Tag: children’s books

Categories
appearances getting published

Author Tour Report 1: Obviously, I’m a philistine…

Author Tour Report 1: Obviously, I’m a philistine…Originally uploaded by mgharris


…because today was my first time at the British Museum.

My lovely publishers always out me up at a boutique hotel in Bloomsbury when I’m doing author stuff in London. It’s right next to the British Museum but until today I’d not taken the time to visit.

Quite awe-inspiring stuff actually. Mind you, all the big London museums are.

The striking thing is that unlike the huge museums of Mexico City (and I believe, Cairo), they aren’t dedicated to indigenous culture. London’s museums reflect a fascination with every other part of the world.

Is it hubris on the part of Mexico and Egypt, compared with generous interest on the part of the Brits?

Or does it simply reflect the success of Britain’s plunder and conquest of ancient treasues? And modern Mexico and Egypt’s lack of conquest over anything except a dead indigenous civilisation?

The people who think the Elgin marbles should be returned to the Greeks might argue it’s the latter.

While I was writing this blog post, two American tourists from Minnesota -father Lars and 12-year old Leif – sat down near me to enjoy some yummy-looking chocolate cake and Coke. We started chatting about this and that and the Maya.

The museum is light on Mexican exhibits, but the little they have is nicely displayed. An excellent lintel from Yaxchilan shows a Mayan queen performing the blood-letting ceremony.

Anyway. An amazing day followed…brilliant visit to the quite fab Eltham Centre library to meet a class of year 6s from a local primary school. Then a sumptuous afternoon tea with my publishers. Then champagne cocktails and canapes at Waterstones Piccadilly as we watched a Sotheby’s auctioneer sell off handwritten short stories by famous authors (read the BBC news report here…)

Luckily for me they hadn’t asked Murakami or Vargas Llosa so I wasn’t in danger of losing my head and getting into a bidding war. One of my publishers was a bit miffed at being beaten to the Doris Lessing. And we all felt that the 800 word Harry Potter went cheaply at around £25,000. But the auctioneer was taking absentee bids. The whole room could sense that Mystery Bidder was prepared to go to daft numbers. So everyone chickened out. Afterwards we all felt daft. Because you could probably have doubled your money at least even on eBay. Later I asked one of the Bloomsbury team why they hadn’t bid to push up the price. She pointed out that even JKR’s agent hadn’t bid. And from what I heard about who was there…he was probably the richest person in the room.

It would have been public-spirited to have kept Mystery Bidder going to what would probably have been silly money. But it seems no-one wanted to risk that tricky conversation at home. ‘Honey, I seem to have spent fifty grand on a bit of a story…’

Then Scholastic kindly took Axel Scheffler and I to dinner at the Criterion. His lovely Gruffalo story was the fourth most expensive at the auction.

Ee. See what a fabulously glamorous author life I’m having just now? Today doing a bunch of bookshop signings and then playing the biggest room I’ve done as an author – 180 years 5 and 6 in Dulwich.

Better get up then…
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Categories
ice shock nostalgia raves writing

One of those rambling posts about the vagaries of life

I am doing blogging all wrong.

I’ve been reading other people’s blogs and I can see that mine is Not Quite Right.

Well I’m going to do a post that’s more typische. Part rant, part rave, part diary, part confessional.

Rant: Where to start? I’m not much of a ranter over things that don’t directly concern me and over which I have zero control. Not saying there’s anything wrong with ranting, in fact I seem to have voluntarily surrounded myself with people who love a rant; my daughter, my husband, my agent to name only three. Maybe that’s why no ranting. Ranters need to be listened to. And that, it seems, is increasingly my role.

However, I did recently get slightly involved in the age-ranging debate about putting labels like 5+, 7+, 11+ on children’s books, although only in the private e-space of a members-only online writers’ club. But actually, meh. The businesswoman in me dislikes the attempt to stop a perfectly legitimate marketing initiative. Last time I looked publishers sell the books and do the deals. Ifnwhen the sales director at my publishers phones me up and asks me to make sales calls to sell my books to the major chains, then maybe I’ll start to feel I have any place telling her how to run the business.

Rave: Now what I AM is a raver. So many things to enthuse over, so little time. Let’s just divide the things that have recently amused or fascinated me into categories.

TV: All the usual suspects for me: Battlestar Galactica continues to swoop, Lost continues to be gloriously daft-yet-compelling, still laughing over Peep Show’s use of a highly literary reference as a euphemism for erm…well I can’t better it so let’s just say ‘doing a Chesil beach’; reruns of Sex And The City. How I love Samantha. She somehow reminds me of Jessica from Pokemon’s Team Rocket.  And a surprise new addition to my highly selective TV viewing is BBC4’s US import Mad Men – set in 1960’s Madison Avenue and the cutting edge world of advertising. The men are urbane, sexist and wear natty suits; the woman are gorgeous, ambitious, under-appreciated, professionally limited and don’t complain when their bottoms get slapped in the office. Everybody smokes and all these macho men wilt the minute one of these supposedly suborbinate women turns her ravenous gaze upon one of them. You can sense the powerplay just waiting to happen. Ah the good-old-days when a pretty secretary could take a powerful man down. Mostly I enjoy the offices though. They remind me so much of my father’s set up at Mexicana de Cobre. Just good ol’ plain nostalgia.

Reading: I’m very busy writing so haven’t read much lately. I bought some books by Cornelia Funke; Inkheart and Inkspell and some books for younger readers that I’ll read to the little ‘un. I have, however, been enjoying reading The Spectator and New Scientist, which I can manage in bite-size chunks. Two Speccie articles made me laugh out loud today, one by Rod Liddle about the Eurovision Song Contest (it wasn’t political; Eastern Europeans just don’t ‘get’ decent 12-bar blues based pop music), one by Deborah Ross, but then she always makes me laugh. Right-wing intellectuals are so much funnier than left-wing ones. And therefore sexier. I’d have PJ O’Rourke over George Monbiot, any day. But then the left does have Naomi Klein. So maybe it’s gender specific?

Geekchic: Loving my Sony Vegas video editing software. Hey I never said I didn’t have some special interests.

Podcasts: The usual trio of Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s Radio5 movie review show, Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time and the Litopia After Dark podcasts continue to equip me with the knowledge and ideas to do my job.

Music: Performance Channel is screening a Beethoven piano sonata every evening. I caught one while half asleep yesterday. It wasn’t one I knew and being on the verge of sleep was struggling to place it – Brahms? Schubert? Beethoven? It sounded very German and very wonderful. I lay there thinking about Wilhelm Meister and Marienbad and Werther and other ghosts from the past, conversations with my mother.

Diary: Well not much to report here. I have been editing book 2 of Joshua; ICE SHOCK. It’s been hard work but I finally made it through the whole script, having addressed all Editor’s notes. Now I need to write two short new sections and then do a continuity check. But I’ll do a separate post about this. And liasing closely with the publicity department at Scholastic to put things in place for a book tour starting next week. Yay!

Confessional: Well wouldn’t you like to know. I don’t dare to be open about such stuff. Would cause a rare old scandal, no doubt.

Categories
appearances Joshua Files readers

MG on BBC Radio 4’s go4it


Behind the scenes at go4it…even woozy with pain killers for a fresh football injury, Barney kept us all laughing.

Earlier this week I joined two terrific kids named Mia and Joss to meet children’s presenter Barney Harwood at the BBC…where we recorded an episode of BBC Radio 4’s children’s magazine show, go4it.

We talked about Mexico, the Maya, UFOs, wondered what mysterious event will occur at the end of the Mayan Long Count in December 2012, and of course – talked about The Joshua Files.

You can listen again to the programme via the go4it Website.

Categories
raves

Books for readers aged 5-8: Amelia Bedelia

We have a 6-year old daughter and therefore are engaged in the struggle to find the right books for this age group.

It’s no surprise that it’s difficult. It’s an age where the reader’s appetite for story usually outstrips their ability to read or even understand the material themselves. They love books like “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe” or “The Hobbit” but can’t possibly read them alone. But you also have to give them books they might be able to read alone, or else they might be content forever to listen to audiobooks or watch TV and skip the whole reading thing until it becomes unavoidable.

The age at which children learn to read, believe it or not, is the subject of great debate amongst those concerned with primary education. Some blame the UK system, in which children start school aged four, as the reason for lower literacy rates than some European counterparts. It seems that in countries where children don’t start proper structured schooling until age seven, they learn to read much faster and without the angst that some UK primary kids suffer.

Our older daughter, although finally a keen reader aged fifteen, fell into the read-it-to-me camp. Looking through her selection of books for 5-8, I can see why. It’s all classic fairy tales and Narnia, the odd Dr Seuss and several gorgeous picture books (mostly gifted by my lovely friend Dr. Ann Vernallis, whom we refer to affectionately as American-Ann). Very few books that she could hope to read alone, since she wasn’t one of those little Precocias who have a reading age 3 years above their age.

So for Daughter #2 we are making a more concerted effort. I have stacked her shelves with even more Dr Seuss. Another good one is Frog and Toad.

 

The latest triumphant discovery is the wonderful Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parish. A Christmas gift from fellow parent Jessica at the primary school, Amelia Bedelia is a brilliant character that our daughter absolutely adored from the first reading. She’s a very literally-minded housekeeper, whose misunderstanding of instructions causes all sorts of trouble. But she is forgiven everything on account of her amazing baking skills.

Well, I never had an upset that I couldn’t resolve by baking the injured party a pie myself, so I know from experience that this woman is on to something. Nor could I remain angry at someone who baked me a yummy pie…sadly I’m the only baker in the family so far.

People think baking is easy. But it’s a love-thing. You have to devote hours and hours to the craft. As a teenager, every Sunday I’d…

But that’s another story. (It’s a good thing I have this blog. If I start a sentence with ‘when I was your age…’ my teenage daughter is out of the door yawning before I reach the end.)

Categories
nostalgia

Things I Miss About Being A Kid

Sitting here, waiting to go out to buy Harry Potter 7, is enough to make me understand – if ever there was a mystery about it which for me there isn’t – why Harry Potter is SO great.

For adults I mean. Simply put – it makes us feel like kids again. Like Disneyland, swimming in the sea and…in my case, almost nothing else. (If you’re very good at things like surfing and skiing you probably get this feeling from that too, but last time I skied I was trembling with fear and then I snapped my leg across the top of my boot – and heard it crack.)

I miss being a kid, even though you’re relatively disempowered and have homework and exams, and you can get teased and bullied, I mean, there’s no doubt it can be tough, BUT:

What a great feeling it used to be to wake on a Saturday morning and know that beyond the hour or two of chores that you might have to put in, the day was yours. I used to lie awake in bed making plans which would go something like this:

1. Call for Eoin across the road.
2. Mooch into the village to buy sweets and comics.
3. Go to Eoin’s house to read comics (Roy of the Rovers and 2000 AD), eat sweets and watch TV.
4. Get ready to go watch Man United (if we were playing at home)
5. Drop by the sweet shop on the way to the bus to get supplies for the match.
6. Leave for Old Trafford around midday.
7. Get to the match early to get a good standing position, usually on the railings at the front of the Stretford End Junior Paddock.
8. Amuse each other with silly stories and voices (mainly Eoin’s)
9. Go home (hopefully triumphant but if not then full of mock-bitterness and disappointment)
10. Watch “Doctor Who”
11. Hopefully have a teenage babysitter of an evening, and persuade them to read to us from their totally inappropriate book of horror tales, or if a girl, to tell us about their dates with boys.

(A close second for a Saturday when United played away, was scoring some new William, Mallory Towers, Tintin or Hardy Boys books at the library, or trespassing in the garden of the nearby grand house.)

Ah. Days where you don’t count the minutes of time wasted, responsibilities ignored, calories and the effect of sugar on your teeth.

Well, I’m having one of those days today and the housework can sit there and my kids can Make Their Own Entertainment.