Like Jenkins I’m as interested in the cultural as well as publishing implications of Pottermore. I was slightly startled to see Youtuber Alex Day (nerimon) respond within hours with his video What the F**k Is Pottermore? (over 200,00 views since posted, as of today).

Was this some kind of new backlash against an author trying to control how fans play in the sandbox she created? Or just a disguised version of the all-too-familiar Potter-envy, which has resulted in a tedious stream of law suits, and critical sniffiness, such as this think-piece by a author A.S Byatt?

Two of the comments by Alex Day struck me. First, he seems to resent to being referred to as part of the ‘digital generation’. Maybe like me, nerimon senses that this is yet another spurious term trying to pin down something which marketeers don’t actually understand. Those crazy digital people! Yes. That’s right. Fear us, we are strange and pixelated!

Secondly, he suggests that if one feels strongly enough about which Hogwarts house you might be in, if such a thing actually existed, you should be able to decide for yourself.  Official or not, you shouldn’t need the official website to dictate. (Alex feels loyal to Ravenclaw. When I did the test on Facebook, it picked me as a Gryffindor. But I’d have chosen Ravenclaw too, probably.)

In Three Reasons Why Pottermore Matters, Henry Jenkins addresses whether authors should try to control the extent and manner in which which fans interact with their creation. Jenkins coined the term ‘textual poacher’ for such fans, and he’s written extensively on the phenomenon of fan fiction, in which readers/viewers appropriate published or broadcast material for their own creativity.

Where do I stand? Well, for once I have a foot in both camps.

Like a few other newish YA authors (e.g. Cassandra Clare, author of The Mortal Instruments books), I began my writing career as a ‘textual poacher’. Back in the late 1990s my good friend Reba Bandyopadhyay and I started the first online Blake’s 7 fan fiction zine.*

Without the literary multi-gym of fan fiction, I would probably never have become a published author. Writing Blake’s 7 fanfic developed me as a writer, it also introduced me to some wonderful friends.

So I’m in favour of the fan-created world. Long may it live!

On the other hand, now I’m an author too. And the world of The Joshua Files doesn’t stop at the books. There is a whole other novel in the form of the Alternate Reality Game, The Descendant. Who killed Josh’s godfather, PJ Beltran, and why? Where is PJ’s teenage daughter, Gabi? The answers these questions are answered in the form of over 50 videos, blogs, secret messages in Habbo Hotel and a code in the UK and US editions of the second Joshua book, ICE SHOCK.

Then there’s Josh’s new secret blog, which provides glimpses into his life before and after the fourth adventure DARK PARALLEL. Fans are beginning to comment on Josh’s blog, to interact with him. But fans have also created their own versions of Josh’s blog, and have inserted themselves as new characters in the investigative drama that is The Descendant, they’ve made their own video trailers.

I think this is more than cool – it’s essential to real growth of a story. A story really only takes off when it has been poached. Hence all the versions of Robin Hood, the Merlin story, etc. Now we have modern day equivalents – the new Star Trek movie franchise kicked of by JJ Abrams is a professionally-produced AU (alternative universe) Trek fanfic.

But authors should be able to play too! That’s what Pottermore is – the author’s own personal sandbox, or as Youtuber Mickeleh says in his response to nerimon (What’s Pottermore? I’ll Tell You) – it’s JKR’s “own personal bandcamp”.

Join the author there if you want, if not, don’t. Mind you, it will be the only way to buy HP ebooks.

However! Chin-stroking commentators who write that it’s the end of publishing as we know it, fundamental paradigm shift etc, may have missed something.

Pottermore is a closed shop – a site for HP fans only where they can only buy HP-related products. That’s fine when you have hundreds of millions of readers.

If you don’t, if you are, oh I don’t know, lemme see, almost anyone else on the planet, you probably still need to sell your books, e or paper, in a place where other books are sold.

Never underestimate the power of cross-buying, impulse buying and the all-powerful bookseller’s tool, 3-for-2. Or indeed, Amazon’s witchy ways of figuring out what customers like to read.

Pottermore is like a cheese shop that only sells gorgonzola. Great if you love gorgonzola, but a fan of cheddar, cheshire or brie isn’t likely to wander into there by mistake and give it a try.

Like, I suspect, all other authors in the world, when my books go digital later this year – next week for ICE SHOCK – I want them sold at all the outlets possible. Breathe easy, Amazon et al. There’s only one Harry Potter.

*Reba has read everything I have ever written and from the beginning commented as seriously on my Blakes7 fanfic as she does now on Joshua Files and the manuscript for Ultra Secret New Project. I promised to base a character in Joshua Files on Reba, so Joshua readers will be visiting Reba at her observatory in Joshua 5…

Jackson Curtis is the spitting image of Jackson Bennett

How very postmodern of Emmerich et al to make the hero of the 2012 movie an author of a novel set in a post-2012 world…

I like it.

Check out the first chapter of ‘Farewell Atlantis’ by Jackson Curtis, the fictional novel written by the lead character. Kudos to the creator of the 2012 Movie Experience for bothering to write it! It’s not the first time such a thing has been done. Remember the manuscript that sexy Sawyer was reading on the beach in the first series of LOST? Well, that novel – ‘Bad Twin’ made the bestseller list in the USA!

Quite an interesting novel opening! Also – search for the title ‘Farewell Atlantis’ on IMDB and you’ll see that there’s already an entry. It’s not what you think though…

Makes me wonder if I should tidy up the 85,000 word manuscript for “The Descendant” and give it away for free like Cory Doctorow did with ‘Little Brother’.

Maybe one day. What do you think, blog readers? Would you like to read about cute action guy Jackson Bennett and his encounters with Melissa DiCanio and the Sect of Huracan?

Seriously I love all of this blurring-the-lines-of-reality stuff. If this kind of thing has existed when I was a kid I would have disappeared into a fictional world and probably never emerged.

(Well I kind of did that anyway with BBC TV’s Blake’s 7.)

Oh drat - it's raining meteors.

I’ve decided to devote a whole week of blog posts to the Big Movie Event this week – the release of Sony Picture’s 2012 movie.

I’ll be taking some time each day to play on the many 2012 apocalypse websites that have been created by the imaginative team behind the ’2012 Movie Experience’ (basically, an Alternate Reality Game or ARG, not unlike the one we created for Joshua Files – THE DESCENDANT.)

And on November 13th I’ll go see the movie and post my review. Yesirree.

Like The Joshua Files books, the central theme of 2012 is the mysterious end-date of the Mayan calendar – 21 December 2012.

Only, 2012 is a Massive Great Disaster Movie from the king of the disaster movie genre, Roland Emmerich. (THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, INDEPENDENCE DAY). Whereas The Joshua Files is a puzzly, twisty, young adult fantasy technothriller about one teenager’s role in an ancient secret to protect the world from a global catastrophe in 2012. The final book, Joshua#5, will be published in 2012. So I’m not going to say whether it ends up in a big disaster scenario or not. Except that that wouldn’t be terribly original, would it? Not after 2012 – the movie.

So – 2012 the movie! Will it be any good? I hope so. If Emmerich blows the whole 2012 doomy gloomy excitement for Joshua Files, I shall be Very Cross. Let’s hope that that it will be STONKING.

Good indicators are the video trailers (both the 2012 cinema trailer and a new one which shows a brilliantly exciting escape scene as John Cusack and his fictional family escape spectacular doom in LA. ) and the fabulously serious and kooky 2012 Alternate Reality Game (ARG) that has been running since the launch early this year of the website of The Institute for Human Continuity.

(If this all sounds eerily familiar it’s because I have already blogged about this back in March 2009 Let’s Play 2012 Movie Virals.)

The IHC site was set up to inform people of the serious dangers of 2012 and to enter people in the 2012 Survival Lottery to be one of the lucky survivors. Coolio! I myself entered the lottery. Still don’t know if my number has been picked. Fingers crossed!

The whole 2012 thing is of course terribly controversial. If we’re being serious about it. I doubt that Emmerich et al are about any more convinced than me that there’ll be any actual disaster on 21 December 2012. It makes an exciting premise for an adventure story though.

But some people really believe this! And some people were actually taken in by the IHC site. Not that it was real, but that it was part of a global conspiracy to blah blah blah. You know, the usual They Are Out To Control Your Life crowd. For example, check out this earnest debunking of the IHC website. It isn’t real? You don’t say. We couldn’t tell.

It can be hard to distinguish fact and fiction on the Web. For example, one of the sites we created as part of THE DESCENDANT ARG,  the Joshua Files Alternate Reality Game, is archaeologyconspiracies.com As part of the game, I wrote an entirely fictitious article about how the ancient Sumerians had knowledge of advanced biochemistry. Now archaeologyconspiracies.com is getting lots of traffic – around several hundred visitors per day. And the number one story on the site is guess what? Yep – one former biochemist-turned-novelist’s crazy and totally invented story about ancient Sumerians burying a code in amino acids. Yet there’s a clear disclaimer on the site which says that it’s part of the Joshua Files ARG – THE DESCENDANT. Are people reading that? Hmmm.

Fact vs fiction. Sort it out! (For some fact vs fiction guidance re 21 December 2012, see mayan2012kids.com.)

Phew, we’ve had a month of Gabi video blogging, Josh and Gabi watching and commenting on each other’s blogs, secret (or not-so-secret) meetings in Habbo Hotel with mysterious messages left on sticky notes on the walls…we’ve had a strange old geezer who calls himself TheOldMan49 tweeting away as he follows Josh and Gabi around the Web and tries to help.

There’ve been increasingly hysterical news stories in El International de Mexico about murders, unexplained disappearances and a kidnap. Secret surveillance documents revealing that in the world of The Joshua Files, no meeting is secure, no telephone conversation goes un-bugged… Some bizarre organisations have emerged too; the conspiracy theorists at archaeologyconspiracies.com, the Sect of Huracan and Chaldexx BioPharmaceuticals.

And some suspicious names are cropping up; names that might be familiar to you if you’ve read THE JOSHUA FILES…

If you don’t know what I’m talking about – where have you been?! It’s not too late to play THE DESCENDANT - the mystery is still unsolved. But the clues and evidence are now out in the open.

Find them if you can!

Anyway, it’s been fun (and exhausting!) for those of us running the show behind the curtain…

There’s going to be a virtual wrap party so that players can meet and chat to the game writers and lead developer. Check back here for details. Ooh and vote in the poll – would you like a virtual wrap party on Mogulus, Habbo Hotel or both (at different times, obviously)?

Okay, time for some fun on someone else’s ARG after all the work on the DESCENDANT…

As-you-know-Bob, the 2012 movie from Roland Emmerich of awesome STARGATE fame, is due out later this year. Emmerich is also known for his disaster movies INDEPENDENCE DAY and THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW.

Mmmm, apocalypse. He wants his apocalypse now. There, that’s the apocalypse jokes over with.

2012 will be another disaster movie, with the good old Mayan Long Count final date as the prediction for this movie’s end-times. It shares that and at least one other thing with The Joshua Files: the notion that the 2012 scenario is detailed in a still-to-be-found ‘fifth’ codex of the ancient Maya.

In the 2012 movie though, we’re cutting to the chase: codex, prophetic doom, disaster, one hero to save his family. Y punto. Oh and John Cusack as the lead. John Cusack! Could it be more perfect? I LOVE HIM! In my mind, he’s Jackson Bennett. (This won’t mean anything to you unless you are playing THE DESCENDANT ARG)

Okay so let’s play.

First, watch the teaser trailer for 2012. Fully awesome! Now isn’t that the way you would like to die…watching that terrifying wave washing over the Himalayas? It sure beats dying in a bed.

Then look at the two linked sites: This Is The End and The Institute for Human Continuity

At This Is The End you can watch nutty old Charlie Frost, a character played by Woody Harrelson, ranting on about the end is nigh on his cable TV show. Brilliant!

At the marvellously-named The Institute for Human Continuity you can watch a video report of the discovery of a fifth codex. I also recommend Joshua fans to look at the IHC’s section on E.A.R.T.H Initiative for a round-up of general 2012 hokiness. It’s a big-budget version of the 2012 page on DESCENDANT in-game site Archaeologyconspiracies.com. So definitely check it out!

They don’t seem to mention the Galactic Superwave though. Huh.

The principle of the Institute for Human Continuity is this: when the apocalypse arrives, we’re mostly doomed. There will be a lottery to choose survivors. You can take a number right now. Oooh, pick me!

Some snooty sci-fi folk have criticised this movie’s marketing campaign for being cheesy. But that’s just what a disaster movie requires! You can’t serve up a dish as scary as worldwide terror and doom without a side-dish of daftness. At least, you shouldn’t. Not if you want young people to enjoy it.

ICE SHOCK is out! So just as we did last year, members of the Joshua Files Facebook group met up at Krispy Kreme in Oxford to share a few boxes of doughnuts and chat about the new book.

Two young lads sat down to crack the new code in ICE SHOCK – it’s a clue for the Alternate Reality Game, you know! I had a nice long chat with Jacky Atkinson, one of the organisers of the Kids Lit Quiz.

Then I went home and frosted the big choccy cake that we’re having for the Joshua party at Blackwell’s tomorrow night.

I hope you are all THRILLED by ICE SHOCK. Check out excerpts, downloads and tips about playing the ARG at wonderful TheJoshuaFiles.com.

I thought I’d alert my blog readers to the fact that there’s a new contest at themgharris.com, the official online hangout for fans of The Joshua Files. 

This one is for budding movie-makers – to make a 30-second video for ICE SHOCK.

There are photos, images, hints, tips, sources of royalty-free images and music, plus a couple of plot spoilers for ICE SHOCK, to nudge your creative impulses.

Go on, have a try! You could win one of these:

In other news, I have had a stonkingly good Christmas and New Year with much socialising and partying – but not TOO much. I can’t handle too much – start to crave the peace and quiet of my desk.

But some is good, as is afternoon tea at Huffkins in Burford, a lovely Cotswold village.

Apart from that, I’ve also been working on the ARG (Alternate Reality Game).

I forget – have we said what it’s going to be called yet?

Nope, I don’t believe we have. Well, it’s called THE DESCENDANT, which is the title of the techno-thriller novel I wrote back in 2005, before INVISIBLE CITY. It’s from this manuscript that the backstory of Joshua Files is drawn, as well as the ARG. I originally conceived a sequel, which was to be entitled THE FIFTH CODEX. 

But then it struck me that the hero of THE FIFTH CODEX could be a youngster. And from that, I had the idea to write for children. (That and a reluctant-reader teenage daughter who I longed to see reading…)

At the beginning of THE DESCENDANT two DNA scientists meet to swap secret biological samples. One scientist is murdered and the other goes on the run. Is he the killer? Or is he running from the killer? The story moves from Mexico to Europe and then to Iraq, where a mysterious underground chamber hides an ancient secret about human civilisation.

For the ARG, we introduced a new character, Gabi – the teenage daughter of the murdered scientist. Her father has been killed – but why? And by whom? Like Josh she’s all alone…stressed out…can’t believe what she’s hearing about her father…and increasingly close to danger. And since her Dad was Josh’s godfather, Gabi turns to her old friend in Oxford for help.

Josh is ready and happy to help…but it won’t be long before his life is taken over by the dramatic events at the beginning of ICE SHOCK.

When we launch THE DESCENDANT ARG you’ll be able to watch as Gabi’s story unfolds. Who’ll solve the mystery first – you or Gabi? And will Gabi survive to tell the tale? In a real-time interactive finale you’ll be able to watch and assist as Gabi goes on a midnight run – with her life at stake.

I’m making a 60-second video trailer about THE DESCENDANT for some online retailers who are interested in having a glimpse. Is this the kind of thing you’d like to see here too? Or does it too badly violate the ARG maxim TINAG – This Is Not A Game?

Tell me what you think.

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…