Archive for the ‘writers’ Category

Posted on May 29, 2009 - by MG

MG – highlights from Hay-on-Wye 2009

Spent the latter half of this week at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, the UK’s biggest celebration of books.

Highlights:

1. Lovely as ever to meet readers young and old, and to interest new people to the world of Joshua. I had to rush the signing slightly because pretty much everyone wanted to see Anthony Horowitz next. One day I will do a signings in a leisurely way and chat to everyone…

2. Saw terrific author events with Robert Muchamore (funny and frank), Anthony Horowitz (funny and hyper), and Andy Stanton (funny and MAD. 6-9 year olds go crazy for Andy and his books!). Andy is a former standup comedian and described by the Guardian as ‘one of the best performers on the children’s literary circuit’. (I’d agree)

It made me wonder if I should attempt to be funny but yanno what? No. I’m a girl, not a blokey boy like those three guys. Hard for girls to be funny unless you have way more energy than me. So you’ll be getting the laconic archaeology lecture for a bit longer until I can get away with telling childhood anecdotes.

I have already lined up the anecdotes, will save that for another post. First will search for photographic evidence, muahaha.

3. Andy Stanton and I hung out at the Kind of Blue jazz concert. Jimmy Cobb, former drummer with Miles Davis, played on that hugely influential album and now leads a very tight band of tenor sax, alto sax, trumpet, bass and piano. Oh man. Imagine hearing that music…then seeing Jimmy at breakfast at the Swan Hotel in hay next morning! I mentioned to him that Kind of Blue is an important reference for Josh in ‘Joshua Files’. ‘Very interesting’ nodded Jimmy. ‘Write the name of the book down so I can find it…’.

Yeah. Cool, huh?

4. Also chatted with Julia Eccleshare and her charming son George. Good luck with the exams, George. Hope you make those 3 As!

5. Ate much cake and wine with the fab Sir Philip of Ardagh, who agonised about leaving the party atmosphere at Hay for the genteel spa-town charms of Cheltenham. ‘I want to stay here and hang with my homies’ he complained.

6. Philip, Andy and Anthony are soon to be our little daughter’s new favourite authors. I don’t believe a child should live on Roald Dahl and nothing else. Weaning started tonight, with Anthony’s ‘The Switch’.

7. Mr Horowitz gave me a discarded page from his first draft of the new Alex Rider, signed over to my niece and nephew in Oz who LOOOOVE him. I gave Anthony an Invisible City postcard. Anthony swiftly moved to deciphering the code without a single key word!

Code crackers, watch and learn…

Posted on April 27, 2009 - by MG

The Wondrous Oscar Wao

There may be a new writer for me to swoon over. Haruki Murakami may be given a run for his money.

Here’s a book I’d been waiting to read until it came out in paperback and I had a really good stretch of uninterrupted time to enjoy it. Now I know I don’t usually blog about new books, because well, there are so many brilliant book review blogs, I’d rather leave that to them.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (by Junot Diaz) though, was a crystal-exploding-in-my-cortex type of book. You know when you feel like a book was written specially for you?

This one won the Pulitzer Prize, too. So it must be good.

Reading Oscar Wao felt to me like reading a funky hip take on Gabriel Garcia Marquez/Mario Vargas Llosa, set to a reggaeton rhythm…but about a character whose references were straight out of my own young-adulthood; Dungeons and Dragons, Blake’s 7 and Doctor Who, Watchmen, Lord of the Rings.

To my young blog readers – this is probably one to save until you are an adult. I would NOT want you to tell your parents I recommended this book. Like many works of Latin American literature, especially those set in brutal dicatorships, there are tales of violent atrocities and some extremely ‘adult’ situations.

To the old fogeys among you, READ THIS! It’s probably unlike any book you’ve ever read. It’s unlike any book I’ve ever read but then I can’t imagine there being another book like it.

Here’s the story: Oscar is a fat nerdy boy growing up in New Jersey. He adores comic books, fantasy role-playing games and sci-fi, he also falls hopelessly in love with girls all over the place but to no avail. Oh the shame of it, because he for all his geekery he is still a Dominican (from the Dominican Republic – it’s the Spanish part of the island of Hispaniola, the other half is French/African Haiti).

Dominican men are meant to be super-macho! They’re akin to Afo-Cubans – part African, part Spanish – 100% macho. Oscar’s mum nods with approval when aged 7 he dates two little girls at once. Once they dump him, Oscar’s romantic life is effectively over. Until much later, when fate returns him to the island of his heritage – and final destiny.

The story of Oscar is narrated with dispassionate energy by Yunior, a close friend. It’s not just Oscar’s tale but the island story of his mother and grandfather, just two of the many, many victims of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Hideous horrible violent and utterly unjust things happen to his mother and her family. It’s all described by Yunior with the pitiless yet sympathetic omniscience that is similar to the sweeping narratives of Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa. More minimalism though, which I like. Which I admire, too.

Historical footnotes provide more information – and it’s here that the voice becomes irreverently venomous. The DR sure was a total rathole (putting it VERY mildly) during Trujillo’s reign, a nightmare totalitarian state where justice ceased to exist and fear ruled supreme.

In common with other Great Writers, it’s not just the power of the story but the evidence of wisdom, shrewd observations of depths of human truths which mark out this author. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

Note to authors. Set your story in a totalitarian state and watch as plot just falls out. When every single person might legitimately be a liar who is about to feed your hero to a torture machine, the streets are paved with pure High Drama.

Posted on March 9, 2009 - by MG

ICE SHOCK and a new refutation of time

I thought I’d start a series of posts about some of the themes in Ice Shock. My publicist Alex Richardson and I worked on this for the new author pack. In the next week or so I’ll drizzle bits of it onto the blog.

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…

Posted on January 21, 2009 - by MG

‘Joshua Files’ a ‘Black Swan’ event?

I am still wallowing in the sparky, philosophical writings of Nassim Nicholas Taleb (NNT).

The best gift that a writer can bestow is the triggering of insight in another mind. That, surely, is one of the main reasons for reading? NNT’s book ‘The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” has had me thinking hard all week.

Today I was struck by the relevance on the section about the “silent, invisible cemetery” of casualties in any field, the ones you don’t hear about, the ones who make ‘Black Swans’ (i.e. random, highly unpredictable events) seem all the more remarkable.

NNT points out how routinely we ignore the failed entrepeneurs (who also displayed exactly the same character attributes as those who succeeded big time), the failed authors (who attended the same creative writing workshops, read the same books or writing, wrote as many words as those who succeeded), the failed gamblers (who didn’t start out lucky so gave up and therefore never figured in the apparently true statistic that gamblers have beginners luck).

There IS a silent cemetery of failed endeavour. But our mind edits it out. We prefer nice patterns where one thing preditably leads to anther. Where the game of life has rules.

As a scientist, I am part of the cemetery. Many enter the game of scientific research and many leave before they even get counted as jobbing scientists who you’ll never hear of (as opposed to the very successful ones you HAVE heard of.)

This whole subject particularly interests me because I know full well that ‘The Joshua Files’ is a Black Swan event. Yes; I can thread a nice narrative through the factors which led up to its writing and publication, and you might believe that it was always going to happen.

But no.

In fact, just as significant were a series of TOTAL coincidences that could not have been predicted.

1. I broke my leg, thus interfering with my work schedule.

2. In my resultant isolation, I was finally able to think deeply enough about writing and to practice it, to get better pretty fast.

3. I found an agent who under normal circumstances would have ignored my submission, because he usually doesn’t bother with the slushpile. But because of a coincidental and tenuous link between me and his most successful client (we both studied biochemistry at Oxford), I was able to grab his attention. 

4. This agent saw that my manuscript was promising but flawed. Unlike another agent who was initially very interested, this agent believed that I could write a publishable version.

And yet…he told me himself that he’d met with many authors at a similar stage and had a similar discussion. Failure…at that stage, was still the most likely outcome. My agent knew all about the cemetery – he’d seen authors wind up there. I didn’t.

Had I known that I would probably not have submitted a manuscript to him. Even though this is normal…most slushpile material does not succeed big-time, whoever the agent!

But since we mainly ignore the fallen in the invisible cemetery, I didn’t think of that…

5. This agent told me something about writing that was as astonishing to me as some rare fact about the life of an inhabitant of Mars. No I’m not going to tell you what that was! If you want to have the benefit of this guy’s advice, join Litopia! That piece of information enabled me to totally shift the focus of my writing.

6. I happened at that exact time to be devouring the works of Haruki Murakami. That single fact helped me to see immediately that my agent was right. Otherwise I might have doubted. But perhaps more importantly, I rapidly had a template for how to achieve what the agent wanted.

7. By sheer chance, no-one was sending in thrillers-for-children based around the Mayan 2012 thing. Not that year. US literary agent Nathan Bransford complained last year that Maya/2012 manuscripts were tediously common. But in 2006 thankfully, in the UK, they weren’t. So at the time, the Joshua Files concept was deemed highly original. (That year it was all magic schools and faeries, I was told.)

Friends and others have told me that it was hard work, perserverance and preparation that got me a great book deal. Oh yes and my self belief. Hmmmm. The evidence would suggest otherwise.

‘Self-belief’? Not really. I was equally convinced that my efforts would lead to failure. 

As a scientist you need to believe simultaneously in the positive result that will vindicate months of work, and the negative result that will mean it was good for nothing better than red-herring-avoidance for other researchers.

Maybe I would have got something published eventually, maybe. But not ‘The Joshua Files’.

Let’s face it, it’s a ‘Black Swan’ event. Had any one of the coincidences above not happened, it would not exist.

To me, it’s all the sweeter for its unpredictableness and rarity. Like being in the middle of a storm of good fortune.

Posted on December 17, 2008 - by MG

Heinstein and Friends

Oxford-based radio presenter Bill Heine has his first book out – ‘Heinstein of the Airwaves’. It’s a set of recollections of his years working for BBC Radio Oxford during which he came to see a very different side to Oxford.

Not the Oxford of ‘dreaming spires’ and Inspector Morse and scientific endeavour, but the Oxford of ordinary people and troubled estates and corrupt publishers (Robert Maxwell)…the real Oxford.

I love this book and read most of it in one sitting soon after buying it at the wonderful launch party in the Ashmolean Museum. Of course I turned straight to the one story in which I had participated – the story of how Bill Heine and author Brian Aldiss incurred the wrath of Stanley Kubrick when they tried to show the then-banned film ‘A Clockwork Orange’ at Bill’s movie house, The Penultimate Picture Palace.

That night, I was in the audience, having queued for ages for the free showing of this notorious film. I’d read the novel by Anthony Burgess and was keen to see it on screen. When Brian Aldiss came forward and explained to the gathered audience that Kubrick had sent ‘people’ and an injunction to stop the show, I got up to leave. I’d queued for ages next to and was now sitting beside a quietly spoken young guy who’d told me that he’d watched the film 57 times. He loved Alex, he told me with tears in his eyes. “I feel so sorry for him when he’s being tortured…”

If you know the story of Clockwork Orange, you might understand why this kinda worried me. So, I declined Bill Heine’s offer to the audience that they could stay and watch ‘Doctor Strangelove’.

Bill Heine invited me to co-host his radio show the week that ‘Invisible City’ was launched. Here’s a 3-minute excerpt of the show.

There was a second event to launch ‘Heinstein of the Airwaves’ last week, at Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford. Bill invited four authors to talk about their books, updating him or retelling stories that he’d coaxed out of them on his radio show. So I shared a platform with adult authors for the first time; Brian Aldiss, Moazzam Beg and Mark Lynas. They told their stories before me; seriously dramatic stuff about dealing with Stanley Kubrick, being unjustly arrested and imprisoned for years in Guantanamo Bay, and almost dying of altitude sickness on a melting glacier (respectively!).

I wasn’t sure how I was going to come across after all that. But light relief and a sneak peek at the beginning of Josh’s journey actually went down very well! And what with Christmas coming up and granddaughters and godchildren and nieces and nephews to consider…we sold lots of copies of ‘Invisible City’!

It made a change for me to be signing copies for adults! Children don’t usually stay to chat…I guess they are shy? But that night at Blackwell’s I was kept very busy and met many interesting new people, including children’s authors and the organisers of Oxford’s new Jazz Festival…who invited me to their launch party! (click on the link to see photos.)