MG Harris at Sky News radio

Some book publicity events are planned months in advance…and some spring up on you all surprising, like.

Last Thursday I’d planned to be in London to renew my Mexican passport at the embassy, after a bit of a saga as you might know if you follow me on Twitter. Suddenly a little new story broke, about some research collated on behalf of Scholastic Children’s Books UK, that in the UK more under 16s own a mobile phone than own a book.

The research was based on a survey of 17,000 under-16s in the UK. Apparently almost 9 in 10 young people in the UK own a mobile, whilst fewer than 3/4 (73%) own a book. 80% of children who read above the expected level for the age have books of their own. This drops by 22% for those that read below the expected reading level (58%).

It was the last day of term for most maintained schools in the UK, so what better chance to stir up some interest in summer reading for kids?

Scholastic wanted one of their authors to be available for comment, so I was invited to stay over until Friday and do some radio interviews. Sixteen, actually, some live, some pre-recorded.

One interview was at my local radio station, JackFM of Oxford. It’s just down the road from me actually, so Sophie Bruce had a bit of fun teasing me about being in London in a recording studio, when I could have just popped in. And guess who does the in-betweeny-voice bits for JackFM? It’s Paul Darrow, aka Avon, the sexy heart-throb star of BBC TV’s Blake’s 7.

Paul Darrow sent all the girls in my class this photo. *swoon*

Now if you’ve read my bio, you know that I heart Blake’s 7 but I specially heart Avon, spent most of my teenage years (ahem and a bit longer too) dreaming about being a crew member on the Liberator and having my wicked way becoming really good chums with Avon.

Paul Darrow, a charming and very lovely guy, was always most kind to his fans. Once for his 40th birthday I got all my school friends to sign a card to Paul. He replied with a signed photo for every girl in the class, how cool is that? And a letter addressed to the Ladies of Fallowfield.

Sophie of JackFM asked me if I’d like her to get Paul to record a message for me, and I said that I’d like to know that he remembered the Ladies of Fallowfield. Who are now the dowagers of Fallowfield, but never mind.

Paul, being full of awesome and everything, did just that. Ladies, listen to this without swooning, if you can.

Here’s the summer Joshua Files news:

1. Mere DAYS remain for the big contest to DESIGN A MAP OF EK NAAB – the ‘invisible city’.
The contest closes on 31st July. Great prizes for runners-up, plus the winner gets their design printed in DARK PARALLEL – Joshua #4.

For HINTS and TIPS read this post on the BookBabbler’s website:
http://bookbabblers.co.uk/2010/07/the-joshua-files-mg-harris/

2. Joshua book and goodie-bag giveaway on BOOKBABBLERS.
There’s an easy contest running on BookBabblers, winner gets a set of Joshua books and a goodie bag of Joshua stuff.
http://bookbabblers.co.uk/2010/07/the-joshua-files-mg-harris/

3. The Joshua Insiders exclusive group of dedicated fans is growing. Still a few places left!
How to join the Joshua Insiders.

4. I have finally finished DARK PARALLEL!
Now Scholastic Children’s Books are deciding how to give the book a really cool, dark cover…

5. INVISIBLE CITY finally published in the USA by Walker Books for Young Readers.

Also in Turkish! It’s always great to see a foreign editions of Joshua. But with another in English, hopefully we’ll soon be able to welcome a bunch of new members from the USA and Canada.

YOU CAN HELP INVISIBLE CITY SUCCEED IN THE USA!

Why not tell your friends and relatives in the USA about Joshua Files via Twitter and FaceBook?

OK everyone, have a great summer, and if you haven’t already I hope you get a chance to read Josh’s latest adventure over your summer holidays. Meanwhile I will get on with Ultra Secret New Project…

very best wishes,
MG
x

River Song, the Time Traveler’s Wife, Borges and The Joshua Files.

Yeah that’s right. I can use all those things in a sentence. Because all four have used one very lovely device of the time-traveling story genre:

Two time-traveling characters who meet up with each other across different time-streams.

The earliest story that does this than Richard Matheson’s Bid Time Return, which was the basis for the adorable time-travel romance starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour; Somewhere In Time. (You haven’t seen it? Rent it now! For more about Richard Matheson and time-travel romances, see the comments below.)

The Time-Traveler’s Wife takes the concept further, criss-crossing ages and stages of the characters as they share a sort of life together across decades. I watched the amazing Doctor Who episode Silence In the Library for the first time last week – and finally saw the story which introduces Professor River Song. Is she our own time-traveler’s wife?

Yeah…maybe! But was she always his friend? Maybe not. Maybe when she first meets the Doctor, they are enemies.

Because he has an inkling of who she’ll become, it’s more interesting.

Anyway, we’ll see. I’m just guessing.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story where a young Borges finds himself next to an old Borges, asking the older one about life. They don’t understand each other too well.

And in The Joshua Files?

Well, by the end of Joshua Files #3, Zero Moment, lovers and time-travelers have already crossed paths. There’s more to come in Joshua #4, Dark Parallel. Beady-eyed readers might have guessed it was happening.

Everyone else will have to wait until 2012 and Joshua #5 to know for sure…

As River Song would say…Spoilers!

On Crosby Beach

Originally uploaded by mgharris

Lovely day in Crosby with Tony Higginson, bookseller extraordinaire from Pritchards Formby. After visiting Merchant Taylor’s Boys and Sacred Heart schools and signing lots of books for Year 8 kids, Tony and I drove to the beach to see Anthony Gormley’s ‘iron man’ statues and grab an ice cream cone. You can see them in the background, staring out into the Mersey.
Sand! Sea! Sun! A rare treat for a landlocked Oxford girl.
More photos will follow on Flickr. Soonish.
Emailed from my BlackBerry®

Josh's dream led him to Catemaco...

At a story-building workshop I was running at Southend Girls High School recently, a student asked me if I believed that Stephenie Meyer really did write Twilight because of a dream of a sparkly vampire.

I didn’t get to answer the question in depth because we were under pressure to finish the story before the lesson period ended, so I simply said that yes, I believed it. What I didn’t say was that there’s nothing quite like a dream to power a story.

Dreams dredge up thoughts and feelings from the deepest, darkest parts of our psyche. They speak to us in the language of symbols. Most people don’t understand the significance of these symbols. It’s hard even for a psychoanalyst to interpret the symbols, without first understanding the particular viewpoint or mental landscape of the dreamer.

So a sparkly, beautiful male vampire means something to Stephenie, something that it might not mean to anyone else. That image thrown up by a dream, which became incorporated into the first Twilight novel, had a hold on her. I’m no expert on psychoanalysis so I don’t know what it meant within her own context.
But we can guess that it meant something pretty deep. It drove an author through a series of gripping novels that captured the imagination of millions, which suggests that it was powerful stuff.

The wider question is this: where do writers’ ideas come from? The answer seems to be that some, you work for whilst others, like the (day?) dreams of Edward Cullen or Harry Potter, pop into your head.

The pop-in idea is a frequent visitor to the writer of fiction, the trick may be an ability to recognise which ones come from somewhere deep enough to sustain a novel or book series.

The deeper the better, really. Like the sludge of a riverbed, the depths of a writer’s psyche are the richest in story-building nutrients.

At another school visit to Larkmead School in Abingdon, a boy asked me why I’d written a book series about code-cracking. It was an understandable question given that I’d just led a code-cracking workshop with about 90 year 12-14 year olds. I told him that I’d realised whilst reading The Da Vinci Code in 2004 that having the hero a puzzle to solve was one good way to drive the narrative. Especially for readers who aren’t so keen, or less able to accessing the emotional drive of the story.So that’s why, rather than write a simple coming-of-age story, which is what  essentially is, I thought to throw in some puzzles.

In fact the central idea for Joshua came from a fear that strongly coloured my own teenage years: a fear of apocalypse – nuclear holocaust. It was the 1980s, the Cold War was still very much in play: we lived quite consciously in the shadow of the 4-minute warning of doom.

I didn’t need a dream to dredge this up. It was something that was obvious to me at the time and long into my 20s.  So when it occurred to me to write an adventure story about a teenager trying to prevent a global catastrophe at the end of 2012, I knew well what fertile personal territory I was tackling.

Graham Greene once said that a writer’s experience of life by the age of 20 will provide all the necessary material for their writing. So maybe we’re all writing from our youthful feelings and memories. But a subject worthy of a children’s book should also be something that was important to us as children and not merely as adults remembering.

A dream can be like a beacon showing us the way back to the hopes and fears of our youth. Any writer lucky enough to have such a dream should definitely take notice.

The artwork may be more traditional ‘adventure-style’ than the amazing, ground-breaking, innovative, deadly-neon-slipcover of the UK, French, Spanish, Catalan, German and Hungarian editions. It draws on the style of influential artist Frederick Catherwood, who back in the 1840s visited the ruins with traveler John Lloyd Stephens and created those first, memorable images of the ruined Mayan cities, which were to stun readers in the developed world.

My friend Chris Maslanka, an eminent puzzlist (who devises fiendish puzzles for The Guardian and The Oxford Times – watch Chris and his evil twin Mikhail show readers how to crack the codes in the first three Joshua books) brought me four copies of the Polish edition of Invisible City, Archivum Josha – Niewidzialne Miasto, which I’ve been meaning to give to various Polish friends in Oxford. It made me very happy to hold these foreign editions in my hands, to know that readers in so many countries are reading them. An amazing thing really, doesn’t feel like it’s anything to do with me either. Rather wonderful!

When it was over, we weren’t happy. We didn’t understand. It was all very fulfilling on an emotional level; all those lovers reunited in the Sideways world. But what did it mean?

Not since X-Files have I actually had to resort to programme notes to understand a TV show. My instinct is that TV entertainment should be simple enough not to require you to RTFM (read the ahem manual).

But actually why not? Why can’t a mainstream TV show be pitched at a deep enough level that you need to discuss it afterwards?

So I’ve spent some time looking for the best articles about the finale, which might help me to explain what happened, what was going on all along, because really, we weren’t trying hard enough. We had just been watching it an assuming that every t would be crossed and i dotted.

Well, it ain’t!

Last night at dinner I sat down with husband and 17-year old and explained the show/finale based on the various theories I’ve read. 17-year old in particular was delighted and is going to spread the word at her school, where the overall reaction to the finale was negative. Like mine initially. They were all dead? It was all a dream? Dammit, give me back my time!

If you were a keen Lostie who lost it a bit with the finale, maybe like me these articles will help you find your LOST love again.

LOST finale recap: And In The End

Lost Finale Explained Well – allegedly written by a writer who worked on the show

But first here’s a little glossary to Lostie terminology:

• MIB – Man In Black aka the Smoke Monster, Smokey
• FLocke - False Locke aka MIB
• Sideways world – the world that seemed to be ‘created’ when the nuclear bomb went off and the Oceanic flight never crashed.
• Lostaways – the passengers who crashed in the same part of the island as Jack, Sawyer etc.
• Island Magic – anything at all that is a bit weird/magical
• Holy Wormhole – the source of light at the centre of the island.

Just like with X-Files, we’re left with many questions. For example:

1. Why is Aaron a baby in the church at the end? We know he was at least three in Real Life. I don’t want to be a baby in the afterlife! Fair enough if you died as a baby but if not…
2. Desmond became some kind of super-being immune to EM powers and Island Magic, who didn’t get smoked when he went into the Holy Wormhole, OK. So how come Jack didn’t get smoked?
3. How did Jacob manage to leave the island to fetch up all the Candidates?

Not that I have a problem with threads being left untied! The glimpses of backstory that we did see about the island’s long, mysterious past were tantalising; the temple, the statue etc, Mother, only make me enjoy it more.

It’s good to have this to share with the Teenager. I think we’ll be talking about it for a few evenings to come.

So – if you have any answers, theories, etc, let me know!

This time it’s a rare post about the process of writing, from me. The reason I don’t blog more about writing is, well, others do it so well. It seems a little superfluous to add any more!

However, since I’m actually struggling with plotting now, it’s a timely point for me to consider the aspect of writing that I think is maybe the most important part of the process, which is the motivation of the characters.

I discovered the importance of this element by accident, while writing ZERO MOMENT. The plot fell into place easier than either the plots for INVISIBLE CITY or ICE SHOCK, mainly because Josh’s motivation was so much simpler to define. It made me realise that where I’d really had to think hard in plotting the first two, was in driving Josh.

Novels tend to succeed if they are about people doing extraordinary things; dangerous either to their health or to their sanity. As readers we like to see characters playing a high-stakes game. It doesn’t have to be physical; simply telling the guy you totally adore can be a very risky game – if the story have been set up properly.

The problem is, real people prefer not to take insane risks. Normal people tend to say ‘travel around the world, risk life and limb to find lost treasure? Hmm. Maybe I’ll stay home.’

Aristotle advises authors to write characters who are as believable as possible (more on Aristotle in the next stop on the tour.) Yet we want them to take crazy risks. The author’s job is simple (hah!) – to make those awful risks seem reasonable, achievable and well worth taking. Whilst creating massive tension in the reader’s mind, anxiety about the dangers.

The first novel I wrote (unpublished, but adapted as an Alternate Reality Game – THE DESCENDANT) used the simplest technique I know: the gun at the back. Create a threat which will force your protagonist to move in the direction you want. Every time the pace falters, step up the level of threat.

You could use blackmail, a hit guy on your trail, a deadly disease. The key is that the protagonist himself must be in danger, and will take action simply to relieve the danger.

It’s what screenwriters refer to as a ‘negative driver’. Crude but effective. In the long run, less emotionally satisfying perhaps? After all – even an animal will take action to get out of danger.

More difficult is the ‘positive driver’, where the protagonist takes action and deliberately puts themselves in harm’s way to achieve a positive outcome, not merely to evade a direct threat.

It’s more difficult because real people don’t take insane risks…and whatever the author tries to tell us, as readers we know this on a instinctive level.

And in any argument between instinct and reason, there can be no winner.

Then – if things weren’t already complicated enough – the author needs to balance the internal and external motivation. Because it’s a thin, unsatifying plot where the character operates only on one level. James Bond wants to achieve his mission because it’s his job is trumped by James Bond wants to achieve his mission because it’s crucial to him getting over the death of his wife.

So – motivation can be positive or negative but it must be strong and it must be believable. (Believable is the hard part.) For depth, motivation must comprise two parts – the external desire (e.g. complete the dangerous mission) and the internal desire (e.g. justify the otherwise pointless death of someone who failed first time).

The final thing to remember is that as well as the overarching motivation that should drive the entire novel, we also need mini-motivations which drive sequences of scenes.

These mini-motivations can change, but should be clearly developed and the reader should be aware of the changing stakes and the new plan. When I say they can change, I mean that the protagonist can set out to do one thing, and then realise that the plan won’t work, and therefore change plans. Or they can overcome one challenge and then encounter another.

One challenge after another can make for a very linear, predictable read where the reader can sense the machine in the story. So it helps to layer the challenges – seed the next before the current challenge is completed.

If at any stage the reader thinks – Hang on. No sane person would do that – or even – this character wouldn’t do that then you have a big problem. The plot may fall apart. The reader may still finish the book, but deep down they’ll know that you drove them through part of the process and they might not like you for it.

Which is why I plot beforehand and at every stage I try hard to focus on this question – why is the protagonist doing this?

And the answer had better be a heck of a lot more persuasive than ’because I need him to get from A to B’…

Someone kidnaps the people Josh most cares about and it is somehow his fault, so Josh must rescue them or else face his own cowardice for the rest of his life - turned out to be the simplest and strongest motivation I had ever been able to find in a plot. Which is why ZERO MOMENT was so much easier to write!

Next on the  Zero Moment blog tour: E is for Everything I Know About Plotting I Learned From Aristotle at myfavouritebooks.blogspot.com (28 April)

It’s festival season and this year I’m doing a few events in the Oxfordshire/Midlands area, including the Eagle House Celebration of Children’s Literature Week and a Youth Libraries Group event in Solihull, but starting on Saturday April 24th with the Kennington Free Literary Festival – see article in The Oxford Times.

My event is at 2pm, will be introduced by the wonderful Bill Heine of BBC Oxford, and will feature an audio-visual presentation about the inspiration behind The Joshua Files…plus maybe even a reading of a chapter from the secret(ish) manuscript for Joshua 4, DARK PARALLEL.

Here’s the brochure for the Kennington Free Literary Festival. As well as my event for kids you can also see local authors Helen Peacocke, Colin Dexter (author of Inspector Morse), Helen Rappaport and others.

Best of all it is FREE for kids and FREE for adults who come along on the day. Unless you want to book, in which case there is a small booking fee.

If you live in Oxfordshire, check out this little one-day festival!

Donations and all proceeds go to the Kennington Library.

I don’t know if she means a real three dimensional object or a virtual pet. Probably both.

If none of this means anything to you, if Club Penguin, Moshi Monsters, Webkinz, Neopets and even Habbo Hotel are just strange names then you might want to wake up and join the 21^st century.

While adults exchange quips, moans and snippets of news on FaceBook while playing Farmville and poker, kids are having way more fun than us, as always, in the virtual world of kid’s social networking.

These worlds have complex rules, games, social aspects, teamwork etc. There are virtual parties, games, product launches even. In lieu of doing a survey myself (I have to stay away from these places. I learnt years ago that I have a tendency to become addicted), I asked my 8-year old for the low-down. This is her personal ranking of sites:

1. Club Penguin. Owned by Disney, backed up with real-life products like plush toys, backpacks, sticker books etc. Hardly a day goes by that she doesn’t beg for a subscription.

2. WebKinz. One plush-toy company that missed out on collectible Beanie mania realised the opportunity of linking real-life plush toys to a virtual pet. Each toy comes with a unique ID that buys the child another pet in the virtual world of Webkinz.

3. Moshi Monsters, Neopets. Neopets is quite ‘old’ now, in that it’s been around for almost 10 years.

I’m probably the wrong person to write a hand-wringing article about the dangers of letting kids spend too much time online or looking at screens. After all – Joshua Files itself includes a big online component – an Alternate Reality Game for teenagers, which takes them from video blogs to Twitter to chat with mysterious bots and hunt for clues in Habbo Hotel.

I’d have been utterly hooked as a kid to a site like Club Penguin, so I can fully understand why children love them. The graphics and special effects, compared to computers games like Xbox, PS3 and even Wii, are cartoon-like in their simplicity. But they are far more compelling. A 7-year old can have many hours of fun designing rooms for their avatars, playing games to earn points (the games might even be educational, who knows?). The points are traded for virtual stuff, including, at Club Penguin, the Puffles, most recently the Zany Orange variety. (It dances with a hula hoop)

How can sticking pasta shapes and good clean fun with paint compete with that? It can’t. Reading books probably can’t compete either. No wonder authors are having to make stories better, faster and more action-packed to engage young readers! With our own daughter it’s certainly a battle.

I remember my suburban childhood as a constant battle with boredom. We definitely had to become inventive to think of ways around the boredom. That inventiveness was probably a good thing, sure. You hear a lot of angst now that ‘kids today’ are ruined by the fact that they are never bored – robbed of a chance to invent imaginary games and run around keeping fit etc. How all the kids today are unfit and glued to the screen.

Hmmm. But then I watch my own daughter. She seems to be having bags of fun. All self-taught too – by reading instructions. It gives her ideas for offline play too. With WebKinz and Puffles, you continue into role-play with your friends. Lots of kids make videos of their Webkinz singing, dancing, acting out movie scenes and upload them to YouTube.

So kids like these don’t know what it means to be bored. Wherever they turn there is creative distraction, entertainment. Is that really so bad?

I can’t join the handwringers, I’m afraid. I can only remember how the hours stretched painfully in the school holidays of my youth, and watch with vicarious enjoyment as my own kids play on Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel. Because I suspect that social networking sites like these are saving kids from some of the worst of the boredom and loneliness of childhood in the past.

Next on the ZERO MOMENT blog tour – Elektra Assassin – the baddest comic book grrl ever at bookzone4boys.blogspot.com (31 March)<–>