Tag: harry potter

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
writing

Harry Potter 7 got me reading again

Well it’s true and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

Here’s my big confession – before reading Harry Potter 7 I hadn’t read a book since March. And that was nonfiction – my agent Peter Cox’s book “You Don’t Need Meat”.

I find it hard to read when there’s a lot going on in my life, especially if the ‘life’ stuff needs a lot of thought. Some years back, when we were setting up our business, I sometimes read fewer than 5 books a year. A YEAR! This is how come I’ve developed a short attention span and impatience with reading anything that doesn’t grab from page 1. In such times I have had to fall back on re-reading my old favourites like Borges, Calvino, Garcia Marquez and Murakami.

It took a lot of determination to read Harry Potter 7 in a day-and-a-bit – not because it was anything but enjoyable, but because with two girls at home, one pre-reader and one teenager from the Harry-Potter-negative segment of humanity (those curious people!), it was hard to get twenty minutes’ peace in one go. I read in chunks punctuated with ‘Leave me alone’, ‘Get your own dinner’ and ‘It’s not my problem that all your friends are too busy reading Harry Potter to hang out with you’.

But having recaptured the discipline of batting the kids away and concentrating long enough to actually follow a fictional thread, I rapidly picked up two more books and read them quick (“Of Love and Demons” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – amazing and “The Chase” by Alejo Carpentier – good but a bit tough-going to be truthful).

Reading is really the best entertainment, once you can submit to a book’s demands.

Next I am going to re-read two old favourites by Mario Vargas Llosa. “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter” and “The City and the Dogs”. The latter is one of the vague influences of my current work-in-progress so it’s time I revisited…

Current desire-to-write is running around 60%…when I hit 80% I think I can try to get back on the horse re Project Jaguar.

Oh and I loved the way JK wrapped up the saga. Especially the stuff re Snape. Excelente!

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.

Categories
raves

It’s 8.30pm…are you queuing for Harry Potter?


It’s 8.30pm…are you queuing for Harry Potter?
Originally uploaded by mgharris

Chucked out of the house by our teenage daughter who wants to partay with her disreputable friends…we ventured into Oxford’s still clogged highways in search of a Friday night salsa. But stopped in town to grab food..honestly the traffic to Cumnor is SO bad.

Snapped the Harry Potter queue. Brave souls enduring the cold and rain! Waterstones had the biggest queue. Even though The Works opposite was offering it for the same price and had a MUCH shorter queue…everyone’s heading for the Waterstones. They could be warm and toasty at Borders opposite, which is open from now till the book goes on sale.

Don’t get me wrong, like. I’m keen too. But sometime after breakfast tomorrow will do me fine.

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Categories
writing

Chocolate and Harry Potter

Interesting to see that Galaxy (chocolate bar) are sponsoring the British Book Awards (Nibbies) this year. With a missionary zeal to persuade people to eat chocolate whilst reading!

Well if only, but I daren’t; I’d get too fat.

However, this is in fact my own private ritual when it comes to Harry Potter day. The day of the new release, I’m down at little Sainsbury’s in town, buying a big bar of milk chocolate and the latest copy (I went to Sainsbury’s because unlike some other major book-sellers, they did not give dark warnings about running out of copies to people who couldn’t be bothered to turn up at midnight…). Then it’s back to mine, flop onto my bed and a day of bliss with chocolate and the latest installment of Harry.

Bit of a dilemma for JK, whether to kill the lad or not. Hmmm. I won’t say what I think, in case it gives insight into my own proclivities.