Ah, the things I wish I could tell you...

Well blog readers, I've had a fun few days. I wish I could tell you everything but because we want to keep some things as a cool surprise I can't.

I popped by the Scholastic offices on Friday to meet up before going to a fancy dinner-n-awards evening with the publishers and some of their guests. Spying some mock-ups of "Invisible City" sitting on a pile of new books, I snapped some photos with my BlackBerry. It's not the final version yet but it was soooooo cool to see it. This book package truly is totally innovative! And splashproof too - perfect for taking the book down to the beach or pool.

But I don't think I'm allowed to post these photos on my blog, sorry...

I was an hour late to another meeting today, because of what the bus driver from Oxford referred to as an 'RTA'. What's wrong with the word 'accident'? Why must we always be decoding TLAs? (three letter acronyms) But my agent coped without me and successfully pitched our proposal to the publishers, leaving me to walk in on the good atmosphere.

The way "The Joshua Files" will be promoted online should now be pretty innovative too. Something new for the world of books, borrowing from something they use to promote some...

But soft! Ere I say too much...

Introspective, moi?

I don't usually turn to introspection on this blog because well, basically, it's not very fun is it? It gets awfully close to that writer's angst I try to avoid.

But today, just now in fact I had a moment of clarity in which I realised that being a published author is going to make me not more interesting as my teenage daughter imagines, but less.

(My teenage daughter observed recently, "I'm looking forward to your book being published. Then maybe your life will finally become interesting. And you'll have things to tell me. Instead of it being the other way round.")

I read an article about something, can't remember what, and was just starting to form a theory, synthesize a thought, who knows it might even have been interesting...when a very strict part of my brain cut in and said NO.

NO. You can't think about that. It might be interesting but NO. It's not relevant to the books you write. It's potentially too interesting to think about as a leisure activity. It's not comforting enough to justify as a daydream. So: simply NO.

That strict part of my brain has a propensity to let me think all I like about the stuff that it deems relevant to my job and hardly at all about anything else. There were times when I was a scientist that I literally turned up at parties unable to speak. I forgot how to make small talk. I didn't want to talk about anything but molecular biology, and no-one at the party wanted to hear about that so...I said nothing.

So I can imagine that what will happen in the next few years is that I will think more and more about my books. At the moment I can count on the fingers of a hand the number of people who have ever wanted to have any discussion with me about my books that goes beyond "You're writing a book, really, what's it about?"...my reply and then, end of discussion.

What if it were lots of people, though? What if that becomes all people ever want to talk to me about?

Then I'll be back where I was in the old days, when I was mad keen to talk about subcloning DNA or whatever part of my research I was up to...and good for little else. Except now the only thing I'll be capable of talking about is a bunch of stuff I made up once.

I'll be back to being a nerd.

Actually I'm being daft. I could right now make a list of 10 friends who will NEVER want to hear about my books. They should help to save me from becoming a total bore.

Joshua 1 all finished...I hope!

Well, I think I've finally done my bit and now it's all over to the publishers. I sent the corrected proofs back last week. Much relief. Now I'm looking forward to seeing the final product, complete with secretly embedded code of a puzzle wot I wrote, which readers can solve to win a prize (an iPod, I believe...)...and the much-awaited, totally innovative jacket.

About which I'm going to say only this - you will be able to see the book all the way across the store! And, no, I'll say another thing. You know how they say 'don't judge a book by it's cover' and such-like? Well, in this case, couldja?

Now Agent Pete and I are working on a cunning plan; an online treat for readers of the book. Top secret!

Bound proof in Lugano

Bound proof in Lugano
Originally uploaded by mgharris

Well blog readers, all five of you, I'm back. Two weeks of driving across Europe close to the Swiss/Italian border in the canton of Ticino, where it's all Swiss, but Italian style.

For example - they speak Italian but serve fresh Swiss muesli for breakfast. For example, where you can hire a motorboat without a licence and drive across the lake but the minute you moor it, a taxi-boat driver comes beetling across the lake, brow all furrowed and tells you off for going too near the rocks which might damage the engine. Yeah, we noticed that too...were taking care and everything... For example, where you get Swiss efficiency but instead of cheese fondue and raclette they serve yummy Italian food with pasta al dente and everything. See how it works?

The publishers of 'The Joshua Files' kindly sent out a couple of bound proofs of the book for me to peruse. Here I am holding my first copy of 'Invisible City'. Bit of a thrill, actually. I was so excited at breakfast that I forgot to eat and the waiters were clucking at me, trying to get me to hurry up and finish that croissant and just go, already...

Wheels begin to turn...

Well my dear blog readers, it's all kicking off round our way!

My publisher - Scholastic Children's Books - announced the aquisition of "THE JOSHUA FILES" series title on Tuesday. And the news is that it seems to have grabbed some attention, which is great, which is wonderful, because it will hopefully help build awareness of the book.

My agent called me on Tuesday morning and told me that the Arts Editor of the Evening Standard wanted to interview me, which she did...and sure enough, they ran a little story in the late edition - on the same page as a big article about Harry Potter, next to one about the Arctic Monkeys.

It's not my first time in the press. But before it tended to be things like "Information World Review", on a page about Knowledge Management software and the like...

This is different and pretty, pretty, pretty cool.

I'm really looking forward to Harry Potter 7. And the huge bar of chocolate I plan to eat while reading it. The day will be sandwiched between two salsa events (Friday night and a Sunday matinee performance of the terrific UK-based son band, Soneando), so I should be able to burn the calories off...

It's my turn to see the latest Harry Potter movie tonight...

Oh...I am currently hugely enjoying watching "The New Adventures of Old Christine" a new sitcom starring my favourite of the Seinfeld four, Julie Louis-Dreyfus. So much that I think I'll give it it's own blog entry...more soon.

Still got writer's block, by the way. I have put a Recovery Plan in place. Luckily for me, it calls for things like going to the movies and reading.

My New Editing Regime...and Memories of Subcloning

The publisher and I have agreed a deadline for Joshua bk 1 v3.0. I'm deep in the process of writing Jaguar though, and can't let the momentum go. So I try to work on Jaguar in the morning at my desk, take a two-hour break to refresh and then it's on with the editing, which seems to require a different skillset as far as I can tell.

Thank goodness for editors. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Mine is probably going to save me from being a laughing stock, if nothing else - hopefully a lot else but you can't predict these things.

I like to take my manuscript out for little walks. I can't be bothered going all the way to the Bod this time around - I'm only spending 2 hours a day on it, what with the Jaguar writing taking up all my morning brain activity. So I've been going to Summertown.

The above photo is taken of my set-up at the Summertown Wine Cafe, a bijoux little joint on South Parade which makes the best coffee in Summertown (there are many Italian coffee machines in Summertown, but few baristas who have a clue how to use them). Sadly however, they charge a small fortune for savoury food - best to stick to cake, I'm trying to avoid blimpdom so that's out.

Blah, blah, blah. Nothin of consequence in this entry sadly. I'm just writing something to have to test in a new way to do an RSS feed. If you read this, you've just participated in an experiment.

Do you feel used?

I kind of miss doing experiments. Somewhere in the back of my mind is the niggling feeling that a PROPER day's work is what I used to pull off at the height of my keenness as a graduate student...a long day in the lab which ends with a successfully identified new DNA subclone to use in a lovely biological experiment.

'Subcloning' is a way of starting with a widgey little bit of DNA that is no use to anyone and two days later having bucketloads (as much as a milligram!) of the stuff that you can use to do biological experiments in tissue culture cells or even in unsuspecting fluffy creatures. (Some journals are so fussy that you can't get published unless your results are in a live organism.)

You insert a piece of experimental DNA into a 'vector' of usually bacterial or yeast DNA which has the ability massively to replicate it. Then you can grow the 'bugs' in a 500ml culture overnight and in the morning extract enough DNA to 'transfect' cells which allow you to test the properties of your experimental DNA. The tricky bit is that when you try to stick your experimental DNA to the vector DNA, only a small fraction will combine to give you the subclone. The rest will just be vector DNA that sticks back to itself.

When I were a lass we used to pick at least 24 bacterial colonies in the hope that 2 or 3 would have the subclone. It could take up to a whole day, a day spent 'doing minipreps', as we used to call it. Sometimes you had to use radioactivity and horrible, ooky, gloopy, neurotoxic polyacrylamide gel to help identify the subclone.

(Any molecular biologists reading this, bright young things with your PCR, your DNA synthesisers and sequencing machines...it's all very easy now, I'll bet.)

But! Throughout most of career as a molecular biologist I noticed that although I was a good little scientist and picked my 24-48 colonies everytime I wanted to find a correctly subclone, more often than not, colony 1 (the first I picked with a sterile toothpick) actually had the subclone. i.e. I didn't need colonies 2-24 and all the effort in 'working them up' was not actually essential.

Other people in my lab noticed this too. It turns out that in maths the number 1 is disproportionately represented (there's some rule and it's used as a way to detect fraud), well, in molecular biology this seems true too.

Don't think we let that observation go to waste, either. Towards the end of my time in the lab, I would often just pick a colony right off, inoculate my 500ml flask and grow up the bugs without testing whether they had the subcloned DNA in them. It saved a whole day! Of course I tested a sample before I used it to transfect my tissue culture cells. Well, duh.

If you didn't understand a thing I wrote in the last few paras, tell me. R1X did, so I have tried to rewrite it so that it makes sense.

New Content? Did I say 'New content'?

The comments on Joshua book 1 version 2.0 are in. After a lengthy meeting over fennel tea and swiss chocolates (aren't we girly?), The Editor and I had a frank discussion of what still isn't working as well as it could. And from this emerged, yesterday, my new draft of the plot for v3.0. The exciting part for me is that it calls for New Content.

Yesiree. Editing where you're just cutting is no fun, not to me anyway. There's a sort of masochistic pleasure to it. Ha! I'll cut out my favourite chapter then, see if I care! That sort of thing. But adding in New Content is lovely. I wrote one new chapter for version 2.0 and writing that was the best bit.

But version 3.0 calls for the restoration - in suitable form - of two sequences which originally appeared in 'Todd Garcia, Boy Archaeologist', the oft-rejected ms which provided the central concept for 'The Joshua Files'.

And they're two really fun sequences, too. I'm relocating one to an even more evocative setting - originally set in a Cotswold village, it will now be set in Oxford's-canal based neighbourhood, Jericho.

It's my first experience of being edited, and I'm really impressed with the attention to detail in a second edit. Little things get picked up, like the consistency of a particular character's diction.

I'm going to film myself writing one of these new chapters and put it on Youtube after the book is launched. I got the idea from my mate Noam, about whom I posted a few weeks back. I might even go to Jericho to write it, on my little red laptop.

Hmmmm.

(In an aside, Caitlin Moran writes in The Times Online:

"Big Brotherly love
Quick note to all those who are saying that they are “Not going to watch Big Brother this year, actually” – YOU ARE DELUSIONAL. Get out of denial and put the telly on."

To which I say...Get behind me, Satan!

Oh help. It's Friday night - eviction night. Must find salsa event to attend....)

In the Oriental Reading Room, Editing

The oh-so-peaceful, non-glamorous Oriental Reading Room of Bodley's library in Oxford.

I could have picked any part of the Bodleian Library in which to edit my ms for Joshua 1. Like the Duke Humfrey's Room, where they filmed Harry Potter (don't ask me what scene, but I direct all the tourists that I meet who ask for Harry Potter hotspots, to this part of the Bod.)

Truthfully though, I can't be bothered schlepping all the way there. It's, like, a bit further away and up some stairs!

So I chose the Oriental Reading Room, in the New Bodleian Library. Like New College, it's not especially new, unless you were born in the eighteenth century.

The Oriental Reading Room turns out to be the perfect place for the total concentration that editing requires. I don't have this trouble writing a first draft - the story sucks me in. Editing, you need to have half your mind in the book and half of it on the editor's suggestions. Which often say, in a much kinder, more helpful and more specific way than this: Write this bit better.

No through-traffic to somewhere more interesting; a long, peaceful room with a window on the Broad. Nobody asking for the latest journals or the latest anything (which is why I won't go back to the haunt of my student days, the Radcliffe Science library; lots of activity there). Just scholars working intently on deciphering their manuscripts, in lovely exotic scripts. The woman who works opposite me seems to be reading something quite spidery and pictographic. Yummy!

You aren't allowed to take bags in, so I have to unpack my laptop and the box with my marked-up manuscript. The Bod Squad (library security) have to check the box, every day. Today I told the guard that I had my future best-selling first novel in there.

He laughed and laughed and laughed.

(Okay, I was going for the laugh...)

Title Dilemma

On the phone to Agent Cox this morning, we muttered words about my title suggestions for Joshua 2.

None of them are on the money. Hmm, but why?

I've been through about 15 suggestions by now. I came up with a new batch this evening. Avoiding words with 'fantasy' connotations, heavy on the 'adventure' connotations.

Hopefully I'm getting closer. We'll see!

Waiting, waiting, waiting-waiting-waiting

If you've seen the DVD of 'Finding Nemo', you'll understand the title.

Agent Cox reports that the publishers have finally agreed on the last-wafer-thin-mint of a clause he wanted for the book contract. We should be signing next week.

Meanwhile, my editor and I are still whupping the ms into shape.

And the publisher is...

Well now, that would be telling.

We're keeping this project under wraps just a leetle bit longer. They will reveal their identity when we've good 'n edited the manuscript.

They sent me flowers, bless 'em. Lovely ones, too!

Best. Week. Ever.

What a week it turned out to be.

About two weeks ago I received an email from my agent, Peter. Could I come to London to meet some publishers?

I hadn't let my hopes get up. I didn't realise that Peter had only recently gone out with it - he'd been waiting for the right moment.

So when Peter began with all the phone calls, I didn't take it too seriously. I was deeply into my new project - working title - 'Realm of the Jaguar'.

Monday rolled around. I met Peter at his club and we chatted for half-an-hour, mostly about a certain press story involving him and a well-loved celebrity, which had caused Peter to be chased by paparazzi.

Then I started to meet publishers. One in particular had some excellent ideas about how to improve the book. Peter sat by and said very little. Later he told me that I'd been a tad too business-like. "It's not a business meeting," he said.

We jumped into a taxi and drove to yet another publisher, where I had one of the major surprises of my life. As we sat down with the editor, I was presented with a suede-covered box, on which a sticker decorated with Mayan glyphs pronounced something about a prophecy from a codex... Inside was another sheet, continuing the story...

(I'm honestly too embarrassed to write the contents of those sheets, but in short, it said that in 2008 they would like to launch my book.)

There was a marketing proposal stuck onto papyrus, and a separate sheet (folded concertina-fashion, like a Mayan codex!) with the 'Offer', which I passed straight to my agent. Everything was gift-wrapped and tied with a bow. There was a box of Maya Gold chocolates on the table, I realised. I frankly could hardly believe my eyes. It was one of those situations where there's a two-second gap between perception and reaction. "Wow," I said, nodding, struggling to comprehend what I was seeing. I was banking on 'wow' being the appropriate reaction, but I wasn't exactly sure.

Then I met the rest of the team. They told me how much they liked my book, asked me some questions about what inspired it and where the story was going...

Well, I used to tell anyone (who'd listen) anything I could about my books, but for the past year I haven't. Guess I've realised that unless you've read and love a book, it's no fun to hear about one. And sometimes even then...yanno. So to suddenly have a crowd of people being so fascinated, was pretty overwhelming. As we left their office, I had the sense of being slowly disconnected from reality. What the hell is going on? I thought.

Back at Peter's club, we met even more publishers. One carried a large aluminium tube decorated with stickers made up in black and red, with the book title in a logo. This 'offer' came gift-wrapped with six bars of Maya Gold chocolate, toys that tied-in with the book and the financial and marketing proposal printed on glossy, "Joshua Files" logo-headed paper. They'd actually knocked up a logo! More enthusiastic chat about the book, favourite films and TV shows, writers, influences, things in the story pipeline, plans for how to sell and launch the book.

I simply didn't know this kind of thing happened. "I need to take a moment," I told Peter after they'd left. "This is a little overwhelming."I wasn't kidding. I worried that I might actually burst into tears...I was having a pretty unprecedented experience. The last time I remember feeling anything close to it was when I was interviewed for a place at Oxford and my soon-to-be-tutor put me out of my misery and told me that he would be offering me a place.

Peter was sympathetic. When I told him that it was beyond my wildest dreams, he said, "This is just the beginning."

So...that's how it begins. Who knew?

Mr. Agent Back In Touch

Mr. Agent has been very busy doing deals for his clients, yay him!

Finally, he emailed me to suggest we arrange a catch-up session. I was planning to be in London anyway for a thing at the Oratory so we decided to meet yesterday.

First good news - he loved the sample of the new novel I'm writing. Not the plot-less character story - I've shelved that until I think up a cure. This is another story; essentially an escape-and-chase story. Gosh I love those, so I thought I'd try to write one. Working title is 'Jaguar's Realm'. After a week of so drafting a trial plot, I started to write. It was fun - I didn't have to wring out every page, as with the coming-of-age character story!

We discussed Mr. Agent's criticisms. There were many! It's back to the plotting for me.

Second good news. "We're starting to see some interest from publishers in 'The Joshua Files'. No offers, but interest."

Now you're talking, pal.

Writing - the progress

No word from Mr. Agent since we talked about the manuscript of my third novel, (fourth if you count Blake's 7 fan fiction...), which I sent him sometime in May.

I'm not going to post anything about the new novel yet. Pretty sure my friends and family are fed up with hearing about my unpublishable novels.

So, let's wait until the jury's back with a verdict before I bore you again.I've been working on some new ideas. Got 20,000 words into a coming-of-age novel for older teens, before realising that there was no proper plot. I wanted to see if I could write a story with no gadgets, chases, mystery, no adventure at all in fact, just characters and relationships. Crumbs, it was hard work.

Then my kind friend Alison read it and said politely "The writing is good...the sentences are good...but there doesn't seem to be a story". Yikes - she was right. I was concentrating so hard on, yanno, the characters and the descriptions, that I forgot to put in a hardcore structured story! So it's back to the drawing board.