The Inception Button should be used sparingly but when called for, it can be highly effective. Located at inception.davepedu.com, it does one thing: plays the sound from Christopher Nolan’s film Inception, which signifies that a new dream – a new level of complexity – has begun. (The sound is, in fact, a massively amplified and condensed note from Edith Piaf’s Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, suggesting that despite what follows, nothing is truly new.)

In 2011, artist and programmer Cory Arcangel created a bot which retweeted people claiming to be “working on my novel”: “cooking dinner, drinking a glass of wine while working on my novel.” (@VivaLaBelle1985, 6/12/12). “Working on my Novel and watching Scary movies :)” (@Donelljackson, 3/10/12). So far, so enjoyably Twitter. Now Penguin Books is publishing a selection of these tweets on paper under the title, yes, Working On My Novel. Inception sound!

Arcangel is perhaps best-known for a series of works which modified video games to produce infinite loops, such as a ten-pin bowling game endlessly hurling balls down the gutter. Viewed in this light, the message of Working On My Novel feels a little less like “the story of what it means to be a creative person, and why we keep on trying”, as its blurb attests, and more like a mournful echo of the futility of writing itself. But behind these tiny stories there are more stories – real ones and fictional ones. I just lost half an hour to Not a Whisper: A Klondike Mystery by Donna B. McNicol, “retired grandmother and author traveling the country by RV and Harley while writing romance and mystery novels”. Of course, McNicol’s experience isn’t summed up by “sitting at McDonald’s working on my novel while Stu does some more electrical work on the RV. Up to 52,500 words now” from August 2012. For that, you have to read those 52,500 words, and a whole lot more.