Archive for November, 2008

Posted on November 28, 2008 - by MG

A visit to the ol’ lab…

I dropped in on my former DPhil supervisor, Nick Proudfoot at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology yesterday. I don’t visit that much, even though we’re good friends now. The lab is a busy place, after all. You shouldn’t delay the progress of science.

I was there to take a photo of some lab equipment for the ARG we’re developing. Yes – there’s a clue. Part of the game will feature a virtual lab facility, where DNA experiments can be ordered over the Web and the results sent by email. It’s all part of the story…

Nick and I chatted – as we always do on these occasions – about recent progress in the field. Or not-so-recent progress, since I actually left molecular biology in 1992 and went into cell biology (the former is mainly about genes, the latter is mainly about proteins and cells). So my knowledge is fairly vague and out of date as it is…

Anyway, OMG! So may cool new techniques have been invented since I left! Eeee, kids today, they dun’t know how easy they’ve got it…in my day you really had to suffer for your science, with home-made apparatus and enzymes and techniques that barely worked…

The march of progress. And yet molecular biology labs are still fairly grungy, messy places to be. As the photo above proves!

Meanwhile, I also took a shot of my thesis, which is on a shelf in Nick’s office along with those of all the other students he’s shepherded through the process of becoming Dr. Scientist. Well done Nick! You’re a STAR. (Really – publishing eight scientific papers this year, in great journals too…)

(and so nice to see my first  ‘book’ in the company of those by my brother-in-law Paul and my good friend Becs!)

And spot the girl in the nerdy jumper, my official department photo from 1991 now displayed in one of the corridors of the labs.

Roll on the NJP Lab Reunion dinner in December!

(Photo above shows me, Alex Moreira, Joan Monks and Nick.)

Posted on November 26, 2008 - by MG

I found Josh’s ‘voice’ in the beginning of ICE SHOCK

You hear a lot about writers finding their ‘voice’ or the voice of their narrator.

It can take a while.

I found Josh’s voice in the first draft of a manuscript I was calling THE FIFTH CODEX. It was to have been the second book of the series.

(Yes indeed. Imagine – in the original drafts I didn’t even let the hero find the codex in book 1 – he only found the city. And book 2 was finally going to address the mystery of the lost codex…and why a famous British Mayan archaeologist apparently suppressed the process of deciphering the Mayan script.)

So I’d written this manuscript: Todd Garcia, Boy Archaeologist.  It was sitting in the offices of a few literary agencies and two publishers. I was waiting to hear (the answer from all would be ‘no thanks’.) And I got to thinking that I wished I’d made young Todd a bit more sensitive. He was a pretty confident, feisty guy. Things didn’t get him down; he took on the world of puzzles with confidence. His world was much safer, much cosier than Josh’s.

So I wrote this blog entry, imagining a troubling dream the boy might have had. (There’s something else to tell about that dream…but that can wait until ICE SHOCK is published.)

And that was it – Josh walked out from those pages, almost fully formed.

When the agent who took me on told me he wanted a complete rewrite with a more vulnerable main character, I knew exactly where to find him…

That chapter has become the first blog entry in ICE SHOCK. When you read it, if you do, remember that in many ways, that’s where Josh was conceived.

The blog entry is called ‘Blue In Green’. I wrote it whilst listening to the Miles Davis track from ‘Kind of Blue’. The YouTube video is some old footage of the Bill Evans Trio playing ‘Blue In Green’.

Posted on November 21, 2008 - by MG

Josh’s state of mind in ICE SHOCK

Okay, since ‘Clues about the plot’ (of ICE SHOCK) is leading in the poll I’ll give you the first one.

I begin each book with thinking hard about the state of mind of the hero – in this case Josh.

How does he feel after the previous adventure? What’s he been through since then? Some emotions might have settled…others have festered. He isn’t in the same emotional state as he was at the end of the last book. Months have passed and when you are a teenager, months can make a huge difference.

So Josh is brooding on what has gone before…and then the story starts when I throw him a curve ball.

Some bit of new information arrives to utterly disrupt his world. In INVISIBLE CITY the news is that his father is dead. In ICE SHOCK too, the news is about his father.

A rumour; something that Josh didn’t know about those last days. Someone comes forward with an astonishing revelation. And that person is a character named Rodrigo del Pozo.

In fact I know a guy called Rodrigo del Pozo and with his permission I’ve borrowed his name and profession for the character. My friend Rodrigo, like the character in ICE SHOCK, is a singer, a tenor who specialises in early and renaissance music.

In real life, Rodrigo’s family and mine became friends when our eldest daughters met at the local Catholic primary school. Then, like the character in the story, they moved back to Santiago de Chile. I thought it would be fun to give Josh’s father a friend with the same name and profession, And then have that character turn up with an astonishing revelation.

But what will it be? Here’s a clue…it’s linked to the last known position of the Ix Codex before Josh’s grandfather, Aureliano, took it back to Mexico.

Meanwhile, if you enjoy music, take a look at Rodrigo’s website or listen to this clip on YouTube, where Rodrigo displays the virtuosity of his voice and range – without every sounding like a ‘screaming drag queen’. As he used to put it.

Posted on November 18, 2008 - by MG

A competition to win a bound proof of ICE SHOCK…with a twist

That doesn’t mean you get a twist of lemon with the bound proof of ICE SHOCK, btw.

It means there’s a twist in the competition; a twist that I’m only telling you guys here on mgharris.net

Firstly though – the competition. I announced this over on themgharris.com - you can read the full story there.

The basics are – you have to take the deciphered message of the code in INVISIBLE CITY and discover the single word that Josh has buried within the text. The code was a replacement code that over one hundred readers correctly deciphered. But what most people haven’t known until now is that there’s a second code.

And what I haven’t told anyone else yet – is that this word is a Very Important Clue in the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) that we’ll be launching along with ICE SHOCK.

So even if you don’t win the bound proof of ICE SHOCK – you can still crack the clue and be ready for the ARG.

One more thing – the method that you need to use to decipher this clue is also used by Josh in ICE SHOCK to crack a very cryptic message about his destiny…

Posted on November 16, 2008 - by MG

Help me to decide what to blog pre-ICE SHOCK

Check out the poll on the right-hand sidebar – you can help me decide what to poll in the run-up to the publication of ICE SHOCK (March 2nd).

My life in the next few months will consist mainly of:

1. Doing my bit in developing and testing the ARG (it has a name but right now I’m not telling…)

2. A few school visits (so far four scheduled for Jan and Feb)

3. Getting involved in pre-launch publicity -don’t know exactly what yet, my agent and I will be having a meeting with Scholastic’s publicity team to brainstorm ideas.

4. Meeting my new editor and getting thoughts started re the edit of ZERO MOMENT

It’s three-and-a-half months to go, but I sense that time will pass quickly.

OK so, in that time, what would you guys like me to blog about? If the above four things plus the usual randomness is enough, go for choice #5.

Oh and…you can pick TWO things from the list.