Those lucky Young Friends of the British Museum get the bonus treat of being allowed to attend up to 4 sleeppvers a year. Last weekend was a special Moctezuma-themed event, featuring storytelling about the Mexican Day of the Dead, warrior head-dress making, Mexican folklore from Mexicolore…and then some Mayan hieroglyph deciphering with me.
Meanwhile publicist Alex from Scholastic and I enjoyed being set free in the British Museum at night. We saw some strange stuff up in the Mesopotamian gallery, near the remains of the Temple of Ninhursag… but I won’t say any more.
What a great wheeze though! Picnic and sleep amongst one of the greatest (perhaps THE greatest) collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts outside of Cairo. All this an education too.
MG and Alex in the Egyptian gallery. At night!
It did bring joy to my nerdly heart to see more than 150 youngsters faithfully copying glyphs from a 6th century Mayan inscription, deciphering them and then standing up to present their translations to their fellow code-crackers. Round midnight, too!
Thanks to Claire Johnstone from the British Museum for inviting me, to Sky and Alex for helping with all four events, and to the very kind Simon Martin of Penn Museum for giving us his translation of the inscription.
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!
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.)
Back from Australia and it was straight down the A34 to Chichester for a reunion from Mia and Joss, the two kids who appeared with me on BBC Radio 4’s go4it.
Becky, (Mia and Joss’s mum) runs Just Write for Kids, a children’s weekend writing club. Cool, huh? What a terrific idea.
About fifty budding young authors aged 6-14 packed into a cute little nursery school to talk Joshua Files with me. I hope I didn’t come across too dazed after the lengthy plane flights of the day before!
Saturday morning down in the Oxfordshire market town of Witney – with a surprisingly literary crowd thanks to Waterstone’s Witney Book Festival. It’s a new mini-festival. Julia Golding and I shared an event in the local Corn Exchange. We quizzed each other on outdoor survival (Julia passed with colours) and the world of diplomacy (I was clueless), and about writing and our latest books. Julia’s latest is EMPTY QUARTER, the second in the Darcie Lock series about a teenage girl whose family business happens to be spying and not, after all, working innocuously in an embassy. My daughter and I are reading it now. I had to skip ahead because it became rather too exciting to read in short bedtime chunks…
Then it was on to the small-but-perfectly-formed and jam-packed Waterstone’s Witney, where a <insert collective noun> of children’s authors hovered in the children’s section signing books and watching a master bookseller in action – Mark Robson. (Here’s Mark’s account of the morning.)
Mark is the author of an admirable number of books – including the DRAGON ORB and IMPERIAL series (he’s also one of those rare self-publishing success stories). Julia too is prolific…they both publish 2 or 3 books a year (see what a slacker I am?). Mark also spends many a Saturday signing in bookshops, where he can handsell a whole stack of books – and not just his own!
Sarah Singleton, author of gothic fantasy novels for teens (including the award-winning CENTURY) was also there. I must admit to being rather impressed by all these authors as they stood by their stacked up books.
I’ve so far resisted the temptation to stop reading books for adults and throw myself gleefully and exclusively into the richly imaginative worlds of YA fiction. But having met the authors and heard about their books makes that sooo difficult.
Yes, I know I still haven’t finished “The Feast of the Goat” by Mario Vargas Llosa. But first I want to read “The Amethyst Child” by Sarah, “Imperial Spy” by Mark and “The Diamond of Drury Lane” by Julia.
