Standing in front of the great machine, Margaret Atwood waves into the camera lens and giggles.

The literary legend is known for her caustic wit and regal bearing, but to market the Long Pen, her long-distance book-signing invention, a softer but no less canny Atwood emerges.

She hovers lovingly next to the Long Pen console as the snaking line of book-signees wait for Alice Munro to inscribe their copies of The View from Castle Rock, bustles in front of the microphone to instruct Munro on how to more comfortably use the Long Pen stylus and even amplifies compliments of fans that Munro has trouble hearing over the connection.

This is not Atwood the author, this is Atwood the inventor, the artist-turned-innovator, out to display her creation.

How does Atwood feel about her new career? "Pretty strange," she says, rhythmically signing copies of Moral Disorder. Despite the potential distraction, Atwood maintains earnest eye contact.

"The best inventing is done in the bathtub," she says, seemingly unsure of how to tie up her answer about the inventor identity.

"Or ironing," she adds. "Try ironing."

Atwood says it was just one of those everyday moments that gave rise to the Long Pen. A simple signing of a Fed Ex panel was the eureka moment for the device that began as an implement for long distance book signings, but is already testing with music artists and athletes.

And as artist-turned-inventor dabbling in another genre, Atwood is not alone. Da Vinci dreamed of innovations beyond the realm of art. Arthur C. Clarke popped out blueprints in his spare time that had little to do with novels: He invented the geostationary satellite in 1945. But we should not be surprised by this sharing of resources, she says.

"Writers are their own little group of people, it's true, but it's not like there isn't any sports and music in their lives. Paul Quarrington writes about hockey, for heaven's sake. Did I go to the entire Ring Cycle? Yes, I did. Am I also familiar with country and western music? Yes, I am."

Of course, the Long Pen isn't the first of Atwood's creations. Atwood's readers know that she created whole worlds in her speculative fiction, like Oryx and Crake. But even further than this, she's dabbled in practical innovation. Earlier this year on Idea Bank, Reading Toronto's Web site. Atwood posted new solutions to city issues.

One suggested, "Why not put hospitals and amateur landscape painters together in a project that would supply healing paintings to the hospitals? (No toxic paints of course.)"

And similarly, with the Long- Pen, Atwood says she provided the idea while engineers and software writers provided the know how. But that doesn't mean she doesn't feel motherly toward it.

"When you write, you're pulling enormous gravitational forces. That was why it was so difficult to make this machine, and why nobody had done it before," she says proudly, still signing away.

"Because if you think of this pen as a car, as a motor car, going through these gyrations, going like this," she says, swooshing the pen with a flourish across the page. "And then if I go like this, and reverse it," she adds, jerking the pen back towards her, "If a car did that, it would just shake to pieces."

She goes on, enumerating each prototype with crystal-clear detail.

"The second one burst into flames and flew apart, and that was a pretty nice design -- it looked pretty good, but," she blows a raspberry with her tongue, "didn't work. When I went to the lab, I literally had things held together with rubber bands and duct tape."

After the reading, and after the crowds, a short line of Long Pen book-signees remain. Atwood drifts from her signing desk to the front row of the now nearly empty audience. Mid-signature, Alice Munro's autograph ceases to be signed from the machine in Toronto. A few people hold their breaths. Others fiddle with the machine. A moment later, the signing resumes. What went wrong with the complicated beast?

"It's just apen," Atwood says. "Of all things, it was out of ink."