A Joshua-themed writing competition for schools

Posted on January 19, 2009 - by MG

A Joshua-themed writing competition for schools

Very happy today for several reasons.

One is that Scholastic have launched a writing competition for schools, in the magazine Junior Education Plus.

On the website and in the magazine you’ll find the first 600 words of a short story – written by me.

To enter the contest, you then write the ending of the story – in 200 words.

The winner gets a signed copy of INVISIBLE CITY (or I guess you could ask for ICE SHOCK if the winner has it already), plus £150 of books for their school.

The story is brilliantly illustrated by Dave Neale and the online interactive version includes turning pages and cool sound effects!

The story is called ‘Stars Fell On Campeche’ and features Josh when he was younger, playing football at some ancient Mayan ruins where his father worked. It was originally one of four prologues I wrote for the opening of INVISIBLE CITY. (In the end we went with the newspaper article about the strange incident at the museum…)

And the other reason I’m happy is that the German (Frank Boehmert) and Slovakian (Ivan Stefanek) translators of Joshua are reading ICE SHOCK now, getting ready to translate it. Frank even blogged about ICE SHOCK (vielen Dank, Frank!).

Still reading the brilliant “Black Swan” book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I wrote him a fan email yesterday and he replied right away! (I told him that one day, a character in Joshua will quote him…he wrote back that he’s very intrigued…)

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 10:40 am and is filed under ice shock, raves, translations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Comments

We'd love to hear yours!

Visit My Website

January 19, 2009

Permalink

Frank said:

Well this is what I blogged:

“Signed contract and began translating: ‘Ice Shock’, the second book of the young readers series Geheimakte Joshua by MG Harris for Dressler. ‘Most Glamorous’, like she is called by some fans, is really turning the screw. Folks, we would have loved this when we were little boys and girls. Definitely!”
Visit My Website

January 21, 2009

Permalink

MG said:

Thanks for the translation Frank. I had worked it all out except the last bit… ‘Aber hallo’. That’s a nice idiom. Would have been worth a point at ‘O’ level, for sure!

Hey, when is our book coming out?
Visit My Website

January 23, 2009

Permalink

Lukas said:

Hey, not commented in a while, sorry about that! I am still reading the blog though!
ICE SHOCK arrived today. I was off school ill, so i managed to read the whole of Joshua Files in 5 hours 20 minutes, and start ICE SHOCK. Thanks very much MG! Loving the first 50 or so pages. Brought up some very intriguing questions i hadn’t really noticed about the muwan and other things. I noticed on the back it said you were the fastest selling debut author of 2008! I knew they sold well but that’s brilliant! Congrats!
Lukas
Visit My Website

January 26, 2009

Permalink

MG said:

Glad you’re enjoying it Lukas!
Visit My Website

April 16, 2009

Permalink

Jasmine said:

WOW! ive been waiting for ages for the book to come out, then when it came out (ice shock) I bought it straight away! But I had to many other good books on my list to read, so I put it aside, but today, I read it in a whole day, and I wish I had read it earlier! IT WAS FAB!!!!!!! I had a feeling that Josh’s dad was still alive, as I find it impossible to think that in books, people die, so I always think, no mater what, that they’ll come back! so it was no surprise!!! i look forward to your next book (book 3), and do you have any idea when it’ll be out as i cannot wait?!?!?!? and how many books in the seris is there going to be! i hope more that 3!!!!!! THANKS! bye xxx

Posted on January 19, 2009 - by MG