'You get them all the time down here,' he replied. 'Ignore them – and never pass on chain footnotes.'⁶

We were accosted by a stout man wearing a sandwich board advertising bespoke plot devices 'for the discerning wordsmith'.

'No thank you,' yelled Snell, taking me by the arm and walking us to a quieter spot between Dr Forthright's Chapter Ending Emporium and the Premier Mentor School.

'There are twenty-six floors in the Well,' he told me, waving a hand towards the bustling crowd. 'Most of them are chaotic factories of fictional prose like this one but the twenty-sixth sub-basement has an entrance to the Text Sea – we'll go down there and see them offloading the scrawltrawlers one evening.'

'What do they unload?'

'Words,' smiled Snell, 'words, words and more words. The building blocks of fiction, the DNA of Story.'

'But I don't see any books being written,' I observed, looking around.

He chuckled.

'You Outlanders! Books may look like nothing more than words on a page but they are actually an infinitely complex Imagino-Transference technology that translates odd inky squiggles into pictures inside your head – we're currently using Book Operating System V8.3. Not for long, though – Text Grand Central want to upgrade the system.'

'Someone mentioned UltraWord™ on the news last night,' I observed.

'Fancy-pants name. It's BOOK V9 to me and you. WordMaster Libris should be giving us a presentation shortly. UltraWord™ is being tested as we speak – if it's as good as they say it is, books will never be the same again!'

'Well,' I sighed, trying to get my head around this idea, 'I had always thought novels were just, well, written.'

'Write is only the word we use to describe the recording process,' replied Snell as we walked along. 'The Well of Lost Plots is where we interface the writer's imagination with the characters and plots so that it will make sense in the reader's mind. After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colours of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer – perhaps more.'

This was a new approach; I ran the idea around in my head.

'Really?' I replied, slightly doubtfully.

'Of course!' Snell laughed. 'Surf pounding the shingle wouldn't mean diddly unless you'd seen the waves cascade on to the foreshore, or felt the breakers tremble the beach beneath your feet, now, would it?'

'I suppose not.'

'Books,' said Snell, 'are a kind of magic.'

I thought about this for a moment and looked around at the chaotic fiction factory. My husband was or is a novelist – I had always wanted to know what went on inside his head and this, I figured, was about the nearest I'd ever get.⁷ We walked on, past a shop called 'A Minute Passed'. It sold descriptive devices for marking the passage of time – this week they had a special on Seasonal Changes.