As I understand it, it is quite common among investors and the like to make bets were the winning party will pay up, as the winner of such a bet is usually in a much better position to pay, at least provided they took their own advice. Camilla and I recently made a bet in the same spirit, agreeing that the first of us to become obscenely rich by writing novels will buy the other one a castle. Having made the bet, we further agreed that on Sundays, we will go to a nice bar, have a glass of wine and work on our novels. And as it was Sunday at the time, we went to Biblos, on the corner of Chambers Street and South Bridge, which by the way turned out to be nowhere near as nice as the sofas and the bookshelves would seem to suggest, and started working on our novels.

Short digression: Neither of us actually have the time nor the inclination to become full time authors, but quite frequently Camilla will say something like "Why can't you invent teleportation, and make us obscenely rich?", to which I will reply "Why don't you just write a ridiculously successful series of children's books, and make us obscenely rich?". And I'm fairly sure writing books, even if it's not exactly an easy way to get rich fast, is still a more likely way to make heaps of money than inventing teleportation. Not that I think teleportation wouldn't be an instant hit, I just think it's still a while off. Anyway, instead of talking about writing a book, we thought we might just as well start writing down some ideas, so if inspiration or unemployment suddenly strikes, at least we have somewhere to start.

After ordering wine and commenting upon the fact that the place wasn't quite as nice as we had imagined, mostly due to the music and the big screen TV (or TV, as it's probably called nowadays) showing Friends, we started out at oposite ends of the high-tech-low-tech scale. Camilla opened up a Moleskine notebook (reporter style) and started making notes with her fountain pen, while I opened up the iPad app store and started looking for writer's apps. I actually found a quite nice one called ThinkBook, which uses a Turing-machine inspired sliding pointer to allow you to easily move text and rearrange notes.

In any case, it turns out writing a best-selling novel is slightly harder than I had imagined, so even though Camilla and I have now spent about two hours making notes and thinking up ideas, I wouldn't say we are very far along percantage wise. Thus, I hereby invite anyone else to partake in our wager. Of course that's a good thing for me, as more people means I have a better chance of loosing, and thus getting a free castle, but I think it's going to be good fun, so everyone should join in.

-Tor Nordam