MG and ‘The Joshua Files’
Originally uploaded by mgharris
Squeals of joy. Two boxes arrived – one for me, one of copies to sign for prizes on swapitshop.com.
I played with them, like dolls. I arranged them in little stacks and next to doughnuts and took photos. I didn’t give them a bath or dress them, but I almost hugged them.
Tomorrow I might hug them. I really might.
Hurray for being shortlisted for a book award! Very exciting. Now those schoolchildren in Leeds have to read all the shortlisted books and do thinks and do discussion and do presentation skills and learning stuff like that. Mmm, good stuff, all very educational. As Benicio would say – Excelente. Actually he’d more likely say chiiiido. (‘chido’ means ‘cool’ in Mexican slang, and isn’t even rude!)
It also means that I get to go to the ceremony and either practise my ‘Not disappointed I didn’t win really because JOLLY GOOD SHOW etc’ face. Or my modest ‘Me?…who me?…really?’ face.
Or more likely not practice anything at all, not even a speech, because I will be so busy writing Joshua 4.
I’ve been to the Nibbies (British Book Awards), I’ve seen it done. The rule of four: thank your husband/wife, your agent, your editor and your publisher. Big smile, move on. Or seethe, glassy-eyed from the losers’ table.
Eee. I’ve never been to Leeds. Hear it’s right sophisticated. The incomparably hip John Shuttleworth says so.
I am NOT ashamed to ask for your help, blog readers. If you are a young person from Leeds, please:
1. Read Invisible City (ah, go on, go on, go on, go on.)
2. Write a stonking review of it on the Leeds Book Award Website
3. Convince a teacher or school librarian to take your class there.
4. On the way to the ceremony, persuade all your classmates to vote JOSHUA.
Another tip from a fangirl is this: write the name of your favourite book on the blackboard every day until your school chums get fed up with you. I did this every week to remind people to watch Blake’s 7, when I were a lass.
Did you know, when I was young we had only THREE TV channels. No video recorders – if you missed your show that was it, you could only tear out your hair and weep. No computers, no handheld video games, no Internet, no mobile phones, no txting. It was the Dark Ages, man, don’t let your parents tell you anything different! On the bright side we had Texan Bars, Pink Panther bars and Banjos.
A very happy day for me, to see my book in the French (Operation Joshua: Dossier Confidential – La Prophetie Maya) and German (Geheimakte Joshua: Die Unsichtbare Stadt) editions.
I like the French title very much although they have missed out on the Calvino reference. Aha, you may come to regret that come Joshua 3, mes cheres amis.
I know I have gone on and on about the pyramid point-of-sales materials but LOOK! It’s so pretty!
There are bookmarks and posters too.
I can give away one poster and some bookmarks, if anyone wants to play another quiz.
OR…you could just promise to write a review of ICE SHOCK on Amazon when it comes out. Doesn’t have to be long. And please – only if you like the book! I’m not nearly famous or well-liked enough to be able to afford bad reviews there…
Joshua Files has now sold in 14 languages: French, German, Spanish, Catalan, Japanese, Polish, Romanian, Slovakian, Czech, Hungarian, Turkish, Greek, Indonesian, Vietnamese.
I have to say that just seeing it in three languages is blowing my mind quite a bit. Fourteen is just…BOGGLE.
Well done to the translators, Frank Boehmert (Deutsch), Amelie Sam (Francais), Ivan Stefanek (Slovak). I have been looking through Frank’s version and marvelling at how some things translate. In fact I think my very rusty German would benefit enormously from reading it.
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.
Very happy today for several reasons.
One is that Scholastic have launched a writing competition for schools, in the magazine Junior Education Plus.
On the website and in the magazine you’ll find the first 600 words of a short story – written by me.
To enter the contest, you then write the ending of the story – in 200 words.
The winner gets a signed copy of INVISIBLE CITY (or I guess you could ask for ICE SHOCK if the winner has it already), plus £150 of books for their school.
The story is brilliantly illustrated by Dave Neale and the online interactive version includes turning pages and cool sound effects!
The story is called ‘Stars Fell On Campeche’ and features Josh when he was younger, playing football at some ancient Mayan ruins where his father worked. It was originally one of four prologues I wrote for the opening of INVISIBLE CITY. (In the end we went with the newspaper article about the strange incident at the museum…)
And the other reason I’m happy is that the German (Frank Boehmert) and Slovakian (Ivan Stefanek) translators of Joshua are reading ICE SHOCK now, getting ready to translate it. Frank even blogged about ICE SHOCK (vielen Dank, Frank!).
Still reading the brilliant “Black Swan” book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I wrote him a fan email yesterday and he replied right away! (I told him that one day, a character in Joshua will quote him…he wrote back that he’s very intrigued…)