Author Archive

Posted on December 31, 2011 - by MG

Protected: Secret first chapter of APOCALYPSE MOON

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Posted on December 21, 2011 - by MG

When MG met LJ

Sometimes I don’t blog everything interesting that happens to me right away; I save it up for a rainy day. Back in Nov 2009 I was on BBC TV’s Click – a show devoted to all things techie and presented by a fab fellow geek girl, the multi-talented LJ Rich. I made a little video of our meeting, the clip itself and then a chance meeting with a certain children’s TV presenter…

LJ asked me to go on the show to talk about the emerging phenomenon of self-publishing, mainly fueled by the print-on-demand revolution. You can see what  I thought two years ago. My how things have changed, in only two years. Note how little we talk about ebooks! That’s where the action is nowadays.

Maybe I should go on Click again to update LJ on my opinion now… because as some beady-eyed members of the Joshua Files Facebook group may have spotted, I myself will be testing the waters in the brave new world of publishing and putting out an indie-published techno-thriller for older readers, set in the fictional world of The Joshua Files around May 2012…

LJ meanwhile has been developing her talents as a musician. Her latest album features her own gorgeous arrangements of traditional Christmas music, performed by LJ herself. Very tasteful and classically inspired, with a touch of gospel. I think my favourite is “I Saw Three Ships”. Perfect background music for a Christmas drinks party or the long drive to visit family, I’d say.

You can preview or download here at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/ljrich3

Posted on November 21, 2011 - by MG

Nostalgia, my mother and Pan Am

I’m enjoying the current TV series ‘Pan Am’ – not so much for it’s alleged similarity to ‘Mad Men’ but for its personal nostalgia value. My mother worked as a stewardess during the same period – the late 1960s – first for Aeronaves de Mexico (now AeroMexico) and then for Lufthansa. She’s pictured here modelling, I think for Lufthansa. Then after being ‘grounded’ by the twin miseries of marriage and children, she worked in reservations for Lufthansa, in Manchester. When her marriage to our stepfather broke up, she returned to the airlines to keep her three children fed and sheltered, this time working for Pan Am.
I choose to write ‘twin miseries of marriage and children’ because I noticed that the Pan Am TV series uses themes that would have been very familiar to my mother, and therefore strike me as accurate. ‘Pan Am’ presents the life of an airline stewardess as one of the few glamorous, exotic escape possibilities for intelligent, attractive women, usually from ‘respectable’ families. One of the main characters actually runs out on her own wedding in order to escape and work for Pan Am. The leading man, a dashing blond pilot named Dean, even warns his lecherous co-pilot not to ‘ground’ the stewardesses when they are admiringly talking about the women as evidence of natural selection in action – beautiful women who achieve flight. The implication was that marriage and children were traps to be avoided – unless you snagged a rich, successful bachelor; another good reason to become a stewardess.
My mother had her offers of marriage – they were more or less a staple of the job, my mother said. She’d started working for Aeronaves de Mexico after divorcing my father, and left my sister Pili and I with our grandmother while she worked short haul flights mainly to South America and the USA. There was a pilot named Hans who showed up with what I remember as increasing regularity, but she was never willing to divulge too many details.
When she was more or less forced to stop flying for Lufthansa, I remember she was rather depressed. We’d moved to Manchester then and lived in a freezing cold flat in a Victorian house in Stockport. The walls were unpainted, the floors were bare boards (and not polished or anything). Mummy dressed up in knee-length leather boots and fashionable A-line skirts and silk scarves, then rode the bus to Manchester city centre, to the sleek offices of Lufthansa in St Anne’s Square. Often, she told me, she would cry all the way there, mascara running down her cheeks, tears for her lost, globe-trotting life which had been replaced with a desk-based existence. I couldn’t blame her. Those years in Stockport were sometimes pretty drab, living through the 3-day week, her husband away on tour with the Halle Orchestra for days and weeks at a time, as well as many evenings. It could have been a very happy time, on reflection; she was in love, she had two healthy little girls who were pretty happy in school, her job relieved her of domestic tedium and brought her in contact with some lovely women, Lufthansa employees who remained lifelong friends; Annie, Ann Samy, Marijke, Maya the dancer.
But for a woman in her twenties, how could that compare to the excitement of flying to a new city, every day, of being responsible for the safety and well-being of airplane loads of well-heeled passengers?
Poor old ‘Pan Am’ – even back in the 1980s the writing was on the wall for that company. Poor service, an ageing stock and the dread entry into the market of Freddie Laker and frill-free flying; things began to get very difficult. When we were enjoying (?) our family right to free travel on Pan Am (standby-only – it could take days to get to Mexico City, with long waits in airport lounges), my mother used to despair of the low standards of customer service, compared to what she’d been used to provide. The passing years had made her stop pining for the job, too. ‘Hours on your feet and being polite to passengers who are rude to you? You can stand it when you’re young…’
By then she was studying and researching Spanish and German 18th century Romanticism. Not quite her true vocation either – that would have been singing. But it did seem, finally, to have cured her wanderlust.
My own memories are slight but definitely and powerfully glamorous;living in a stylish apartment in Frankfurt, my mother playing the Getz/Gilberto album that her cellist boyfriend had given her, looking sharp in a navy-blue, fitted uniform before a flight to the Middle East during which some handsome German or Arab would doubtless ask her out for a drink, or propose marriage. I found it impossible ever to begrudge our mother any sadness she felt for losing that.

Posted on October 21, 2011 - by MG

How I fangirled Haruki Murakami at the #welovemurakami party

Some years ago I wrote a blogpost I am so going to fangirl Haruki Murakami… about my favourite living author. Despite my vow, it turned out to be more difficult than I’d anticipated. I couldn’t find an email address or anything. I thought about sending a letter to his UK publisher, Random House, but something told me that they would probably not pass it on. Murakami is obsessive about his privacy, he’s probably not that interested in fan mail. Maybe it gets boring after a thousand or so? (Message to my readers – I’m not tired of fan mail yet!)

The desire to celebrate Murakami must have built up into something unbearable because when Zool Verjee (@cadmus08) started tweeting about the upcoming launch of 1Q84, I couldn’t resist urging him to organise a party at Blackwell’s in Oxford.

It turns out that another Oxford-based author, Dan Holloway, had been doing just the same thing. Also that Blackwell’s in Oxford is a hotbed of Murakami fans who were delighted at the chance to throw a party for the sheer joy of Murakami-love and shared delight at the appearance of a hotly-anticipated new novel (watch the trailer for 1Q84.)

So last night saw a bunch of Oxford folk gather in the shop for the We Love Murakami party. In honour of Haruki’s own obsession with jazz and cocktails, we had the pleasure of a live jazz pianist. And I mixed Cosmopolitans, Coolman Martinis, Sea Breezes and Shirley Temples, with help from newly-recruited mixologist, Steph.

We shared stories of how we came to love Murakami, what his writing means to us, there were impromptu readings of favourite passages from his books. We voted on our favourite books (mine s0 far is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle). On pink and blue postcards, we jotted down thoughts of what Murakami means to us. There were pop quiz questions with book prizes (I won a copy of Norwegian Wood for our 19-year old daughter).

Euan from Blackwell’s recorded videos of the speeches. He’s sending footage as well as the postcard jottings to Murakami’s publisher who have promised to pass them on to Haruki. (and we believe them!)

Really a special night of great warmth and affection for a writer than I’m pretty sure none of us with ever meet, but whose inner world has touched us to our very core. That’s what readings is for, at its very best. I am but a humble entertainer, but even humble entertainers need sustenance to inspire our writing. Any writer that inspires me; Murakami, Junot Diaz, Pedro Juan Guttierrez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Kazuo Ishiguro, well, I’m forever in their debt.

Thank you Blackwell’s for such a wonderful evening!

Posted on October 10, 2011 - by MG

Hurray for Oxford! (Kennington Literary Festival and Murakami love)

Well, I’m back on the blog. An extended holiday packed with houseguests and road-tripping gobbled up July and August, and the edit of Joshua Files 5 gulped down my September.

(Big announcement about Joshua 5 over on themgharris.com, btw)

Rewriting, as any author will tell you, is mentally exhausting. You have the editor’s notes that point out all the flaws in your manuscript, all that’s needed is to fix things. Sometimes this means breaking your plot and putting it together in a better configuration. I received my editor’s notes whilst on holiday in Spain. During  a long swim, I mentally put together the new, improved plot. Luckily, it still seemed to work when I returned to my computer.

So after emailing the second draft of Joshua 5 to my editor, I’m now free to write about two exciting upcoming events I’m involved in. Two events which demonstrate the awesomeness of Oxford.

The first, next Saturday, is the 2nd Kennington Literary Festival. In aid of the wonderful little Kennington Village Library, this event is pure ‘localism’. You can come along and meet Oxford authors including Bill Heine, Brian Aldiss, Korky Paul and also – me!

Here’s the article in The Oxford Times:  Literary line-up to aid village library

You can download the full brochure for the Kennington Literary Festival 2011. Or later today you can go pick one up from Starbucks in Summertown or the Jericho Cafe, where I will be dropping some leaflets.

BBC Oxford’s Jane Markham interviewed me about Joshua Files, time-travel fiction and the Kennington Festival – you can listen on the interviews page.

My event is on SATURDAY 15TH OCTOBER 2.20pm-3pm. Free for under 16s! Send your teenagers along to hear some Joshua secrets, tea and biccies in the village hall afterwards.

Meanwhile fellow Oxford author Dan Holloway and I seem to have successfully lobbied Blackwell’s, Oxford to organise an event to celebrate the launch of our beloved Haruki Murakami’s new book, IQ84. Read more about our plans here: We Love Murakami. I’ll be making Cosmopolitans and Coolman Martinis, still deciding on which mocktails… Dan might be making Wind-Up Bird spaghetti. Any volunteers to make rude phone calls to him while the pasta cooks?

So much excitement! And Swindon Youth Literature Festival coming up in November!

Meanwhile I will now work on Surprise New Project – an adult techno-thriller set in the Joshua Files universe. More on this soonish! And Ultra Secret New Project, about which I am still keeping mum…