Archive for the ‘raves’ Category

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 June 27, 2011 - by MG

Welcome, Pottermore, to the world of enhanced books!

Excellent news re Pottermore. Why should fans of a series be the only ones to play in the creative sandbox? Authors might want to noodle around there too. And it doesn’t have to detract from the creativity of fandom. Some fans enjoy defining a text by their own reading, to put it in the kind of language used by cultural studies mavens like Henry Jenkins. Equally, some fans want to probe further into the author’s own vision of a world.

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…

Posted on March 30, 2011 - by MG

English Baccalaureate – not quite there yet

I’ve been at the BBC Millbank studios today talking about my thoughts on the English Baccalaureate on the BBC Daily Politics show. In my role as a school governor (which I don’t talk about much here…!) and chair of our governors’ Curriculum Committee, it’s my role to support the school in implementing government policy. Under the last government there were things I had quibbles with but – to be honest – I couldn’t see that government lasting. So like many, I waited patiently to see what the change of government would bring.

And in the main, I liked much of what I read in the Coaltition Government’s White Paper on Education – The Importance of Teaching. I even liked the idea of an ‘English Baccalaureate’ or ‘EBac’, which would steer 14-16 year-olds to a core of broad and academic subjects and away from English/Maths and a ‘soft’ BTec worth 4 GCSE equivalents.

Except that the apparently exemplifying language of the paper ‘and a humanity such as history or geography’ turned out to be utterly proscriptive!

So that seems to be that other humanities; religious education, philosophy, economics, law…will not ‘count’ in the EBac.

Well, it’s a half-baked policy, as I argued in the short sequence filmed at St Gregory the Great School, Oxford, where I’m a governor.

Maybe Michael Gove should pop back to Oxford University, where he and I were contemporaries in the 1980s. He could revisit the Bodleian Library, once the core of the University, and check out the ‘Scholae’ that formed the heart of an ancient University education. Moral Philosophy (modern-day equivalent is Religious Studies), Music, Natural Philosophy (modern-day equivalent is Science), Logic (modern day equivalent, Maths), Grammar and History (language and history).

If you’re going to hark back to a classical education, what’s wrong with Oxford University’s original curriculum?

Or maybe he’d argue that we’ve moved on from the 13th century. That’s fine. So how about adding a core technology subject? ICT/Design and Technology/Computer Studies?

At the West London Free School started by journalist Toby Young and some fellow parents, Latin will be compulsory to GCSE. And you know what – that is fine by me. Toby is a school governor. That’s who should set the curriculum of a particular school: headteachers and governors!

Come on, Michael. Don’t be a fuddy-duddy, meddling micro-manager. Let headteachers and school governors set the agenda, the way the White Paper promised! If we must have another performance measure, at least allow each school to choose the compulsory humanity for their students.

But why stop at a performance measure? EBac could be something actually useful, a pre-16 qualification with a core of English/Maths/Science/Language/Humanity+4 more subjects for the academic strand OR a chunky vocational subject or two.

Anyway, here are some of the criticisms of EBac as it stands:

Catholic Education Service Statement re Religious Education and EBac

Baccing our students - Archbishop Sentamu Academy Submission to E-Bac Select Committee