Extraordinary 75% giveaway!

At some point in the next hours/days/weeks A Box Of Birds will reach 75% of its funding target. To celebrate, all new subscribers (from now until the 75% mark is reached) will be entered into a draw for a free signed copy of one of my books. Here's how it works: 

1. Subscribers to the book are listed here. I'll be keeping an eye on this list and noting who subscribes between now and the point when 75% is reached. 

2. The names will go into a hat, and I'll ask a small, unpaid research assistant to choose one name at random. 

3. I'll invite that subscriber to choose a book and an inscription. You can win a copy of any available edition of any of my books, including translations, and I will sign it and send it anywhere in the world. That includes a first edition of my previous novel, The Auctioneer, and my new non-fiction book, Pieces of Light. (It doesn't include my academic books which are a. expensive and b. boring.)

That's all. The draw is open now and it closes when the book hits 75%. Start pledging!

Meades on memory and place

I had the pleasure yesterday of doing my first reading from Pieces of Light at the Hay Festival. The event, chaired by John Mitchinson and Unbound, put me together with the legendary Jonathan Meades, whose new book Museum Without Walls is a funny and incisive collection of writings on architecture, places and the people who inhabit them. Looking dapper and ever so slightly decadent in his overcoat and silk scarf (Hay was rather chilly this year), Jonathan read out a hilarious demolition of the aesthetics of the Olympic site, which included one of the longest and funniest lists you will ever read in the pages of a book.

I read an extract from the 'Walking at Goldhanger' chapter of Pieces of Light, which describes a walk I took along the Essex coastline in search of memories of my Dad. One of my interests in this book is in how we negotiate memories of people who are no longer here—with 'negotiate' being the operative word. I talked about how memory functions as a kind of bricolage, a putting-together from 'scrounged materials intended for other purposes', to use Meades' words. We reconstruct the past by putting together different kinds of information—sensory, perceptual, factual, semantic—and creating the collage in different ways each time we are called upon to remember. 

There were some great comments from the floor, including one accusation that I was being 'intellectually arrogant' by claiming authoritative knowledge about how the questioner's own memory worked. I responded by saying that I wasn't just reporting the findings of a couple of psychological surveys, but rather summing up decades of careful research by outstanding scientists who have used a range of different methods. If it is intellectually arrogant to aim for a robust, phenomenologically sensitive science of human experience (which challenges the myths of memory's function and rejects a simplistic reliance on introspection and 'just-knowing'), then I will happily accept the charge. 

It's only a fiver

To celebrate their first birthday, those lovely people at Unbound are offering a £5 voucher towards a pledge on any of their books. That means you can help A Box of Birds to be published for only a fiver (the minimum pledge is £10). That's the price of a London pint (I think; I never carry cash in London). What you'll be doing is helping me with a book I've been working on for more than a decade, and which now finally has a chance to see the light of day.

If you have any queries about how the process works, this blog post will help. If you'd like to read a summary of the conversations that have been going on around the book (including coverage in Wired, the Telegraph, the Independent and BBC Radio 4), please read this. You can also read what some wonderful writers have been saying about the book.

If you've already pledged, thank you (though please feel free to pledge again as a gift). If you haven't subscribed yet, now is your chance. The £5 voucher is available to anyone, but only until 12 June. All the details are here.

A Box of Birds: update

A Box of Birds is now 60% funded. Lots of people have pledged support to make this book happen, but there is still a way to go. Here are some things you can do to help.

1. Spread the word. I have been doing a lot of publicity around the book, and there are plenty of ways of getting into the conversation. I’ve tweeted about it a lot, and my Facebook page also has links for easy sharing.

I followed up my interview with Jonah Lehrer in a piece for Radio 4’s ‘All in the Mind’, which you can listen to again here. The book has had a second pre-publication quote from the acclaimed novelist Sara Maitland, which you can read here.

I have written about the Unbound crowd-funding process here, and answered some common questions about the process works. I wrote about the challenges of combining being a scientist and a writer in this blog post for the Independent. I have also written a blog post specifically about how neuroscience explains motivations, and how novelists can make use of that knowledge.

I was interviewed about the book for the magazine Notes from the Underground. The book was also mentioned in this piece in the Daily Telegraph.

I’ll be doing an event at the Hay Festival on Tuesday 5 June. Looking further ahead, I’ll be in conversation about fiction and science with the American writer Ben Marcus at the Edinburgh festival on 11 August, and I’ll speaking about the book at Medicine Unboxed: Belief in Cheltenham in November.

2. Persuade a friend. If everybody who has pledged for the book could persuade one more person, I would quickly reach the target. You can find out who has already pledged support by going here. For those who want to try before they buy, the first chapter of the book is free to read at the pledge page, and the second chapter has just been published too. The third chapter is posted in the Shed, to which only subscribers have access.

3. Pledge again. Unbound make beautiful books which are perfect gifts. This gift is even more special because you can put the recipient’s name in the back of the book. Supporters’ names will appear in every subsequent edition, including the trade edition which will be published by Faber next year (if the Unbound edition reaches its target) and any foreign editions and translations. Remember that the Unbound edition will appear some time before the Faber one, so those who subscribe now get an exclusive preview.

It’s easy to change the name that appears in the back of the book. Simply go into the Shed (as a subscriber you have access) and press the button at the right.

Thanks for your support. 

How do I pledge?

This crowd-funding business is new territory for all of us, so I thought I'd put together a few FAQs to help you decide.

This is one of those internet scams, isn't it? Not at all. The people behind Unbound are highly respected in the literary and media worlds. They have a sound business model and have already brought established writers like Terry Jones and Tibor Fischer into print, with Kate Mosse and Jonathan Meades set to follow soon. They make lovely books and publicise them well, and I want mine to be one of them.

What are the risks, then? There aren't any. You either get a beautiful book (and help a writer get back into doing what he loves most) or, if the project isn't funded, you get a full refund.

Why are you self-publishing? I'm not. If I were self-publishing I would be paying for my book to be printed. (Here's some more on how the Unbound model differs.) There are many reasons for taking the subscription-funding route, and one is that it gives me a chance to talk about why the book is important before it is actually published. (I've been doing that here and here.) There's nothing particularly new in the subscription-funding model; it was big in the eighteenth century and Unbound are simply reviving it for the modern era.

What's this about getting your name in the back of the book? When you pledge for a book, your name is recorded and entered into the subscription list, which will then be printed in the back of every edition that appears.

So can I change the name to make it a gift? Certainly. Once you have pledged, there's a button on the right which allows you to change the name in the back of the book. Change this to the name of the gift recipient, and their name will be printed in the back of every edition of the novel. How's that for literary immortality?

Am I going to get loads of junk mail? No. You have to register with an email address so that Unbound know who you are. They send a weekly newsletter, but you can easily opt out of that. That's all.

It's OK, I'll just wait for the paperback. Er, no. There will be no paperback unless the project is funded. Help me to cross the finishing line and there will be a subsequent trade edition in partnership with Faber (due next year), with the potential for foreign editions and translations. Once the book is published by Unbound (in August, if I get funded on schedule), it will automatically be eligible for prizes and various other good things. But for that to happen, I need your support. You can do everything you need to do here. Thanks so much.

The pull of the story

A few weeks ago I went to London to film the pitch for my novel, A Box of Birds. This will be my first novel for some time (my debut, The Auctioneer, was published way back in 1999), and so it was a big moment for me. I was meeting John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, to talk to him about the themes of the book. We met at Paramount, the restaurant at the top of Centre Point in Soho. The pitch was filmed (by the wonderful and multitalented Laura Kidd) against the extraordinary backdrop of London viewed from 33 floors up. You can see the results here.

It was a wide-ranging, enlivening conversation, as all my chats with John are. I got the chance to explain how A Box of Birds is my way of taking on a fundamental question: how we should live our lives, if we accept (as modern neuroscience asks us to) that we are no more than complex systems of connections. With Yvonne, I wanted to write the story of the first materialist in fiction. That statement probably seems over-bold and certainly needs some qualification, as there are plenty of other novels that touch on themes of neuroscientific materialism. But I don’t think novelists have gone far enough in exploring the implications of this philosophy for their fictional characters. I’ve written more about this debate here, and there’ll be lots more in the weeks to come. If the book is funded, it will be published in the autumn.

In a way, the most difficult question was the last one. ‘What makes you keep doing it?’ John asked me. At an emotional level, I have no doubt about the answer, but it’s hard to put it into words. I have always written fiction—I had a complete draft of a novel at the age of nine—and it’s not too melodramatic to say that I have dedicated my life to it. In one sense it’s the most natural thing in the world for me to do. I suspect that what John was really asking was: What makes you keep doing it, when you could be doing other things? I have a part-time career as an academic, after all: why isn’t that enough?

If I knew the answer to that, I would have solved a basic riddle about human creativity. What makes us want to tell stories? What do the counterfactuals of fiction give us that the realities of science don’t?

There is much to say on this topic, but here's one idea to start with. Looking for the commonalities between science and writing is not a new endeavour, and people before me have considered this relationship very fruitfully. (Here's one great example, and an equally interesting response.) When I'm doing science, I'm trying to go from the specificities of data to theories and principles that can apply more generally. Writers do that too. They look for the particular that can speak to the universal, the part that can stand for the whole.

In some ways, though, fiction has more to do with engineering. When you write a novel, you are building a model and then putting it in a wind tunnel. You're looking to see how the stresses of events impact upon your characters: how they deform them, and draw out their resiliences. You always start with a character, I think, a character in a situation... and then you put your model down on the bench and see how it runs. For me, with this book, that was about saying 'What if you put a materialist into a story? How would she behave when stuff started to happen? How would her view of the world, and of herself, change?' I honestly don't think we can understand the true meaning of neuroscience from within the discipline. We have to look at how it functions in the real world, how it changes our understanding.

So that's one reason why I do fiction alongside science. In the end, I'm not going to be able to give a definitive answer to the question that John asked me, except to the extent of knowing what these things mean to me personally. That’s the bit that’s hard to put into words, and it’s what I tried to explain to John. I’m less of a person when I’m not writing fiction. Without it, I just don't understand things so well. 

Memory Week

Happy 2012 to everyone. This week is Memory Week at the Guardian and Observer, and I've had great fun being involved.

The main event has been an online memory experiment designed by Jon Simons and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge. This is already looking like it could become the biggest memory experiment ever conducted, so please join in. You can hear me talking about the study on BBC Tees (at around 1:50 on this link). You can also read the press release here. Jon's latest blog post gives some more background to the study.

On Wednesday, I did a live Q&A on memory on the Guardian's website (1-2pm). Comments are now closed but I hope to keep the conversation going on Twitter.

Next Saturday, the Guardian will be publishing a free guide called 'Make the Most of Your Memory'. On Sunday, the Observer will be publishing another free guide incorporating memory tests and exercises. The supplements will also be available online.