YES, THE RUMOURS ARE true: soon the LongPen will scribble again, this time uniting the Cheltenham Festival and Somewhere in Toronto with a very long thread of invisible ink. And on October 11, it will be me on the other end of it, doing a reading, signing books, being interviewed, talking to you up close – all the regular features except the shedding of skin cells and flu viruses into your nose.

Or it will be a virtual facsimile of me. For those who have not been following the plot so far, the LongPen is a device that allows you to write actual signatures – or doodles – on books from vast distances away. I first thought it up in a moment of heightened sanity, and it has rapidly passed from hallucination through various prototype explosions and lab fires to solid reality, garnering everything from astonishment to jeers to outrage to fears along the way. As I explained to a tech-minded interviewer recently: “We’ve been through four phases of reaction: 1. You are a lunatic. 2. It will never work. 3.You are malignant and a bad influence. 4. This is brilliant.”

“Oh,” he said, “those are the normal stages.”

I’m happy to have reached “This is brilliant”, but the third stage isn’t completely over yet – although the BookNinja blogger who dubbed us “The Frankenhand” had a conversion experience after actually using the thing, there are still those who dub us “The Evil Claw” and proclaim that I should have my brain put into a jar and shot into outer space.

(We’re getting some T-shirts made for LongPenners with “The Evil Claw” on them. Should we print extras? Limited edition! Collector’s item! Maybe we’ll hide them around the planet, with cryptic clues as to where they can be found.)

What does the LongPen look like? One person has unkindly said that its kiosk – the part where a great big head (mine, in Cheltenham, we hope) will appear on the Tandberg videoconferencing screen and say things like: “How do you spell Jason”, and where the pen will descend and write “Happy Birthday Auntie Madge”, looks a little too much like a bar fridge. But why too much? Don’t bar fridges hold out a promise of infinite goodies inside? I have to say they do. But I would have to say that, wouldn’t I? I am, after all, somewhat ridiculously, chair of its board.

I would also have to say that concocting the LongPen – and all that has followed – has been one of the oddest things I have done in my life. I have met all kinds of people whom, as a poet and fiction writer, I would never ordinarily have met. For instance, I’ve rubbed shoulders with a number of hugely bright techno-geeks. Or not shoulders, exactly – they are quite a lot taller than me – but I’ve had a really intense view of their shirt pockets, and have listened to their joyous dawn chorus of indecipherable cries, and have seen the sun rise over their inspirational empty beer bottles . . . But I wax lyrical.

Here’s the part where I say: “Seriously, now.”

Seriously, now. In August, at the Edinburgh Festival, the LongPen brought a frail Norman Mailer from New England to a sell-out audience of enthusiastic Scots. Deftly interviewed by Andrew O’Hagan, he burst into full Normanhood like a paper flower plunged into water and proceeded to denounce Bush and Blair and all their works, and then to sign his books. A few days later, a relaxed and witty Alice Munro appeared from Bayfield, Ontario. Neither could have been induced to take a transatlantic flight, but they were willing to fly by LongPen, and their fans were happy that they did.

In June, Tim Flannery came from Australia, George Monbiot from Wales, and Robert Kennedy Jr from a hilltop in Virginia, all to the Green Living Show in Toronto. The carbon emission savings were what mattered most to these environmental activists, for the LongPen is very green in that respect. Its applications are much wider than author-signing: anything you can sign – except, so far, stomachs – you can sign with the LongPen. That includes cheques and contracts: I’ve done both.

If the LongPen in its new, smaller desktop model can help to cut business travel and its huge carbon emissions by adding the signing function to videoconferencing – and yes, your signature is still the cheapest and most reliable ways of establishing your identity – it will be doing its planet-saving bit. For the real Frankenmonsters are the gas guzzlers of all kinds, and the real Evil Claw is the human hand that drives them forward.

Today’s LongPen is to tomorrow’s LongPen as the first chunky black telephone was to the sleek, many-coloured mobile phone. What transformations will it undergo? Perhaps, when my brain is circling the planet in that jar, I’ll look down and see the ultimate Little LongPen that could perform its distance-shrinking magic on a billion twinkling desks . . .

Margaret Atwood will not be appearing at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on Thursday October 11 at 8.45am. (But the LongPen will.)
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