Month: September 2010

Categories
Joshua Files writers

Decoding Joshua, with Chris Maslanka

A few months back, my good friend Bill Heine (he of the shark house and BBC Radio Oxford) had lunch. Bill double-booked me with another friend of his, Chris Maslanka, a top puzzlist who writes the puzzles for the Guardian and The Oxford Times.

Oxford being so tiny, the degrees of separation are usually 2. It wasn’t much of a surprise to Chris and I to learn that we were connected through St Catherine’s College, also my own wonderful literary agent. And Bill.

Bill has turned interviewing me into a sport – you can listen to some of our previous encounters on my interviews page.

Joshua Files in Guardian puzzle page

Anyway, thanks to Bill I made a new friend. Chris and his evil twin, Mikhail, proved to be great allies when I needed a way to visualise some of the puzzles in the first three books of “The Joshua Files”. Code-cracking workshops are now part of my school-visit repertoire…it’s surprising what you learn to do as a children’s author!

‘Mikhail’ Maslanka provides the solutions to all the puzzles in extended videos on the Joshua Files puzzles page at themgharris.com

And in this week’s Guardian puzzles, you can find the first in an exclusive series of Joshua-themed puzzles!

Solution in next week’s paper…

I’ll update this blog entry to include the puzzle after publication.

Btw Mikhail isn’t so much evil as eccentric. Chris is very normal though, a rum-tee-tum sort of fellow.

Categories
translations travel

When MG met Frank…in Berlin

Frank Boehmert and MG Harris

Ultra Secret New Project features a key sequence which takes place in a French town shown in this blog post.

But at the end of summer, my travels took me back to Europe, this time to Berlin. I walked the streets where the final scenes of the novel will be set, plotted a course for the Big Chase, and had a good look at the (secret) location of  the novel’s climax.

My first time there, imagine! All those years visiting Germany, I never visited Berlin. I rather regret not visiting before 1989 now, or soon after. The city has utterly transformed since then. In my lifetime few major cities have changed quite to much. I’d quite like to have seen it before.

I’d like a chance to have a bit of Osstalgie (newish German word meaning nostalgia for the good-old-days of the DDR, when they were properly Communist and austere.).

But no Goodbye Lenin for me and my good pal and long-time travelling buddy, Rebecca. We sampled the delights of Europe’s coolest capital city: cafe life (Kaffee und Kuchen, Berlin cuisine, the best Mexican tacos I’ve eaten outside Mexico) cultural life (museums and a performance of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater in the Marienkirche of Alexanderplatz).

Not neglecting, of course, Cuban salsa! Where else but Berlin’s fabulous Havanna nightclub. One of the best salsa nights I’ve been to In The World! Lots of cute guys to dance with…

Another great pleasure was that I finally met the wonderful German translator of Joshua Files, Frank Boehmert! Here is Frank’s own version (auf Deutsch) of the event, featuring the same photo taken by my pal Becs.

MG in Berlin

So here’s some of Berlin’s new architecture. I’m standing in front of a glass wall on which is etched the German consitution.

Das ist Extrem Cool.

Categories
other books travel

Where in the world am I now?

It's France. But where?

It’s been quite a while since I blogged. Apart from having family and friends visit and move to Oxford, I’ve been busier this summer than I usually am.

Busy with writing and busy with researching!

As I type this I am 74,000 words into Ultra Secret New Project. I haven’t written an uncommisioned novel since Jaguar’s Realm (I’m still holding onto that by the way, in case you’re wondering, haven’t decided when the right time is for Jaguar to hit the world…). I remember blogging about the final stages of writing Jaguar’s Realm and this feels a bit like that.

1. Tiring!

2. Someone had better publish this book after all this effort to write it…

3. Drained.

Usually I do all my research trips before I start writing a novel. In the case of Ultra Secret New Project, however, I visited the two foreign locations during the writing itself.

The first location is shown in this photo. At the bottom of the photo you can also see my two Brazilian friends, Ana and Deborah. Loyal travel companions and veterans of an MG Harris research trip, (they’re mentioned in the dedication of Zero Moment), Ana, Deborah, as well as Ali and Kizzie, once again braved foreign lands to scout a location with me.

But where in the world are we?

Prize for the first correct answer in the comments – a Joshua enamel badge and a signed Invisible City postcard.