Archive for the ‘blog tour’ Category

Posted on March 10, 2011 - by MG

Blog swap! Katherine Langrish and MG Harris interviewed by teen readers.

Today it is my turn to host the fabulous Katherine Langrish on her WEST OF THE MOON blog tour.

Katherine and I are interviewed by two teenage readers, Libby and Patrick Caffrey, who have been following both Katherine’s TROLL FELL and my Joshua Files series.

You can read the interview with me over at Katherine’s blog, Seven Miles of Steel Thistles.

Katherine and I have decided to swap blogs for the day. So here on mgharris.net it is all about Katherine and WEST OF THE MOON.

WEST OF THE MOON  – an abridged version of the TROLL FELL trilogy – is the kind of book that will have you wishing that you were a teenager again so that you could read it at the most humdinging age, hunting around for a teenager to give it to and then snuggling down to enjoy it all by yourself, the wretched teen can get her own book…

Katherine writes beautifully, perfectly pitched simplicity with just occasional, delicious use of unusual words that settle the reader right into the world of Norse mythology. The story opens when Peer, a twelve-year old boy is whisked away from his friends and neighbours after his father’s death. He’s taken to live with two evil uncles who are in league with trolls to steal children. Yet what could easily become a bloodthirsty tale of child abduction becomes an atmospheric, brooding and charming tale of a fishing village in the craggy north where trolls and humans try their best to get along, with occasional misunderstandings. There is darkness and cruelty in Troll Fell – but it comes from the lonely shapeshifter Granny Greenteeth and bullying Uncles Baldur and Grim.

It’s a heroic tale of family, young love and the bravery of two kids – Peer and Hilde, who eventually travel to the fabled lands ‘West of the Moon’ for their biggest challenge. And kept me thoroughly entertained these past few nights while I’ve been in Switzerland!

Katherine studied English at university, got a job, got married, had children and went to live in France and then in America. She began visiting libraries and schools, telling stories aloud. This turned out to be excellent practice for being an author! She moved back to England and began writing the stories that turned into the Troll Trilogy, ‘Troll Fell‘, ‘Troll Mill‘ – and ‘Troll Blood‘ (HarperCollins) which was recommended in the ‘Top 160 Books for Boys’ compiled by the School Library Association.

Katherine’s latest book Dark Angels (US title is The Shadow Hunt) has been  nominated for the American Library Association’s Best Fiction for Young Adults 2011.

FOUR BIG QUESTIONS FOR KATHERINE LANGRISH (by Libby and Patrick Caffrey)

1          How do your editors affect your work and have you always worked with the same editor?

What an interesting question!  Readers often assume an author simply writes the book and has it published in exactly the same form, not realising the role editors play in the process.  And as you might guess, the role of an editor varies from author to author and from book to book.

Some authors like their editors to be hands-on, involved from the outset, talking through plot, structure and even characters.  This can work especially well if the author is a planner, someone who likes to know where they’re headed well in advance.

Me, I’m the other sort.  I’m a kind of secretive hermit.  I try to tell people as little as possible about what I’m writing, and this includes my editors, who have to be very patient and restrained!  I usually spend a lot of time before I even begin, just privately thinking and mulling over my characters, getting to know them and their world.  Once I really know who they are, plus their surroundings and situation, I set off with them, usually with only the vaguest idea where we’re all heading.  That way, I stay interested.  (A friend once described this to me as ‘weaving my parachute on the way down’, but for me it seems to work!)  Only when the book is finished does my editor get to see it.  I re-draft as I go, so by the time I’ve got to the end, I’m usually fairly happy with it, and happy to show it.

At this point, my editor (and I’ve had several by now, so no, not always the same one) will read the manuscript.  She will come back to me with her overall impression (hopefully good!), and with some more detailed suggestions, perhaps for cutting passages here and there to improve the pace, or asking me to look again at whether a certain chapter works, or perhaps strengthening a character or two.  Often she’s 100% right; sometimes I don’t agree and we argue it back and forth a little: but her input is essential.  If there’s one rule in fiction, it’s that you can afford to cut out a lot more than you think!  So I really appreciate my editors, who, to a woman, have been professional, tactful, intuitive, and as keen as myself to make the book as good as it can possibly be.

2          The Troll Fell trilogy has a lot to do with folklore – is this something you were brought up with as a child or did you have to research it while writing?  If so, where did you find information from?

The answer is, a bit of both.  Yes, I grew up reading fairytales, and was always interested in folklore and legends.  They creep into stories even for quite little children more often than you’d think.  One of the earliest books I remember reading all by myself was ‘The Tale of Mrs Tiggywinkle’ by Beatrix Potter.  If you think about that story for a moment – it’s about a little girl, Lucie, who runs off up the mountain called Cat Bells in the Lake District, trying to find her pocket handkerchief (her quest).  She finds a door in the hillside, goes in, and meets Mrs Tiggywinkle who is obviously a hedgehog – we can see that from the picture! – but who is also a kind of fairy laundress.  While there is nothing threatening about the story (or is there?  Those prickles poking out of Mrs Tiggywinkle’s gown are a bit unsettling), Beatrix Potter is clearly bringing together all sorts of folklore here: stories about children who run away or are taken away to fairyland, the underground elfland under the hill – and who may not always return safely…  And behind the comfortable figure of the fairy laundress is the more dangerous one of the Washer at the Ford, the banshee, the fairy laundress who washes the bloodstained clothes of those who will die in battle.  I can’t pretend I was aware of all those echoes when I read the book at the age of five or six, but I was certainly aware of a sort of mysterious depth to the story.  And that was why I loved it.

But going back to my own books, for ‘Troll Blood’, the third part of ‘West of the Moon’, I needed to do a great deal of research into the folklore of a Native American people, the Mi’kmaq of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. I spent many, many weeks in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, reading ancient copies of journals like The American Anthropologist and the Journal of American Folklore. Often these included direct translations of stories told by named individuals to the person who wrote them down – and therefore authentic.  And I avoided like the plague volumes with generically vague titles like ‘Legends of the North American Indians’, which almost never provide sources, and sometimes don’t even say from which tribe or nation the story is supposed to come.   (If you think how big North America is, you can see that talking about ‘Indian legends’ is about as useful as putting Greek and Scandinavian mythology together and labelling them ‘European legends’.)

3          You just released ‘West of the Moon’, the abridged version of the Troll Fell trilogy – how did you decide which parts to leave out and why did you feel the need to abridge it?

Actually I believe that ‘West of the Moon’ is greater than the sum of its parts… I wouldn’t so much call it an ‘abridged’ edition, as a ‘revised’ one.  ‘Abridged’ always suggests to me something rather lopped and truncated, and I did not want that to happen!  No episodes or characters have been cut.  What I did get rid of was a lot of unnecessary repetition, especially in the first third of the book, ‘Troll Fell’, which was, in places, a little wordy!  To me, this new version is tighter and runs more smoothly as one three-part story.  I hope readers will agree!

I was also able to lose all those bits you have to put in to a sequel, so that readers who don’t know the first book will be able to understand what’s going on. You know what I mean, the bits that go something like ‘But Harry was no ordinary boy! Ever since the extraordinary events of his twelfth birthday, when an invitation to become a pupil at Hogwarts’ School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was delivered to him by owl post at the house he shared with his horrible relatives, the Dursleys…’

4          Hardback, paperback or Kindle – and why?

Oh, ideally all of them.  First of all, a hardback book is just such a lovely, durable thing.  There are hardcover books I owned as a child, which are sitting on my bookshelves right now in perfectly good condition and have been read by my own children, and will still be there in twenty years time to be read by my grandchildren, should I ever have any.  And I believe the next generation will still be reading real books, too – alongside Kindles, or whatever will have replaced Kindles by then.

Because real books are so handy – especially paperbacks.  They are relatively cheap to produce and buy and pass along – and it doesn’t matter too much if you drop them in the bath, or get sand in the pages, or leave them on the floor to be stepped on or chewed by the dog, or out in the garden overnight to be rained on…

All of my books are available on Kindle as well as in traditional formats.  But I haven’t got a Kindle of my own yet, though I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.  It will be useful if I go on holiday (cutting down on the pounds of book-weight I normally cart about with me). But I will have to be careful with it.  I must NOT leave it lying around on the floor, or out on the patio catching dew. I must not balance it on the edge of the bath while I lie back up to my ears in the nice hot water.  Perhaps owning a Kindle will improve my character and make me a better, tidier person… and perhaps not.

THANK YOU TO KATHERINE FOR VISITING MGHARRIS.NET ON THE WEST OF THE MOON BLOG TOUR!

You can follow Katherine’s blog tour tomorrow down at Scribble City Central.

Posted on March 7, 2011 - by MG

Return to Eggli Mountain

As I tell kids when I visit schools, the Eggli mountain near the Swiss town of Gstaad is where I broke my leg skiing, the ‘lucky break’ which gave me the time and mental space to start my writing career.

I hadn’t been back – until today! Visiting my brother Michael and his family, I joined them at the top of the mountain. In fact I’m writing this post whilst sitting on a deck chair, facing the sun and a gorgeous view of gleaming snowy mountains. In fact…is that a tinge of tanning I can feel on my face?

Michael has given me his iPod with his playlist of Ed Reardon’s Week. Essential listening for writers, I’m assured. It’s probably because I insisted that we check to see if the airport WHSmith’s had my books. All authors torture themselves like this. Luckily I left happy – they had ZERO MOMENT.

My tiny, three year old nephew and niece are schussing around the piste as if the skis were extensions of their legs.

I’m in the middle of a bunch of author visits – last week with kids from St Edmund’s in Hindhead, Bampton Primary, Cheney School Oxford, and St Bartholomews, Newbury. Next week – College du Leman in Geneva. Photos and a big round-up to follow.

Coming soon: On March 10th Children’s author Katherine Langrish and I swap blogs for the day! Two teenage readers, Libby and Patrick Caffrey have read West of the Moon, a new abridged version of Katherine’s Troll Fell trilogy, and also The Joshua Files. They’ve put together some questions for Katherine and I – we’ll be answering on 10^th March. It’s all part of Katherine’s West of the Moon blog tour.

I’ve been reading WEST OF THE MOON and telling a very simplified version to my three-year old niece and nephew. Trolls stealing young children, evil Uncles Baldur and Grim, it’s going down a storm! I overheard my nephew playing a game later which featured Uncle Baldur as the villain…

Ah. The shiny shiny snow beckons. Maybe I should take a little walk around the top of the mountain.

Posted on April 24, 2010 - by MG

Motivating your characters – the key to success? (ZERO MOMENT blog tour #7)

The Zero Moment blog tour continues…and M is for Motivating your Characters.

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)

Posted on March 30, 2010 - by MG

Zany Orange Puffles and social networking sites for children (ZERO MOMENT blog tour #1)

Rumours of the Zany Orange Puffle have been around for about a year. Small children would argue with you about whether the sightings (posted on YouTube) of this rare Puffle are genuine or fake. A certain small child has been begging me to let her get an Orange Puffle since their official release in the online world of Club Penguin in February.

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)<–>

Posted on March 13, 2010 - by MG

The ZERO MOMENT blog tour

Here is the list of articles in the ZERO MOMENT blog tour which ran throughout May 2010, along with the kind blogs run by friends of mine who have kindly agreed to host a rant, ramble, book review or intelexshull think-piece.

Z is for Zany Orange Puffles and social networking sites for children here at mgharris.net

E is for Elektra Assassin – the baddest comic book grrl ever at bookzone4boys.blogspot.com

R is for Richmal Crompton and the genius of Just William at bartsbookshelf.co.uk

O is for Om nom nom – the nommity meme at chicklish.co.uk

M is for Mayan myths in popular culture (2012 and all that) at scribblecitycentral.blogspot.com

O is for One Hundred Years Of Solitude – a bluffers guide at viewfromheremagazine.co

M is for Motivating your characters – the secret to success? here at mgharris.net

E is for Everything I Know About Plotting I Learned From Aristotle at myfavouritebooks.blogspot.co

N is for Numbers in the Dark by Italo Calvino – a short story collection review at nextread.co.u

T is for Ten Things That Helped me Get Published at howpublishingreallyworks.com