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.

My life in the next few months will consist mainly of:

1. Doing my bit in developing and testing the ARG (it has a name but right now I’m not telling…)

2. A few school visits (so far four scheduled for Jan and Feb)

3. Getting involved in pre-launch publicity -don’t know exactly what yet, my agent and I will be having a meeting with Scholastic’s publicity team to brainstorm ideas.

4. Meeting my new editor and getting thoughts started re the edit of ZERO MOMENT

It’s three-and-a-half months to go, but I sense that time will pass quickly.

OK so, in that time, what would you guys like me to blog about? If the above four things plus the usual randomness is enough, go for choice #5.

Oh and…you can pick TWO things from the list.

Well I’ve got me new website design and I’m delighted with it!

Readers, I have been SO busy with stuff…so much to write about Bill Heine’s book launch party, the Oxford heat of the Kids Lit Quiz, but most of all working on the Alternate Reality Game we’re developing to co-launch with ICE SHOCK.

That’s right, I said Alternate Reality Game – ARG! Conceptually, our game is a cross between Lonelygirl15 and The Beast.

But! It’s a secret. So don’t tell, okay?

Thanks to David for the upgrade to the latest version of WordPress and for helping me to configure and to Liam McKay of Woothemes for his custom design work in modifying his Papercut theme.

Here’s a sneak peek of my new website design, which is being done by Liam McKay of Woothemes.

We’ve gone for a jungly/Mayan/codex/grunge theme.

See how those elements naturally work together?!

I guess we’ll have to close the site down while my technical team i.e. Him Indoors/Beloved Husband uploads the latest WordPress software and puts all the blog photos through an auto-resize program and installs the new theme files while I look on helplessly and admiringly.

I hope you all like the new site. In the meantime I am thinking up ICE SHOCK-related snippets to feed you in the run-up to publication date.

The competition for bound proofs is a GO, by the way. Scholastic have kindly offered SIX proofs of ICE SHOCK to give away. And I have come up with an idea. We’ll be making the announcement on themgharris.com by the middle of next week and contacting school libraries and reading clubs too…

 I’m working on this at the moment, as you can tell. I’m new to WordPress and not sure I’ll stick with it. Having to get quite geeky again, using FTP software and stuff. The results will hopefully be worth it; if not I’m going to stick with Blogger.

Meanwhile thanks for your interest and I hope soon to be able to actually command this web publishing software. It is non-trivial, whatever people tell you. Point and click and drag and drop it ain’t.

Meanwhile, I have been watching Armstrong and Miller via Youtube, on the recommendation of a good pal.

I love the RAF pilot sketches, right? They’re just like my teenage daughter and her friends, yeh? Who related a whole conversation to me yesterday, yeh, and she was just like, “so he was just like…and I was just like….and he was just like…and I was just like…”

And I was just like…do you know any other ways to say ‘said’, isn’t it?

Except I didn’t actually say that. Cos that would have been, like, harsh.