-reality, just as you can choose your wardrobe in the metaverse.

3. Jane Austen’s world has way better clothes.

Also: Jane’s characters have legs.

4. The difference is probably not terrible graphics

Jane Austen doesn’t come with graphics.

5. I went to get antibiotics yesterday

The pharmacy was closed for lunch which was really annoying. So I sat in a coffee shop while I waited. The woman next to me was editing her novel. I mean I can’t be totally sure it was her novel but it darn well looked like one and somehow the way she was working on it was the way a novelist cares about something they have given birth to. She didn’t look like a professional editor doing a professional job all the 15th manuscript of the year. She sat forwards, almost cradling it. Her attention was certainly focused, but I would say that it was lovingly focused.

I am really not sure whether this is relevant.

6. Mark Zuckerberg wants you to love his technology

That’s the focus, isn’t it? You are meant to marvel at the possibilities. If that kind of technology has a selling point, it is that you can do anything. I mean, not have realistic bodies, of course, but, apart from that, you can do anything.

7. Novelists offer the opposite

You can’t do anything. You can’t make choices. You get on a train at the start of a novel, and then steel tracks steer you all the way to an outcome that you, the reader, has not chosen.

8. Readers choose the type of fun fair ride

Obviously, somebody picking up a novel by Jane Austen wants a shot of something different than does somebody picking up a novel by Louise Penny or Stephanie Meyers, or whoever else. But once a reader has chosen their type of ride, the power of choice leaves them completely. The author is in control.

9. That woman. In that coffee shop.

But it isn’t control without kindness or focus. I watched that woman writing her novel and she was caring about every word, as she should have done. As I would have advised her to do.

10. The technology of printing is still basically 15th century

The machines have got fancier, but they are still all about slapping some ink on some hard-wearing surface and pressing that against paper. Still. In this day and age.

11. We like books

Physical books. Things that you can throw at an annoying child, or leave on a bus, or put on a shelf somewhere. E-books have been revolutionary, but we still like the old-fashioned things too.

12. The metaverse is empty. A book is a conversation.

Between a human author and a human reader. And about a topic that they both deeply care about.

13. You can swat a hornet with a book.

I mean, I’m all for live-and-let-live. But there was a massive hornet in the kids’ room with a sting on it like some kind of scary-insect-Apache-gunship-poison-dagger thing. I couldn’t get the damn hornet to go out of the window, so it ended up dying at the hands of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five. Can’t do that with an e-book. Now the kids want to squash the hornet into some modelling clay, so they can make a plaster cast of its corpse. Not sure if that counts as a parenting win or a parenting fail.

14. And look, it’s love, isn’t it? It all comes back to love.

Zuckerberg’s metaverse seems cold because it is cold. It seems technologically focused because it is technologically focused. And books seem warm and human and living because they are born of a kind of love.

That woman in the coffee shop. Me when I write, you when you write. All of us have complicated relationships with our creations, of course. We are never only loving. We are also anxious and paranoid and fearful and self-doubting and all the rest.

But that is what we transmit when we write. We transmit love. And that is why people read it.

Put love in your books. And swallow antibiotics by the handful.

Til soon.

Harry