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

Bill Heine talks to MG at the Ice Shock launch party

I’ve finally gotten around to editing some of the audio and video files I’ve had on the hard drive for months.

There’s now a page of collected MG Harris interviews, audio and written, from BBC radio as well as a podcast, book blogs, writers’ blogs and The Oxford Times.

It’s strange being interviewed. I’m clearly vain enough to enjoy it. Most of all though I like talking about the books themselves. Even more vain! Me and some other person or people talking about a story wot I made up!

Crazy, hey? I used to be a scientist contributing to Important Work on cell biology and vaccines and stuff.  Never got interviewed then. Now I make up stories and people want to talk to me about them.

It may be topsy turvy but you know what? I LOVE IT!

Here are my favourite two interviews:

Thanks to staff and students at Oxford High School and St Gregory the Great, Oxford, especially librarians Elizabeth Sloan and Hilja Bassett, to staff at Blackwell’s Bookshop Oxford especially Natalia de la Ossa, to my publicist at Scholastic, Alex Richardson for supporting all these launch events and persuading the Oxford Mail and BBC Southeast News to cover the event at St Greg’s.

And to everyone who came along to all these events – over 600 people in total! I hope everyone had as much fun as I did.

Now…go out and buy ICE SHOCK and tell the world! Every little bit helps, honestly. Word of mouth is KEY.

The book opens with a quotation from Jorge Luis Borges. It’s from a essay of his – A New Refutation of Time.

After taking issue with the very existence of time as anything other than a metaphysical construct, Borges writes:

“And yet, and yet . . . Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.”

When I was writing Ice Shock – and indeed the sequel, Zero Moment (working title, pace Polly!), I became interested in re-reading writings about our human experience of time. I also read The Time-Traveller’s Wife – a novel which deals almost exclusively with the emotional possibilities of one man’s time travel within his own timeline and lifetime. Another old favourite was ‘Bid Time Return’ by the influential writer Richard Matheson, which was filmed as ‘Somewhere in Time’ – an old favourite of mine from the 1980s. If there’s going to be time-travel in Joshua Files then what interests me isn’t just the cool adventure possibilities (of course I have plans to use that!), but also the emotional impact.

Of meeting your parents before you were born, of meeting your loved ones after your own chronological death; all that. Time travel is too good to squander on mere adventure! There’s a deep philsophical aspect to it, too.

So, I dug out that quotation by Borges. Somewhere along the line I decided to include it as part of the story. A message from the enigmatic Arcadio to Josh – a warning about Josh’s destiny. And it won’t be the last…

Gorgeous party at Blackwell’s last night to celebrate the publication of ICE SHOCK. Children and adult friends, librarians and publishers my agent and fellow Litopian Richard Howse and the force of nature that is Bill Heine joined me and some wonderfully generous staff at Blackwell’s, Oxford to party.

Regular blog readers, FaceBook and Twitter friends will already be aware of my cake-fixation, so shouldn’t be surprised to see that I took the opportunity for a major baking session. Cup cakes and the biggest, fattest chocolate cake that I know how to make. With a filling made from melting Dairy Milk and Bourneville bars with a bar of unsalted Normandy butter. I had a piece this morning. Damn, it was good! That is the best recipe ever, ever, from a book that deserves its title: The Cake Bible.

Photos are now on Flickr.

Tomorrow, the Official Launch on World Book Day at St Gregory the Great School, Oxford. Where for the first time ever, I will read aloud from ICE SHOCK.

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.

The Joshua Files: Ice Shock

Originally uploaded by mgharris

Squeals of joy. Two boxes arrived – one for me, one of copies to sign for prizes on swapitshop.com.

I played with them, like dolls. I arranged them in little stacks and next to doughnuts and took photos. I didn’t give them a bath or dress them, but I almost hugged them.

Tomorrow I might hug them. I really might.

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…)

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.

Over at Litopia, the writer’s community run by my literary agent, they put out a daily podcast. I actually believed people were insane dedicated enough to get up early to record this every morning.

But no. Turns out that this is what my agent does with his Sunday afternoons, then preps all the podcasts for a neat daily publication schedule. That way he can put something out every day without actually going mad.

So too the 12 Days Of Christmas feature over at literary magazine The View From Here, was prepped in advance and is now lined up to appear on a schedule over Christmas.

My own article appears on the second day of Christmas. As in – today!

At least it will be – when you read this.

(Btw readers who voted for me to post clues about ICE SHOCK might want to take a look. I give away a juicy bit of plot-line on this article…)

Lightbulb moment. You’d think that I would have cottoned on to the idea from our work developing the ARG that will be co-launched with ICE SHOCK. One of the websites has over 60 blog entries scheduled to appear over a month. We’re hoping that people will become hopelessly addicted and be checking the site every hour or so for updates as the story unfolds. It’s a thriller, so the pace hots up towards the end.

Yet it’s never occurred to me to do this with my own blog.

Until this post, everything you read has been published right away. No planning, just feel-think-write-publish.

There’s glory for you.

I received a brilliant fan letter recently. A boy from Colchester who said lovely things about INVISIBLE CITY and then said he was looking forward to my next book. He then described what he wanted my next book to be about – in quite some detail! Enough detail that I would probably be in trouble if I wrote exactly that plot. I think I’ll write back and suggest he writes up his idea himself. It sounded fab. People stranded on an island and at the mercy of flesh-eating zombies. Cool huh?

Apart from that, I’m having a very Christmassy Christmas, lots of carol singing and advent services and relatives and friends. Today we sampled various bloatation aids – cream tea in Burford, fish and chips, mince pies and mulled wine. And lemon, strawberry and blackcurrant bonbons from an old-fashioned sweet shop.

By the time this post appears I will be a BLIMP.