Extras by BlackBerry

I believe I have already mentioned my adddiction to my BlackBerry Pearl. Not since the luscious Palm Vx have I been so taken by a gadget. The iPhone looks very pretty but it will take a while to convince me to part with my CrackBerry.

Meeting a group of independent, London-based booksellers last week I realise that the anecdote which they seemed to enjoy most during the after-dinner conversation was the one which followed a throaway comment of mine about how most of the 'extras' in the book 'Invisible City' had in fact been written abroad and on a BlackBerry. By sheer coincidence I kept receiving emails from the desk editor at Scholastic asking for urgent additions to the book, and was always away from home at the time.

For example: the text of the integral code which readers can track throughout the book, solve and win an iPod, was written late one evening in a bar in a hotel in Nimes, France. Not because I was drinking, but I needed peace and quiet and the hotel was very quiet at night.

For example: the Q&As (if they include them) were received very early in the morning whilst we were on the isolated, corally beach near Tulum, Mexico. I had jet lag and there was no internet access in the hotel so wound up typing out the whole reply on the BlackBerry, under the bedcovers whilst the rest of my family slept. Then I went out and finished it as the sun was coming up.

What would I do without my BlackBerry? I would miss deadlines, that's what.

Day of the Dead

Calaveras de dulce - sugar skulls on sale in Cancun's Market 23

Well, I'm back. I was going to post a very jolly thing about Day of the Dead and the party we had last night to celebrate the Mexican festival of Dia de los Muertos, but it seems rather crass given that for thousands of Mexicans in Tabasco state, yesterday was one major disaster - the awful floods.

Earlier this year, photos of Oxford flooded made it onto international news and resulted in my Mexican relatives sending me anxious emails. A bit of a turn-around - normally we're the ones calling about earthquakes or volcanic eruptions (part of my family comes from a small town near the active volcano Popocatepetl).

Anyway, from the looks of it Tabasco state has got it pretty bad indeed, but so far not many people dead, thank God. Either it's a miracle or Mexico isn't so third-world as the outside world likes to portray it.

It's been a busy, busy week and I started it by being ill with some virus. Had to go to London to do stuff with the publishers and only started to feel better yesterday. Then I set myself up as the cocktail mixer for the party, making margaritas and daiquiris, sampling all batches of course. Feeling a bit delicate again to be honest...

"Invisible City" has been selected by the trade magazine "Publishing News" as one of its February Picks with a very nice review that head of publicity at Scholastic passed on to me:

"Conspiracy and intrigue, complemented by non-stop action and excellent characterisation make this an exciting debut. Think Young Bond/CHERUB levels of potential. Plus the cover is really cool."

The publishers and I are all pretty chuffed by that...

Bugged Out in Calakmul

Our daughter on top of Structure VI at Calakmul, Campeche, Mexico

If you've never heard of the ancient Mayan city of Calakmul, don't worry. Neither have most Mexicans. That includes people in the tourist industry and work just a few hours away. It also includes the people who set up the otherwise excellent Mayan museum at Chetumal, the state capital of Quintana Roo and at 3.5 hours away, the nearest large town to Calakmul.

But back in the day, Calakmul was the local city-state; 'the day' being roughly in the middle of the seventh century. Calakmul was the Snake Kingdom, vying for power with the huge city-state of Tikal (now in Guatemala).

The ruins of Calakmul are not what you'd call particularly accessible - even now when there's a paved road which takes you all through the 50km of surrounding bioreserve . Until quite recently though it really was lost in the jungle. Archaeologists are only starting to uncover the history of the region. A major breakthrough came with the decipherment by Mayanist David Stuart of an inscription on a staircase at Dos Pilas. (See Maya Hieroglyphs Recount "Giant War" in National Geographic).

(There's a recent issue of National Geographic with several great articles about recent findings in Mayan archaeology.)

Visiting the ruins at Calakmul, as well as those at nearby Chicanna and Becan, gave me the biggest 'discovery' buzz I've ever had at an archaeological site. Unlike other sites such as Chichen Itza, Palenque, Uxmal, El Tajin, Teotihuacan and Tula, the ruins at these three Campeche sites have been left relatively uncleared. The trees have been left growing between the main excavated structures, and in many cases, left growing out of the actual temples, as in the photo above.

There are howler monkeys and spider monkeys in the woods. They swing through the trees watching you progress along the trail.

That, plus the fact that in all these places we were practically the only people visiting the sites, gave us the feeling of what it must have been to discover these places...kind of like John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, the latter was the artist who produced such evocative pictures as the one shown below.


The downside is the mosquitoes, and the heat. The ruins of Calakmul and Chicanna are accessed by walking down a jungle trail, during which a cloud of vicious mosquitoes surround you and munch on every scrap of exposed flesh. Insect repellent may cut your bites down to twenty or so. Stop moving and they'll settle for a good, steady drink of your blood.

But heck. It's worth it.

At Last, Becan

becan ix
Originally uploaded by mgharris

We visited Becan yesterday, a ruined Mayan city in the state of Campeche. Readers of The Joshua Files will know the significance of this place - no spoilers please!!!

After the carnival of Tulum, Becan was a wonderful experience. Can you believe that we were the only people visiting this amazing monument? Yes, for the two hours we were there we had the whole place to ourselves. No other tourists, no tour guides, no vendors hassling us. Just the sounds of the surrounding jungle. And the racket we made - two children can't be silent after all.

You catch a glimpse the summit of the tallest pyramid, Structure IX, over the tops of surroundings trees as you approach from the main road, Highway 186.

Closer though everything is shrouded in dense jungle, so you walk through trees and then notice stones and steps from the base of the temples, cool grey in the midst of green; leaves, creepers and a mossy ground. At Becan the temples really do appear to rise up out of the jungle.

Becan has four really huge structures which are quite well restored; Structures II, VIII, IX and X. There are a large number of other buildings too, but many are still swallowed by the jungle. I wonder why the place isn't more well-known. I suspect it's only recently been restored to this level. I saw photos of Structure IX years ago and the staircase was a pile of rubble. Now though, as you can see, this side of the temple is quite well restored, with the staircase good and sharp all the way to the top.

We didn't climb this one - there was a helpful rope but also a note saying 'please don't climb the pyramid'.

We did however climb Structure VIII, from where we took this photo. And my cousin Oscar and daughter couldn't resist crawling into a tunnel on Structure X, where they found a chamber with bats...

My valiant husband tried again to take some non-hideous photos of me for the publishers. About 90% were gruesome, but we do have some usable candidates now, especially if Photoshop can help out. The sun was beating down on us most of the time, and I was the only one allowed to use the brow-mopping cloth, so this 'photo shoot' was none too comfortable.

Lake Bacalar

Lake Bacalar
Originally uploaded by mgharris

Finally a chance to swim in the biggest and bluest freshwater lake I've ever seen. In southern Quintana Roo state, this lake was known by the Maya, apparently, as the Lake of Seven Hues. The aqua coloured parts are where the base is shallow and sandy.

We ate fish fajitas, ceviche and Mexican beer in a lovely little garden restaurant on the edge of the vast lake, which stretches for miles. Hardly anyone around and nortenos playing on the loud stereo. It felt really nice and properly Mexican. I thought of my uncles in Mexico City and felt a bit guilty that we weren't sharing this with any of them.

Still - cousin Oscar Raul arrives tomorrow! And then it's off down Highway 186 to Becan.

There have been a lot of blue Nissan Tsurus around, ooer. Readers of Joshua Files will know what I mean...

Tulum - my how you've changed!

No Internet access here, but my BlackBerry is working so I've been sitting on the beach outside our room (about 30 meters from the sea) exchanging emails with my agent and the desk editor at Scholastic re some final touches for the book.

Tulum has changed a lot since I was here with my husband and fellow biochemistry student, Becs, almost 20 years ago. Back then we hired a taxi for $80 US dollars and the taxi guy drove us down from Cancun, hung around the makeshift car park while we traipsed around the ruins, carefree as you like. On the tiny but gorgeous beach by the ruins we met some people from Didsbury, Manchester of all places (where I grew up). The sea was rough that day. The whole area was experiencing the beginning of what would become a tropical storm. We drove back along the coastal road with the windows down - no aircon and stopped en route for a swim at the blue, blue lagoon of Xel-Ha. (pronounced shell-ha)

Around 3 weeks later the storm became Hurricane Gilbert and devastated Tulum.

These days Tulum is a BIG tourist trap, Xel-Ha too. Big car park, coach loads arriving all day long, massive arts and crafts shops and restaurants. Official tourist guides take you round and give you a terrific spiel, all the latest findings. No more free wandering around the ruins, no more clambering over the pyramids.

Ernie, our Mayan guide explained how all 52 structures in Tulum played their part in a ceremonial centre which also functioned as an astronomical and weather calculator. He showed us the place where at around 5am on 13 November the light from the rising sun passes though a small window in one temple and lights up the door in the surrounding wall - to the west. This would be the signal to harvest the last of the crops before winter. Another portal would trap light to signal the time to sow. And by an amazing feat of engineering,the Temple of the Wind God uses a pole and a temple window to raise the alarm of an approaching hurricane, whistling like a flute when the wind speeds start to get dangerous.

Tulum is a city with natural protection from invaders - mangrove swamps to the west, the Caribbean to the east and offshore, a long reef which prevented Spanish from landing anywhere close. So why did they need to build a 6ft high wall all the way around the ceremonial centre? It's the only example of such a wall in a Mayan city.

Ernie gave us the latest explanation - and it's ingenious. "Tulum's biggest danger was always the hurricane" he said. "Where do you put 2000 people in a place like this, to protect them from the hurricane?" The buildings held at most 600 people - and they were in danger of having their palm rooftops ripped away. The answer was this: the wall. It was long enough for all 2000 people to line up behind the wall as a shelter.

Ernie is a bona fide Mayan - comes from a tiny place deep in the interior of the Yucatan peninsula. "If you want to see the real Mayan people," he chuckled, "get a guide to take you in a 4x4, and tell him you want to go where the tourists don't go. He'll take you where you won't hear a word of Spanish - only Maya."

Well maybe next time. Our kids are way too whingey for that right now. The heat and crowds of Tulum got to them. Chances are that Becan and Calakmul - in the Campeche jungle to the south - is going to be too much.

All the way down from Playa del Carmen, the highway cuts through the jungle. I peered into the trees. Poor Josh Garcia - in "Invisible City" he spends hours lost in there. Me - I wouldn't dare to step 20 meters into that place.

Tomorrow, Chetumal, the state capital of Quintana Roo and the place where Josh's Mayan adventure begins...

To Mexico - in one week!

This time next week I will in at Healthrow airport waiting for a flight to Toronto, Canada and then to Cancun, Mexico!!!!

Gosh I'm looking forward to it. The family are taking a break to do a Joshua Files Roadtrip. We had planned to follow in Josh's footsteps from Chetumal all the way to Catemaco but honestly the driving would just be too tiring.

So we're doing a cut down version. I will be posting much more about this, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, especially for Lucas, I dug out this TV ad for Josh's favourite cupcakes, which he eats on his bus journey through Yucatan in 'Invisible City'.



The are called 'Pinguinos' and are like Hostess cupcakes - white vanilla cream inside a chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting and a squiggle of white icing on top. And a childhood favourite of mine.

Mmmm, additives.

Sneak a peek at "Invisible City"

Almost-final version of "The Joshua Files: Invisible City", snapped by BlackBerry during a visit to the Scholastic offices...

Heck, I'm pretty sure it's okay to let you see this now. After all there's an image on Amazon.co.uk now, and when the lovely people at Scholastic videoed a promotional clip of me talking about the book, they had a whole bunch of the book mockups in the background.

I can't take any credit for this amazing package so I don't feel AT ALL bashful about praising it.

Itssosososocool!!!!!

See how it glows at the edges? See how there's lots of lovely edges? See how you slip the book right into a splashproof jacket so that you can take the book to the pool, to the beach? See how the actual cover (under the dayglo-orange plastic) is mostly white, black and orange?

I dreamed of having a book design that was minimalist, graphic and mainly white and black but I didn't even dream of asking for that, cos I assumed they'd say - "A kids' book? White? It'd get grubby...and hey that's a bit dull..."

I want one. I can't wait to see what they look like when lots of them are stacked up, that orange glow reinforced in every copy.

How much would you pay for a book like this? Would you pay £6.99?

Sold! (In fact you can get it quite a bit cheaper, I found one online retailer selling it at less than a fiver. No, I'm not saying where!)

Never let anyone say I'm not a huckster for my books. Buy one! Buy them for your sons and daughters and nephews and nieces.

Go on, make me happy. Pre-order, why don't you?

Forgive the giddiness. I'm still happy about finishing my latest manuscript. I just asked my husband to nip out to buy a box of chocolates to eat while watching TV. Tomorrow we'll celebrate properly with un daiquiri en La Floridita.

(It's not counting my chickens. Milestone celebrations are important, esp for scientists and writers who can work on one thing for years. If you've finished a ms recently, good onyer. It's no small achievement, for anyone.)

Weekend in Cornwall

Prussia Cove, Porth-en-Alls

taken with my BlackBerry

Some dear friends of ours from my days in the Nuffield Department of Medicine were over from Melbourne. (That's where the UK bioscience brain drain has been for the past ten years, or so it seems to me; if I count up all my best friends from doctorate and post-doc years about half have ended up in Oz. Okay, most of those were originally Australian, but hey...)

They'd always talked about taking us to their favourite haunt in Cornwall, where they'd rent a cottage almost every year when they lived in the UK. We hadn't seen them for years, so this it was wonderful that this time, we could join them there.

I've been to Cornwall once before, North Cornwall, which is gorgeous but this place was even better! It has the Lizard on one side and Lands End on the other (both far in the distance); old smugglers caves, gorgeous little coves as well as wide, sandy beaches with all the stuff kids like (e.g. rock pools, pebbles, shells), amazing clifftop walks with views out to St Michael's Mount.

So after a gorgeous weekend eating Cornish pasties (veggie and yummy!), visiting ice-cream parlours and eating cake, I've probably gained a pound or three, despite the exercise of walking.

My friend Magda gave me a lovely scientist flashback moment when she went through the slides for a talk she gave last week at a conference in London; a fantastically effective new way to use nano-particles as part of a new vaccine for diseases like malaria. My very first research job was with a team developing one of the UK's earliest candidates for an AIDS vaccine, so it was vaguely familiar territory. I'm so proud of Magda, of all my scientist friends she's the first to be made a full Professor. Professor Magda!

In other news, someone is selling a bound proof of The Joshua Files: Invisible City on ebay. There are only a few hundred in circulation, I believe...

Only!

It should go for a very, very reasonable sum, i.e. cheap-as-chips, given that at this point in time i) almost no-one has heard of the title and ii) almost no-one has heard of the author...

Google Books - How cool is this...?

Putting together a presentation for the Scholastic sales reps I am meeting tomorrow, I stumbled across the most fabulously useful thing - Google Book Search.

Google, as you may know if you're an online information nerd like me (hey I did work in the area for five years so I'm allowed...), are planning to digitize all the books in the world. Well, as many as they can get their mitts on. There was a hoo-hah about this for a while. Quelle horreur, authors and publishers all going to lose out; that sort of thing.

Well today I had planned to do the following - for just one of my presentation slides:

1. Go downstairs and find my copy of 'Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan' by the original Mayanist, John Lloyd Stephens.
2. Find the page where he mentions the rumours of a 'living city' of the Maya
3. Go down to our garden office and scan the page.
4. Manipulate the image file on my computer at my desk, back in the house.
5. Pop it into the Powerpoint slide.

Not so difficult, aye, but remember I actually own this book.

But with Google Books, here's how that scenario played out:

1. Search on Google, find the book.
2. Search for the string 'living city' - find the right page.
3. Use the inbuilt screenshot clipping tool to clip an image of the page, the bit where he mentions the mysterious city
4. Pop it into the Powerpoint slide.

5 mins in total.


Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan By John Lloyd Stephens
Now is that not awesome?

(If you read 'Invisible City' you'll find that this section of the 'Incidents of Travel' book is referenced. I'm not saying why...that's all a bit of a mystery, to be unraveled in later books...)

SPOILER ALERT IN THE COMMENTS!

I have one lovely comment from a guy who read the book for the waterstones competition, but you should be warned that there are spoilers for INVISIBLE CITY therein...

SPOILER AHOY!

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...

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...

Chichen Itza at the Equinox

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned the spectacle of the equinox at the Mayan site of Chichen Itza (one of the New 7 Wonders of the Ancient World).

I had a look on Youtube and indeed there are some videos of the event. Nice, saves us all having to join the madding crowds.

Here's my pick of the crop:
Paco, a Mayan guide at Chichen Itza, explains the whole thing to a TV reporter.


Atmospheric little Chichen-equinox movie, with Pink Floyd music.

Mayan site of Chichen Itza One of the New 7 Wonders!

Chichen Itza
Originally uploaded by Aleksu

The results are in - it was the final days of lobbying wot done it!

The Mayan city of Chichen Itza has been named as one of the official 'New' 7 Wonders of the World.

The photo is one of Aleksu's - a contact of mine from Flickr who takes gorgeous photos. He's been urging people to hit the 7 Wonders Website voting for Chichen.

Chichen Itza was the first Mayan ruin I ever visited, aged 15, on a hugely memorable trip to Yucatan with my father, stepmother and three sisters. We were driven there on the slow dusty road from Cancun. Not by my father - who stayed in Cancun to play golf - but his chauffeur. This was before cars routinely had aircon. It was a sweltering August day - at least 45 degrees Celsius and close to 100% humidity. and the site was crowded - even in 1981 it was Mexico's most popular archaeological site after Teotihuacan. My sister Pili passed out from heat stroke in the ladies' bathroom.

We walked around the site in stunned, exhausted silence. I was nursing my usual sunburn and was in agony most of the time. (Sunblock didn't work in those days; I always forgot to wear a T-shirt for a critical hour or so, for which I always paid in tears of pain). I tried climbing the main staircase of tht Temple of Kukulcan aka El Castillo (pictured above) and got about twenty stairs up before I turned around and had an attack of vertigo. I knew without a shadow of doubt that if I climbed to the top with my sisters I would have to be helicoptered down. I managed to climb back down those 20 stairs but my legs were shaking all the way down, even though I used the trick of descending on a diagonal.

I went into the tunnel in El Castillo to try to climb the Temple of the Jaguar that sits under the newer, flashier Toltec-influenced pyramid. There was a crowd of tired, hot, breathless tourists waiting patiently to ascend a tight staircase just wide enough to permit a line of people going up and a line of people going down. It was like a steam oven in there; everyone was being slowly poached. The skin on my shoulders felt like it was on fire. I took one look up that staircase and felt like I'd got as close to hell as I ever wanted to be. A wave of claustrophobia gripped me; I almost shoved people out of my way on the way out.

Chichen isn't my personal favourite of the Mayan sites. I prefer something more Classic Mayan, with the Puuc or Rio Bec architecture, ideally in a more jungle-setting, like Palenque. However Chichen has two sites, including an older, Classic Mayan site which is Puuc style.

Chichen's buildings are spectacularly preserved - by now all four faces of El Castillo are restored, when I first visited it was just two. This pyramid is precisely aligned to capture the sun on the sides so that it lights up triangles on the main staircase and the serpents head at the base. This happens only on the Spring and Winter equinoxes and it has the effect of creating an undulating serpent-of-light on the staircase. I've never visited then because the crowds at that time of year are insane. (There must be a Youtube video of it...I'll check).

Despite the constant pain of my sunburn I was impressed beyond anything I'd ever experienced. I'd never visited any Mexican pyramids before, for some reason I'd never been taken to Teotihuacan (near Mexico City). I'd had a fascination with the Maya since aged 11 my father took us to stay at the Acapulco Princess, fashionable in the late 1970s/early 80s, and - I was told - built in the style of a modern Mayan pyramid (although the website says Aztec but still...) But to see the real thing, to experience something of that atmosphere, to imagine the citadel filled with warriors and priests, ball-players and sacrificial victims...was quite, quite amazing.

We returned late that evening to the hotel in Cancun. I went into the hotel bookshop and bought the shortest book I could find about the Maya. It turned out to be one of those Erich-Von-Daniken type books about ancient astronauts and their supposed influence on early civilisation. I lapped it up. I hardly slept that night.

If any of you read 'Invisible City' next February you will see just how far that day left its indelible mark on me.

Ancient Knowledge at the Ice Cream Cafe

Ancient Knowledge at the Ice Cream Cafe
Originally uploaded by mgharris

I have become a Flickr addict, I admit it. Especially since this morning when another member added me as a contact. I favourited some photos yesterday and a few were this guy's amazing photos of Mexico. This morning I spent ages admiring the rest of his work...check out Aleksu on www.Flickr.com

I started looking around at other stuff you can do on Flickr. Pretteh, pretteh, pretty cool! You can upload to you blog via email. Which means that if you are like me, also a CrackBerry addict, you don't need to pay to moblog!

Here's a poster I saw in G&D's ice-cream cafe yesterday. This ancient knowledge stuff is all the rage, it seems, or la bomba as we Latinos say. Let's hope it still is in 2008...to say any more might be a spoiler...

Emailed from my BlackBerry®

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.

Rare books mark climactic page in archaeology's history

This article in the Boston University Bridge caught my eye two years back and inspired a chapter in 'Todd Garcia, Boy Archaeologist', a chapter which didn't make it to the first two drafts of 'The Joshua Files'.

The article describes how a book collector came across a super-rare copy of a book by the explorer who kicked off the whole field of Mayan archaeology, John Lloyd Stephens. The bookstore didn't recognise quite what they had in their shop, not having realised that the apparently insignificant inscription in the flyleaf was from the author to President Martin Van Buren.

Only two copies of this book ('Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan') would be more valuable and are in fact still missing...the author's own copy and the one he gave to his friend and collaborator, the artist Frederick Catherwood.

In real life they are still missing. In 'The Joshua Files', however, one of these might be hiding, unnoticed in a second-hand bookshop in Jericho, Oxford...

And today, that deleted chapter (rewritten for Joshua) will be making its way into Invisible City version 3.0.

(Provided I don't get tempted by something else, like an afternoon at the pool. Fingers crossed for rain...)

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....)

Capoiera in Oxford

Here's a video I made last year of the Oxford capoeira players demonstrating their sport in Summertown. The hero of "The Joshua Files" is a capoeirista. I love watching this sport, something I became interested in when on a business trip to the USA. I had this really tense meeting to go to and I couldn't sleep, so watched this bad-but-fascinating movie called "Only the Strong", all about a school teacher who motivates a gang of rough kids through capoeira that he's learned in the street gangs of Brazil.

I really love writing the capoeira sections of Joshua.

(Yes, the compression sucks on this version, I don't quite know how to fix it. Looks fine when I run it locally... Any suggestions welcome.)