Archive for the ‘raves’ Category

Posted on March 28, 2011 - by MG

Save the Libraries – Kennington (Part 2 of 2)

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…

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 January 26, 2011 - by MG

Save the Libraries – Kennington (Part 1 of 2)

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.

Don’t just cut a hole in the heart of the community. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that because some people don’t personally use a service, they don’t have an interest in its existence. Where would we be if we took that approach with every publicly-funded institution?

Libraries and civilisation go hand in hand. What do we rightly regard with horror as one of the existential crises in Western civilisation? The burning of the Library of Alexandria!

Please use your influence and act to serve the community who elected you.

Please show that this matters to you!

I’m involved in the Campaign to Save the Kennington Library. This is a perfect example of a local library that should be supported. It is the Big Society in action. The community run a Free Literary Festival (see attached article from The Oxford Times), which raises awareness and funds for the Kennington Library. The library is used regularly by local primary schools, in effect providing an extension of their own library provision. Without that library people for whom mobility is an issue will have difficulty getting to town.

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)

Posted on December 4, 2010 - by MG

Remembering Vincent

There’s a friend of mine that I’ve blogged about before, Christian Pattison, who writes as Christian David. He’s been stomping around Summertown lately in his leather jacket, putting together his latest scripts and the novel and also The Vincent Fund.

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!)

Posted on October 20, 2010 - by MG

Character Motivation and The Social Network

I hugely enjoyed the movie of the story behind the founding of FaceBook. It reminded me of the heady days before 2001, when the dotcom bomb exploded. Good on all those guys for plugging exciting new life into the Internet, long after investors in the UK had pretty much stopped being excited about the potential of the Web.

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.