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raves switzerland

MG and baby bro

MG and baby broOriginally uploaded by mgharris


Yes, yes, I’m fully narcissistic with all these photos of me-n-someone else but COME ON!

What cooler way to navigate the mountains of Switzerland than in a Porsche?

R kid is driving, Michael who lives in Switzerland with wife and kids.

Today we did birthday celebrations (including mine!) with cousins and all. Two of the boy cousins, Max and Cyrus, are 14, the same age as Josh Garcia in books 2 & 3. Watching them play like daredevils in the playground I wondered how they’d fare if plunged into the same kinds of perils and dangers as Josh. And decided that they’d probably do pretty well, no worse than Josh.

At 14 they’re MUCH fitter and stronger than…ooh, let’s say, for example, me. They may still be children but they’d survive jungle dangers far better than I.

I’d be a total wuss. I’ve seen the rainforest thicket into which I sent Josh. You wouldn’t get me more than 5 metres into that without severe panic…
Emailed from my BlackBerry®

Categories
raves

WOW 366 – the National Year of Reading

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Yay, the WOW 366 book is out! It’s a collection of 366 stories, each exactly 366 words long. And the profits of the book sales will go to charity.

Perfect bedtime reading for busy parents…

Like many authors (including Roddy Doyle, Susan Cooper, Eva Ibbotson, Jeremy Strong, Georgia Byng, Ian Whybrow, Charlie Higson and Sally Nicholls) I was asked to contribute a story. I finally wrote down a little ghost story that I’ve been telling since I was a teenager, and more recently to my kids.

It did get a little stripped down for the 366-word format. My little daughter listened to me reading the written version (as opposed to the making-up-up-as-I-go-along version while she is in bed) and then glowered at me. “That’s not how it goes,” she said. “What about this and what about that…”

That’s the problem with oral story-telling. You add all these bits in the heat of the moment and you forget them right away. I’m still trying to remember a story I once told my older daughter, about a mouse, a lollipop-making kit and a magic chemistry set.

But it’s no use. It’ll never be as good again…

Oooh, guess what – (my story) Ghost Story, True Story is this week’s featured free WOW 366 story.

Meanwhile little daughter and I are reading Empty Quarter by Julia Golding. Cracking teen-girl spy adventure!

Categories
appearances cuba salsa

Aching for salsa…Edinburgh bound…and maybe Oz too?

I’ve been getting ready for the Edinburgh Book Festival, much excitement, yay!

My event is on Wed 21st – sold out, I’m surprised and impressed to see. It’s a heck of a marketing machine, the Edinburgh Festival. Most of the Schools Events are sold out.

I have been getting my multimedia stuff up to scratch, cutting DVDs of my videos and rejigging my Powerpoint slideshow with one new slide – all about 2012. Apart from that, I have now booked my schedule solid between seeing friends who are visiting the Festival and hanging out at parties and lunches with my lovely publishers.

And I’m flying there! I will feel rather fabulous…

Meanwhile my sister has made us all very proud by giving birth to a bouncy boy, Benedict. I’m seriously thinking of going to his christening, all the way in Australia. Since we all live so many squillions of miles away from each other, my brother and sisters, these sorts of events are starting to be the kinds of excuses we can use to justify the increasingly terrifying expense of meeting up.

But maybe Scholastic Australia would like me to do some book events and schools visits….

That makes it much more justifiable, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile despite some very good news (apart from a new nephew) – which I’ll share in the next few weeks – I’m feeling rather melancholic. It’s been far too long since I went dancing – not since the Oscar D’Leon concert on July 12th. I think the doctor may order a trip to Mambocity soon. Damn salsa for being so addictive! I’m good and hooked.

Listened to BBC Radio 4 last night; Grevel Lindop reading from his book Travels On the Dance Floor – also on listen again. For a UK-based salsera like me his experiences are very familiar. It made me think nostalgically of Cuba. Especially when he played a song which played often when we were in Cuba. Whenever I hear it I feel a kind of desperate, romantic ache for Havana.

Well I listened to the lyrics, searched for the first line on Google and found this video: it’s the late guajiro Polo Montanez singing “Un Monton de Estrellas“.

Very romantic song. And turns out he’s dead – in a traffic accident in 2002, when he was 47. *sob*

I NEED TO DANCE TO THIS SONG SOON OR I WILL BURST!

Categories
raves

David Tennant – a Hamlet you can actually like…

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Thanks to my friend Susie Day and her two last minute spare tickets, I found myself driving me and my teenage daughter up to Stratford last week for the previews of ‘Hamlet’ at the Courtyard Theatre.

Obviously I’m a Star Trek fan and obviously Patrick Stewart played the best-ever Starfleet captain. And my daughter is at the impressionable age in which Her Doctor will always be David Tennant. (I’m on the Jon Pertwee/Tom Baker cusp…)

So, pretty much of a double whammy for us…

Here then, is my review of the lovely, slender Mr Tennant’s performance…

David Tennant plays Hamlet as a likeable, energetic, frenetic and often funny young nobleman. He can get a laugh from his delivery of lines such as ‘It is VERY cold’. That’s not to say he doesn’t brood – he does – he angsts and broods quite prettily at the beginning. The scene with the ghost and his first Loony Hamlet scenes (the famous soliloquy with all the conscience-ridden talk) are bewitching – at that point I truly believed that Hamlet would wither away from anticipatory guilt and distaste for the murderous act his father’s ghost has demanded.

But once the travelling players arrive and Hamlet hatches his plan – he is neither believably dysfunctional nor ruthless. And that makes him a very different Hamlet than any I’ve ever seen.

He is full of glee watching the play-within-the-play (itself a major highlight – wickedly bawdy, grotesque – with costumes so gawdy and camp that they make up for the austerity in the rest of the production). He plays ‘mad’ with gusto, is chillingly disinterested in having dispatched Polonius, and passionate in the counter-(quasi-)seduction of his mother. He seems to relish the irony of his fate of being sent off to England with the super-preppy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It’s all great.

But deep down part of me was rebelling. You’re not meant to like Hamlet – are you? You’re meant to be fascinated with his downward spiral into obsession, indecision and revenge.

So this is a very new take on the role. My 15-year old daughter was a Hamlet virgin  – she didn’t even know how it ended! Maybe for her this will be the definitive performance.

Sadly though the one Big Scene which didn’t quite deliver was the ending. Played as a nice clean fencing match with the likeable, roguish Hamlet and the very brooding Laertes (he Did Brooding much better than H), it seemed to wind up as a sort of unfortunate series of events in which everyone accepts their fate (death) with not much more than an ‘oh well’. I can’t help feeling that this scene needed more work and hopefully it’s improved since the previews.

Granted, we don’t need to see any Olivier-esque wailing of ‘I am dead!’ from Hamlet, but in this Hamlet the failings of the writing (yes! see how I DARE criticise Shakespeare!) were brought into relief. In the end a bunch of people we don’t much like all die. Okay in this case we like Hamlet but he doesn’t seem to care enough about staying alive for us to care. And Laertes with his last minute apologies…please!

Patrick Stewart, on the other hand, is utterly faultless as Claudius. It’s a much easier part than Hamlet with all his contradictions. Stewart is charming, smooth, stern and ruthless without coming across as either a camp villain nor thoroughly evil. So he coveted his brother’s gorgeous yummy-mummy wife and his throne, and let himself slip one afternoon in an orchard with a bottle of poison… At least he’s sorry – well at least he wishes he were sorry.

By contrast Hamlet comes across as outraged and self-righteous when it comes to judging his uncle’s and mother’s behaviour while his own murderous impulses run unchecked. His attention-grabbing sobs at Ophelia’s burial are seen for exactly what they are when we think back to his merciless treatment of her in the ‘get thee to a nunnery’ speech.

Spoilt mummy’s boy, cowardly boy-man, disturbed, vengeful and utterly selfish – Tennant’s Hamlet has it all. And yet also, somehow likeable.

(As a coda, I should say that it’s lots of fun watching Hamlet with someone who doesn’t know that all those now well-worn cliches like ‘neither a lender nor borrower be’, ‘the lady doth protest too much, ‘to be or not to be’, etc etc, all come from the same play…I kept hearing little gasps of recognition from my daughter…rather nice)

Categories
fangirling raves writing

I am so going to fangirl Haruki Murakami…

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“Norwegian Wood” by Haruki Murakami – One of my favourite books ever. 

Well I am! (Details at the end of this post, and I promise to keep you all updated…)

I only wish I could claim to be the first children’s author to be massively influenced by the wonderful Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Even if there aren’t any Japanese children’s authors who are evidently under his spell – and how could there NOT be – there’s Daniel Handler.

Daniel Handler – aka Lemony Snicket, author of “A Series Of Unfortunate Events” once wrote a brilliant article with the succinctly direct title: I Love Murakami. Handler, being a graduate of English and a Very Clever Bloke to judge by the cut of his gib,  writes eloquently of Murakami’s general excellence in a way that I never could.

But I do know what reading Murakami did for me and it’s nothing less than this: it enabled me to write a publishable novel.

I’ve written before about the day I met several publishers who were interested in acquiring ‘The Joshua Files’. And one of them commented “We can’t believe this is your first novel!” to which I replied (laughing) – “Well it’s not – it’s my first publishable novel. I’ve written three before this.” “So what happened,” they asked, “between writing the other three and writing Joshua Files?”

So I told them the truth. In the meantime I’d read almost all of the works of Haruki Murakami.

Backtrack a little. There I was with two manuscripts written in 6 months and both getting essentially rejected by agents. Actually the second ms was getting some interest but it wasn’t quite making the grade. And I understood this: without a quantum leap, my writing was not going to be good enough to be published. Something had to change; something major. I had maybe 50% of what was needed. The rest of the 50% was going to have to come with hard study, graft and experience. Or a bolt from the blue.

I couldn’t be bothered to do it the hard way. Crumbs, I was almost 40 years old! I didn’t have too much time left to get a writing career off the ground whilst I was still young enough to enjoy it (both my parents died aged 46 – that gives you a sense of urgency…).

So I began actively to search for the bolt from the blue.

I read a book on how to structure stories for screenplays, even wrote a screenplay for practice. And meantime, I read all the works of an author until then unknown to me – Haruki Murakami.

Bless TIME Magazine – it was the second time in my life that reading an article there literally changed my life. I read about this Murakami guy whose new book “Kafka On The Shore” was selling like hotcakes. The combination of elements that his stories used sounded scrummy – mysterious young women, missing cats, magical realism, laconic and distant young men, jazz, Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart and dreams. Too good to be true!

So I went to Borders and picked out three books “South of the Border, West of the Sun”, “Sputnik Sweetheart” and “Norwegian Wood”. (Kafka was only out in hardback and I’m stingy). I figured I’d dip my toe first…I began with “South of the Border, West of the Sun” because it’s the shortest.

From the first page I was – more than captivated – almost possessed. There was something about this wistful, minimalist and apparently very straightforward style that was entirely new to me. It was direct and with the simplest of language, sprinkled with unusual and naturalistic metaphors, tapped something deep within.

This is common for readers of Haruki, so I hear. Fans talk about feeling that their brains have been altered. I read that book almost at one sitting and finished in a daze, wondering what had just happened. I moved on to “Norwegian Wood”, a longer read, and began to feel even more deeply moved. It’s a story of a boy aged 19 who falls in love with a strangely troubled girl, with tragic consequences. But the sequences where the two teenagers walk together, talk and fall in love reminded me so keenly of the first time I fell in love, one summer in Mexico when I was 18, that I actually began to cry from the memory. And frankly, with sorrow for the fact that I broke that boy’s heart by being too afraid to let what developed between us grow into anything permanent.

Okay so we all fall in love for the first time and it’s often painful. When we’re middle-aged of course we look back and wonder. That’s what Norwegian Wood is about – a guy in his late 30s looking back at his first love. Nothing new under the sun, and yet Murakami’s writing spoke – as no other writer ever had – directly to those memories. It brought them back. Sad though they were – it was good to see them again!

Dang, I thought. My boy hero needed some of that Murakami wisftulness and haiku-like poetry. It could be just the antidote to the high-octane action and conspiracy thriller elements. I was already planning a sequel to the original version of Invisible City. So I wrote the first few pages, under the influence of Haruki.

It changed something. The character was totally different to the first boy I’d written. He was lost in grief. He longed for his missing father, or at least for answers. The disappearance of Andres Garcia had tapped deep into his psyche, with resultant disturbing dreams. In fact I stole one of my own dreams, from when my mother died.

So when I came to rewrite my boy-hero-discovers-hidden-Mayan-city story, I knew exactly what he sounded like. That particular chapter, by the way, now appears near the opening of Joshua book 2. (Still no title…)

There are homages to Haruki all over Invisible City, if you know what to spot. The most obvious one is the jazz motif. The second most obvious is the Hotel Delfin (Dolphin) – of course a reference to the infamous Dolphin Hotel of “A Wild Sheep Chase” and “Dance, Dance, Dance”.

Haruki’s memoir “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” is out soon, and of course I’ll be buying it right away and eating it up.

But also – I’m going to send him a copy of “Invisible City”. Yeah I know, stalkah, fangirl… I just have to though. He has to know how grateful I am.

This is how good Haruki Murakami is; amnesia-worthy i.e. worth getting the memory of reading him wiped from your mind so that you can read him all over again for the first time.

If you want to know more I recommend reading this: Ten Things You Need To Know About Haruki Murakami (quite accurately subtitled The key facts about the coolest writer in the world today.) And for a taste – just a teeny one – here’s a short story of his: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning.

(And if I receive a reply – which I doubt because he’s a GENIUS and I’m NOT WORTHY – I’ll let you know what he says…)