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

My mother (Maria) in her Lufthansa days

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.

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!

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…

MG Harris on BBC Daily Politics

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.

MG Harris's 'Soapbox' on 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

A Pied Piper leads Kennington villagers in protest at library cuts

Update on the Pied Piper March in support of the Kennington Library (see Save the Libraries – Kennington (Part 1 of 2))

I received a lovely letter from the organiser, Paddy Landau, as well as a CD of photos from the day. The event was a huge success! Councillor Keith Mitchell turned up to the tea party with the children and heard Korky Paul and I reading to the children of St Swithun’s Primary School. he then received baskets of petitions and posters from the children. In his address Keith outlined a number of options open to the council to make the savings required of them by the Coalition Govt.

The Pied Piper March was covered by local news, radio and TV. And here’s the GOOD NEWS! It seems to have worked – the plans to cut 20 of 43 libraries will be entirely rethought.

County tears up library closure plan

Funnily enough, Councillor Mitchell didn’t mention cutting salaries of highly paid council executives…of which I should stress that Councillor Mitchell is not one – he is an elected official. But there are people in Oxfordshire County Council who are paid top salaries to plan, for example, exciting new road schemes. Not to implement those plans – that would be people far down on the ladder.

Call me old-fashioned but I think that when your household runs out of cash you stop paying the architect to dream up that enormous extension and concentrate ONLY on repairs until there is money in the bank again…

That’s my tip for saving the libraries, anyway. Cut some salaries – just a bit! However, I suspect the extra revenue might be raised bythe return of Sunday and 24-hour parking charges, and the resumption of the speed cameras…

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.

MG at Kennington Literary Festival (photo by Mostly Books)

It’s all over the Internet and the news – to save money, local governments plan to close down some libraries. In Oxfordshire, 20 of 43 local libraries are threatened with closure. The communities are protesting, demonstrating, writing letters. This is the moment to persuade the county councils to change their minds!

I’m involved with the Save the Kennington Library Campaign. I’ve written before about this lovely village library and the Kennington Free Literary Festival that the community organises to support their library.

Local primary school children who use the Kennington Library have written letters to Cllr Keith Mitchell, who leads the Oxfordshire County Council. The Save the Library campaigners have written to Cllr Mitchell and to local MP, Nicola Blackwood, inviting them both to tea with the kids on February 7th, and to receive the letters of petition.

I’ll be joining with Korky Paul, an Oxford neighbour and illustrator of many wonderful children’s books (including Winnie the Witch), to read to the Kennington children.

Local media have also been invited to record the event. We’re very much hoping that Cllr Mitchell will turn up!

Here’s an excerpt of a letter I wrote to both.

The Government proposes to radically overhaul education, which I support. In that instance, it isn’t proposing to close schools and let natural selection take over! Libraries deserve the same, albeit on a smaller scale.

Please – consult with stakeholders, ask for proposals and bring in examples of best practice.

So…roll on February 7th…! I will post a report from the event, right here on the blog.

UPDATE: To see how it all turned out, see Save the Libraries – Kennington (Part 2 of 2)

It’s a memorial to the man he worked with for twenty years, good as: Vincent John McKeown, an incredible project that deserves wide support: a fund to help disabled people and their carers to enjoy the arts.

Christian is telling stories inspired by Vincent’s life, which ended abruptly last year after a long struggle with multiple sclerosis. Christian has spent most of life since graduating as a carer for the disabled, whilst also producing an amazing variety of artistic works (novels, plays, musicals, poems, as well as literary underground art/poetry/pop magazine, The Illustrated Ape.)

The web comic (gorgeously illustrated by Charles Cutting) is a series that begins with Vincent eschewing the afterlife (upstairs it’s Sunday every day and there’s a lot of Kum-bye-ahh; downstairs it’s always Monday morning and full of venial misery, as well as horned-ones in suits). Instead, Vincent chooses another, purely poetic route…

Vincent was a poet and a lecturer before the MS made work impossible. Christian used to accompany Vincent to as many arts events as possible. (They became experts on all the churches of Oxford too…) But it often took effort – try using the London Underground if you’re disabled…

So now the idea is to raise money so that other disabled people and carers can enjoy something that they don’t get as much chance to do as they might like. You can give money via the website to help for transport, or donate tickets. (Hint – putting on a show? Know any theatre producers? Tell them about The Vincent Fund!)

In the movie, which is based on the non-fiction book “The Accidental Billionaires”, we watch 19-year old Mark Zuckerman (played by Jesse Eisenberg) take an idea for a Harvard U based social networking site, and run off with it, building a site that would extend far beyond Harvard; first to other Ivy League Colleges, then to Stanford in California, then to Oxbridge, then all Unis, then the World.

Which is when you and me and most of our friends started using FaceBook.

Did Zuckerman steal the idea? Yes, insofar as someone told him about a great chair they’d imagined, and then he went off and built a chair himself. The blueblood Winklevoss twins and their partner made the mistake of telling a smart geek about their flashy idea, without tying him in to a contract, etc. Well that’s a tad naive. Back in the day when we started our IT company, we didn’t even talk about an idea we were serious about without getting someone to sign a confidentiality agreement.

Anyway, technicalities of the plot aside, what interested me was how screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) chose to tell the story.

He chose to start the movie with an incident that Zuckerman claims is fictional – the dumping of arrogant, pushy Mark by a lovely young WASP girlfriend. In his jilted rage, allegedly, Zuckerman sets up Facemash, a Harvard-based site for comparing the hotness of girls from a bank of photos pulled from the Harvard online ‘facebooks’ (books of photos of all undergrads). The site crashes Harvard’s server and lands Zuckerman in hot water with the administration and outraged ladies of the campus. Facemash is a fail, but brings Zuckerman to the attention of the Winklevoss twins, who need a bright young programmer to build their site, Harvard Connection.

Sadly these gentlemen underestimate Zuckerman’s own drive to control his efforts, his desire to build something awesome (he admits he doesn’t know what he’s building but he knows it is cool), and they overestimate the importance of a verbal agreement between Gentlemen of Harvard.

But as a motivation, by Hollywood standards that is a bit thin.

So Sorkin adds something else – a subplot designed to suggest that Zuckerman is driven mainly by an urge to be in the Posh Boys Club. Now the kid seems plenty posh enough to me – he went to Philips Exeter Academy and Harvard, for goodness sakes. (OK, that might be presuming; maybe he was on a scholarship, who knows.) When Zuckerman doesn’t get into the Posh Boys Club (it had a name but I’ve forgotten it. It’s something far less exclusive than the infamous Bullingdon Club at Oxford Uni of which David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson were members) – he is so consumed with a desire to Prove Himself that he steals the social networking site idea, creates FaceBook, and eventually even fiddles his own business partner out of the 30% of the multi-billion concern that is rightfully his for lending penniless Zuckerman the princely sum of $19,000.

Now there’s a motivation that we can all get behind! Muaha ha ha, evil young entrepreneur driven by pride and jealousy.

Zuckerman, who of course few ordinary people really care about, what with him being super-rich, has objected to the portrayal. At an address to Startup School in Stanford he concluded that Hollywood writers, “can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.”

Well, I bet they can. Even, maybe especially, Aaron Sorkin. Hollywood is the planet’s most effective mass-communicator. If Hollywood doesn’t make movies about geniuses who want to build something terminally Cool, it’s because they know that in reality most ordinary people, who are the majority of film goers, cannot identify with such a motive.

Entrepreneurs cannot ever expect to get a fair hearing from Hollywood, because they do something that by definition is exceptional. They do what they do for reasons that are not always easy to fathom. Their success involves so much luck and factors that were beyond their control, that it’s impossible to map the clear route to success that others might emulate.

Complicated motives and the hand of fortune don’t make a good screenplay. The truth about almost any business success would leave 95% of filmgoers baffled.

So Sorkin did his job – he found an ordinary human motivation – sexual jealousy and societal envy – in a complicated tale.

It’s probably nothing to do with the truth, but the truth rarely makes a good, clean story.