And writers
MG Harris is the author of the internationally best-selling children’s books, THE JOSHUA FILES, GERRY ANDERSON’S GEMINI FORCE ONE (Orion Children’s Books) and as MG Reyes the EMANCIPATED trilogy for young adults (Katherine Tegen Books, May 2015).
This is my blog, with thoughts and memories, reflections and hurrahs, as well as information for schools. More detailed book information at theMGHARRIS.COM
Sometimes I don’t blog everything interesting that happens to me right away; I save it up for a rainy day. Back in Nov 2009 I was on BBC TV’s Click – a show devoted to all things techie and presented by a fab fellow geek girl, the multi-talented LJ Rich. I made a little video of our meeting, the clip itself and then a chance meeting with a certain children’s TV presenter…
LJ asked me to go on the show to talk about the emerging phenomenon of self-publishing, mainly fueled by the print-on-demand revolution. You can see what I thought two years ago. My how things have changed, in only two years. Note how little we talk about ebooks! That’s where the action is nowadays.
Maybe I should go on Click again to update LJ on my opinion now… because as some beady-eyed members of the Joshua Files Facebook group may have spotted, I myself will be testing the waters in the brave new world of publishing and putting out an indie-published techno-thriller for older readers, set in the fictional world of The Joshua Files around May 2012…
LJ meanwhile has been developing her talents as a musician. Her latest album features her own gorgeous arrangements of traditional Christmas music, performed by LJ herself. Very tasteful and classically inspired, with a touch of gospel. I think my favourite is “I Saw Three Ships”. Perfect background music for a Christmas drinks party or the long drive to visit family, I’d say.
You can preview or download here at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/ljrich3
Excellent news re Pottermore. Why should fans of a series be the only ones to play in the creative sandbox? Authors might want to noodle around there too. And it doesn’t have to detract from the creativity of fandom. Some fans enjoy defining a text by their own reading, to put it in the kind of language used by cultural studies mavens like Henry Jenkins. Equally, some fans want to probe further into the author’s own vision of a world.
Like Jenkins I’m as interested in the cultural as well as publishing implications of Pottermore. I was slightly startled to see Youtuber Alex Day (nerimon) respond within hours with his video What the F**k Is Pottermore? (over 200,00 views since posted, as of today).
Was this some kind of new backlash against an author trying to control how fans play in the sandbox she created? Or just a disguised version of the all-too-familiar Potter-envy, which has resulted in a tedious stream of law suits, and critical sniffiness, such as this think-piece by a author A.S Byatt?
Two of the comments by Alex Day struck me. First, he seems to resent to being referred to as part of the ‘digital generation’. Maybe like me, nerimon senses that this is yet another spurious term trying to pin down something which marketeers don’t actually understand. Those crazy digital people! Yes. That’s right. Fear us, we are strange and pixelated!
Secondly, he suggests that if one feels strongly enough about which Hogwarts house you might be in, if such a thing actually existed, you should be able to decide for yourself. Official or not, you shouldn’t need the official website to dictate. (Alex feels loyal to Ravenclaw. When I did the test on Facebook, it picked me as a Gryffindor. But I’d have chosen Ravenclaw too, probably.)
In Three Reasons Why Pottermore Matters, Henry Jenkins addresses whether authors should try to control the extent and manner in which which fans interact with their creation. Jenkins coined the term ‘textual poacher’ for such fans, and he’s written extensively on the phenomenon of fan fiction, in which readers/viewers appropriate published or broadcast material for their own creativity.
Where do I stand? Well, for once I have a foot in both camps.
Like a few other newish YA authors (e.g. Cassandra Clare, author of The Mortal Instruments books), I began my writing career as a ‘textual poacher’. Back in the late 1990s my good friend Reba Bandyopadhyay and I started the first online Blake’s 7 fan fiction zine.*
Without the literary multi-gym of fan fiction, I would probably never have become a published author. Writing Blake’s 7 fanfic developed me as a writer, it also introduced me to some wonderful friends.
So I’m in favour of the fan-created world. Long may it live!
On the other hand, now I’m an author too. And the world of The Joshua Files doesn’t stop at the books. There is a whole other novel in the form of the Alternate Reality Game, The Descendant. Who killed Josh’s godfather, PJ Beltran, and why? Where is PJ’s teenage daughter, Gabi? The answers these questions are answered in the form of over 50 videos, blogs, secret messages in Habbo Hotel and a code in the UK and US editions of the second Joshua book, ICE SHOCK.
Then there’s Josh’s new secret blog, which provides glimpses into his life before and after the fourth adventure DARK PARALLEL. Fans are beginning to comment on Josh’s blog, to interact with him. But fans have also created their own versions of Josh’s blog, and have inserted t
hemselves as new characters in the investigative drama that is The Descendant, they’ve made their own video trailers.
I think this is more than cool – it’s essential to real growth of a story. A story really only takes off when it has been poached. Hence all the versions of Robin Hood, the Merlin story, etc. Now we have modern day equivalents – the new Star Trek movie franchise kicked of by JJ Abrams is a professionally-produced AU (alternative universe) Trek fanfic.
But authors should be able to play too! That’s what Pottermore is – the author’s own personal sandbox, or as Youtuber Mickeleh says in his response to nerimon (What’s Pottermore? I’ll Tell You) – it’s JKR’s “own personal bandcamp”.
Join the author there if you want, if not, don’t. Mind you, it will be the only way to buy HP ebooks.
However! Chin-stroking commentators who write that it’s the end of publishing as we know it, fundamental paradigm shift etc, may have missed something.
Pottermore is a closed shop – a site for HP fans only where they can only buy HP-related products. That’s fine when you have hundreds of millions of readers.
If you don’t, if you are, oh I don’t know, lemme see, almost anyone else on the planet, you probably still need to sell your books, e or paper, in a place where other books are sold.
Never underestimate the power of cross-buying, impulse buying and the all-powerful bookseller’s tool, 3-for-2. Or indeed, Amazon’s witchy ways of figuring out what customers like to read.
Pottermore is like a cheese shop that only sells gorgonzola. Great if you love gorgonzola, but a fan of cheddar, cheshire or brie isn’t likely to wander into there by mistake and give it a try.
Like, I suspect, all other authors in the world, when my books go digital later this year – next week for ICE SHOCK – I want them sold at all the outlets possible. Breathe easy, Amazon et al. There’s only one Harry Potter.
*Reba has read everything I have ever written and from the beginning commented as seriously on my Blakes7 fanfic as she does now on Joshua Files and the manuscript for Ultra Secret New Project. I promised to base a character in Joshua Files on Reba, so Joshua readers will be visiting Reba at her observatory in Joshua 5…
A day does actually arrive when you find yourself typing the final words of your multi-volume young adult series. My final Joshua Files day didn’t have the intense drama of JKR finishing Harry Potter, naturally, because we can only imagine the pressure she must have been under.
And there’s also the sheer levels of immersion – all five Joshua adventures weigh in at around 375,000 words. That’s only one-and-a-half of the longer HP books!
There was however, one tiny similarity, which is that I too will admit that I had written the final page long before I finished the series. I think I wrote it back in 2009 when I was writing Zero Moment (Joshua Files 3). There’s a scene in that installment – let’s just call it the surreal bit – which put me in just the right, slightly sentimental mood. And I knew, quite suddenly, how I wanted to end The Joshua Files.
That kind of mood is difficult to bring about on demand. There are ways to get close, but if it should happen that one day you find yourself in the right emotional state to put down a particularly tricky or evocative scene, I find it’s best to go with it, drop everything and write it down.
Which is what I did that day in 2009. So when it came to the day of finishing Joshua, I had the most difficult part already drafted.
Here’s what I did that day. It was a perfect writing day – no author events that day, daughters were both at school, husband was out at meetings. I was guaranteed to have no interruptions. I had about one chapter left to write, then slide in the final scene and polish it up.
I made some toast with marmalade, brewed a cafetiere of coffee, dropped myself in the sofa in front of the 1980s movie ‘Risky Business’, the movie which launched a very young Tom Cruise to mega-stardom.
No idea why I picked that movie – it was on the Sky box and I was wondering if it was as good as I remembered. As soon as the music started I realised that I’d forgotten just how great that soundtrack was, with the electronic dance music of Tangerine Dream. As Joel’s life fell apart, with his hopes of a place at Princeton seeming to melt away under mounting disasters, Joel seemed to snap. An almost joyous, freeing sense of fatalism overtook Tom Cruise’s character. The Tangerine Dream track ‘Love On A Real Train’ kicked in, with a relentless, yet emotionally detached drive.
I saw immediately what I wanted to write and exactly how Josh might feel during the climactic moments of Joshua 5. Like Joel from Risky Business – all the best laid plans of his young life are suddenly under threat.So, I rushed upstairs, added the track to the growing Joshua Files playlist on we7, plugged the computer into surround-sound speakers and played the track.
Perfect – just the right sense of tension, urgency and drive, yet underneath it all I could sense that Josh, like Joel in Risky Business, would feel control slipping away from his hands and into the hands of some external force; destiny. And in that moment, like Joel, who grins and says ‘F**k it”, a part of Josh is resigning himself to fate.
I finished the scene, added the finale that I wrote in 2009 and gave both scenes a brief polish.
I was done by lunchtime. I went out into the street feeling a stone lighter. On the way to pick up my daughter I passed BBC Oxford’s Bill Heine and rolled down the car window to yell ‘I’ve finished The Joshua Files’. Bill gave me a huge thumbs-up.
And that was it. No trauma, no sadness. Quite a bit of satisfaction, if I’m honest.
Will there be more Joshua? Who knows. I leave Josh in a place that wouldn’t make it difficult to allow him to continue his adventures. Yet part of me feels that the kid should be allowed to live a normal life, play his guitar, write his songs and date a girl, without having to save the world and evade death every few months.
If you’re interested, here’s the Joshua Files playlist, featuring all songs that are mentioned, quoted or alluded to in the series, roughly in order.
The final four tracks are from Joshua 5. For now, that’s the only clue you get…
The DARK PARALLEL launch season began with a lovely event at Waterstone’s Milton Keynes, where I was joined by the dashing former RAF pilot, YA author Mark Robson.
We swapped books and decided to interview each other about our latest offerings. Mark’s latest is a VERY shiny new exciting thing, a book about an adventure in the Bermuda Triangle! Massive coolness. I’ll be telling you about it in a few days. But for now – the interview swap. you remember how this works from my recent swap with Katherine Langrish. Interview with MG Harris about DARK PARALLEL over at Mark’s place – Trapped by Monsters. Interview with Mark Robson about THE DEVIL’S TRIANGLE here at The MG Harris Blog.
Mark, you’ve been a regular on the children’s and YA literature scene for a few years now and are something of an expert when it comes to school visits! But for readers who may not have met you in their school or read your books, can you summarize your writing career and the fictional worlds you create?
Firstly, I never intended to be a writer. I was a pilot in the RAF and loving it, but whilst on detachment in the Falkland Islands, I got bored and irritable – so much so that my navigator uttered the life changing words ‘For goodness sake, Mark! Do something useful. Go write a book, or something!’ I took this as a challenge and have been writing ever since.
My first series of books were very much inspired by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I wanted to write something that had a similar story arc, but that was more action driven and that utilised my military background. The Darkweaver Legacy was the result, out of which evolved my second series – The Imperial Trilogy – the story of a nineteen year old female spy who makes an enemy of a top assassin. By now I was no longer in the RAF, as I’d turned full time as a writer, so I felt the time was ripe to write a flying story. Dragon Orb a series of four high action dragon stories bring dragons from a fantasy world into World War I France, where they fly in secret with the Royal Flying Corps against the Red Baron! It was an unusual idea – sort of like Biggles meets dragons. The Devil’s Triangle, my latest labour of love, is my twelfth novel.
Would you say your influences are literary or screen? What are the big inputs into Devil’s Triangle?
I would say my influences are widespread. I’ve always read prolifically, so there are many influences there, some of which I’m probably not even consciously aware. Although I’m not a great cinema goer, or film buff, I’ve seen a good number over the years and yes, they most certainly influence me as well. I would say there is a good dash of Planet of the Apes, Jurassic Park (book and film) and The Land that Time Forgot in this new series. Now that I think of it, there are some interesting parallels with a series by Julian May that I read and enjoyed in my teens that began with a book called The Many Coloured Land. It was set in the future where a one way time portal is opened to the Pliocene era and many of society’s misfits undergo sterilisation and then pass through the portal to escape from modern society.
Highly-evolved lizards have been in vogue ever since the original V-the Visitors series about a covert invasion of Earth by reptilian aliens. Do you think there is something in our obsession with reptiles as the enemy?
I think there is something inherently scary about reptiles. I have a fear (I wouldn’t say phobia, as I believe this to be a perfectly rational fear) of poisonous snakes. I’m OK with handling pythons and grass snakes, but I’m terrified of their poisonous cousins. Over the years I’ve stumbled across quite a few in different parts of the world, and although I’ve never been bitten, these incidents have only served to strengthen my fear.
In many of the stories I wrote as a young child, snakes were the bad guys. The very earliest story I still have from my childhood (I would guess I was about 6 when I wrote it) is called ‘The Friendly Crocodile’ and guess what… the bad guy is a snake. OK, so the hero was also a reptile in that story, as is Nipper in my new story, but I can’t help thinking there is something untrustworthy about reptiles that goes right back to the earliest times. Satan is even depicted as a snake in Genesis. No wonder we fear them.
This is the first time you’re writing in a ‘realistic’ contemporary setting, after a series of bestselling stories involving swords, sorcery and dragons. How different was it as a writer? And are you now converted to blending fact with fiction?
Oh wow! ‘Different’ doesn’t begin to describe it, MG! For me it was like learning to write all over again. I found it incredibly difficult to begin with, as I guess I’d become used to being able to just create my worlds the way I wanted them to be. The constraints of a real world story make the research of even the smallest details mandatory, and I found having to constantly stop writing in order to check out trivia incredibly frustrating to begin with.Now that I’ve written one story in this way, I must admit that the results are interesting, and more than a little pleasing. I think readers will identify with my characters more easily in this sort of story and I’m sure that I’ll continue to improve my storylines the more I write this way. I’m not sure that ‘converted’ is the right word, but I think you’ll be seeing more of this sort of story from me in the future.
The ‘Bermuda Triangle’ phenomenon has been rather neglected of late, and may I say what a genius idea it was to resurrect it! Is there a reason things have gone quiet? has the mystery been quietly solved, do you think?
I think there will always be those who will be believers and those who will dismiss the mysteries as a load of bunkum! Has the region gone quiet? That depends on what you read, but in terms of media coverage, I suppose you would have to conclude that it has. The most recent book I came across during my research was by an American author called Gian Quasar, published in 2004. He claimed in the book that there had been over 1000 unusual incidents recorded in region during the 25 years running up to the publication of his book. (This will obviously not include the famous incidents like Flight 19 and the USS Cyclops that were long before this.) How accurate his stats are, I don’t know, but the book was certainly an interesting read and there are dozens of websites dedicated to the ‘ongoing’ mystery.
The quiet undercurrent of public interest is still there, but no one seems to have used the mystery as the focus of a fictional story for a long time. I’m finding it fun to play with some of the reported phenomena of the region and use them as a vehicle for creating a science fiction/fantasy story.
Part of the realistic setting is that it requires an author to construct very credible family relationships within familiar constraints. I was impressed at how well you did this, how much time you were willing to give to the emotional impact of the disappearance of Clare (the missing mother). Was domestic drama an aspect that you relished writing? Did you get any inspiration for the relationships from your own family or extended family?
I’m not sure that I ever ‘relished’ the idea of writing domestic drama, but I do recognise that people like it. Look at what the writers of Dr Who did with the families of the Doctor’s various assistants over the past few series and it’s easy to see that family drama is a theme that crops up again and again. The popularity of soap operas seems never ending, so having an element of this in my ‘real world’ side of the story seemed essential if I was to give it broad appeal.
As for drawing aspects of the relationships from my own family – no, not really. Though I did steal the names of the characters from members of my family! My youngest sister is Clare, her husband is Matt, and their children are called Sam and Neve. I changed the spellings of their names a little in the story and made the children twins, which the real Sam and Neve aren’t. I did ask them first if they were happy for me to do this, of course. Fortunately they thought it would be fun to have a special part in the story. It has sort of made it their story, though none of the characteristics of the fictional characters are even close to the real people.
Parallel evolution is a fascinating topic! I will admit that a teeny part of me – the biochemist – did wonder why velociraptors would evolve to become human-like in the past 65 million years, when they had failed to go anywhere close to that in the previous 150 million. Evolution, as I understand it, happens because of external pressue. Organisms evolve out of a death-trap (by acquiring camouflage, for example) or they adapt to a lack of food. Velociraptors were already efficient predators, as far as we know, and likely at the top of the food chain or good as. So in the parallel universe, what might have happened to force them to evolve opposable thumbs and human-like intelligence? Is this a mystery that will be addressed in future stories?
I’m sure I read somewhere that had velociraptors been given enough time to continue to evolve, the projections were that they would have become more humanoid, and possibly even warm-blooded. I couldn’t quote the source now. It’s something I read sometime in the dim and distant past. I wouldn’t claim to be an expert in this, but this article was in the back of my mind as I developed my ideas for the parallel earth. I think the combination of this idea and the cunning and adaptability of the raptors in the film Jurassic Park combined in my mind to evolve the raptors in the way I have. I don’t anticipate exploring the evolution process in future books, as the action will very much centre on the current political and social evolution (and revolution) that is about to shake the raptor world. There will, however, be more on some of the historical events in our world that have created the Bermuda Triangle legend into the phenomenon it is today.
Devil’s Triangle is actually a clever, subtle satire on contemporary energy and pollution issues. Did you plan this political angle? Personally I love a good political/religious undercurrent in children’s books, but find that it can become wearing if it is too preachy. Devil’s Triangle gets the balance absolutely right!
Yes, the energy and environmental issues were very much planned. The way the High Council in my alternate Earth seem set on covering up the true impact and ramifications of their global environmental problems from the wider raptor society was always intended to be a none too subtle parody. However, I detest books that obviously set out to preach on political or religious issues, so whilst the problems are ever-present in the story, I try to keep the focus on the characters. I’m delighted you feel I have the right balance.
At the end of Devil’s Triangle you’ve taken two characters to a horribly dangerous world from which it appears there is no return, with another character hell-bent on reaching the same destination. What is next for Sam, Niamh and Callum?
Things are set to change fast in Eye of the Storm. Sam and Callum discover that someone (Amelia Earhart’s grandson as it happens) has been developing flying machines in the alternate world. Callum instantly starts thinking this might offer them a way home, whilst Sam’s mum and her band of rebels are more set on stopping the raptors from gaining the power that flight brings. Sam and Callum are therefore set to take part in a ‘Mission Impossible’ style kidnapping at the start of book two. As for Niamh, well she manages to slip through the fingers of the police and goes back on the run… will she find a way to catch up with the boys? I’m not saying. What I will say is there is plenty of action ahead for all of them.
Wow – what fascinating answers. I could have chatted all day long with Mark, but we kept having to sign our books and meet readers!
Hope you’ve enjoyed that as much as I did! If you still haven’t read my own interview by Mark, hop over to Trapped By Monsters, or Mark Robson’s blog – where you can find out more about Mark Robson and his books.