How to use this Page

Bruce Parry meets some llamas on his latest adventure Yesterday I mentioned how Bruce Parry is my hero - he is also partly the inspiration behind Dr Midas who is a TV adventurer. You may also remember that my second book is set in Peru and the Amazon - well my best friend has just told me that Bruce is currently filming there for a new BBC series. I loved his Tribe programmes especially as they give you a true look at the places he visits not a 'holiday-show' version - so I'll definitely be tuning in. In the meantime I can follow his journey on the BBC's website including blogs, interactive map and pictures. There's a great picture of him with some llamas wearing traditional dress (above) and another one where he's learning to be a cowboy. Hopefully I might also pick up some more tips to keep my writing authentic until I'm lucky enough to visit South America myself (I'm saving up for Madagascar first!) As I've mentioned before the original Dr Midas was a traditional crazy professor type - like this ... (Fantastic drawing by one of my animation heroes Lou Romano - check out more of his superb pictures at www.louromano.blogspot.com) He was definitely the stereotypical old-fashioned explorer - well as Bruce Parry, Ray Mears and Bear Grylls have shown that style is definitely gone - and there's definitely more effort made to dress appropriately to local custom. (I love that line in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - "Brody's got friends in every town and village from here to the Sudan, he speaks a dozen languages, knows every local custom, he'll blend in, disappear, you'll never see him again. With any luck, he's got the grail already." Cut to Marcus Brody in Middle East bazaar wearing white suit and hat: "Uhhh, does anyone here speak English?") * If you're a Bruce fan too check out www.bbc.co.uk/amazon. The new Amazon six-part series is due to be broadcast on the BBC in the Autumn.

Bruce Parry meets some llamas on his latest adventure Yesterday I mentioned how Bruce Parry is my hero - he is also partly the inspiration behind Dr Midas who is a TV adventurer. You may also remember that my second book is set in Peru and the Amazon - well my best friend has just told me that Bruce is currently filming there for a new BBC series. I loved his Tribe programmes especially as they give you a true look at the places he visits not a 'holiday-show' version - so I'll definitely be tuning in. In the meantime I can follow his journey on the BBC's website including blogs, interactive map and pictures. There's a great picture of him with some llamas wearing traditional dress (above) and another one where he's learning to be a cowboy. Hopefully I might also pick up some more tips to keep my writing authentic until I'm lucky enough to visit South America myself (I'm saving up for Madagascar first!) As I've mentioned before the original Dr Midas was a traditional crazy professor type - like this ... (Fantastic drawing by one of my animation heroes Lou Romano - check out more of his superb pictures at www.louromano.blogspot.com) He was definitely the stereotypical old-fashioned explorer - well as Bruce Parry, Ray Mears and Bear Grylls have shown that style is definitely gone - and there's definitely more effort made to dress appropriately to local custom. (I love that line in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - "Brody's got friends in every town and village from here to the Sudan, he speaks a dozen languages, knows every local custom, he'll blend in, disappear, you'll never see him again. With any luck, he's got the grail already." Cut to Marcus Brody in Middle East bazaar wearing white suit and hat: "Uhhh, does anyone here speak English?") * If you're a Bruce fan too check out www.bbc.co.uk/amazon. The new Amazon six-part series is due to be broadcast on the BBC in the Autumn.

I'm very proud of my Dr Midas website as I put it together myself through trial and error with overwritten templates and copy and pasted designs. However I know it is really basic compared to some author websites out there. So I've enrolled on a web design course starting in September where I will learn all about Dreamweaver and HTML coding and hopefully from there I can go on to Flash animation. I've been looking for some ideas and found some great author websites on a link at bloomsbury.com. I'd love to have some cool icons like on Celia Rees' Pirates! or simple animations like the burning flames on Powder Monkey. But if I could steal any website it would be those belonging to Justin Richards - www.justinrichards.co.uk - for (museum-set) The Death Collector and The Chaos Code where you can scroll over a desk and artefacts and uncover bits of information. My website is also limited to ten buttons/ pages so it would be great to expand from that and get away from lots of scrolling. I wonder if I'll need another domain name? I would ideally like to be able to add lots of the information I have gathered for my second Dr Midas book. I have lots of photographs ready to use too of Peruvian animals and artefacts including owl monkeys, llamas and the Peruvian mummy I saw at Bolton Museum. Speaking of which I've also set my Sky+ machine for a documentary on the History Channel tonight. It's all about the conquistadors and how they conquered the Incas. I'll be making lots of notes especially about the clothing in case there's anything I need to clarify when I re-edit my book. Don't forget you can tell me about your blogs and websites - just tack the information onto a comment.

Enthralling adventure in an eye-catching cover When his archaeologist father goes missing after an aircrash in Mexico, Josh suspects alien abduction. But after he discovers his father was murdered, Josh is caught up in a race to find the legendary Ix Codex - a lost book of the ancient Maya containing a prophecy about the end of the world… There's no missing The Joshua Files: Invisible City by M.G Harris in the bookshops - it's the fabulous looking book in the bright orange plastic sleeve. But is the inside as exciting? Well I was keen to find out - and was delighted when Scholastic kindly sent me a copy to review. The Invisible City follows 13-year-old Josh Garcia as he tries to come to terms with his father's death before being drawn into an adventure that ultimately takes him to Mexico. M.G (Maria) Harris has created a very convincing young hero - you really get inside his head and his grief is very believable although I had some difficulty accepting that his mum would let him travel overseas with just a couple of friends. The story builds well with twists galore - and the whole Ix Codexpart was very imaginative and edge-of-your-seat stuff. The book has gone down a storm with young readers who will be desperate to get their hands on the next installment - as will I. M.G Harris Mexican-born and Manchester raised Maria also has a fantastic website and blog which writers will love - she talks about how she completely revised her book (she began with a boy archaeologist story), found an agent and how publishers tried to woo her with Mayan chocolate. (There's some lovely Madagascan chocolate available if any propsective Dr Midas & the Pirates editor is reading this!) Maria's agent is Peter Cox of Redhammer who runs the popular writer's colony - litopia - which unpublished authors can use to post their work and seek comments. Visit Maria's blog at www.mgharris.net and her fansite at www.themgharris.com

By Anatoly Liberman

Countless unnatural things happen in the history of language. Coincidences, as bizarre as in Dickens’s novels, encounter us at every step. For example, it turns out that Modern Engl. un- is a symbiosis of two prefixes. One has broad Indo-European connections and is the same in English and Latin. It occurs in adjectives, adverbs, and participles, such as unkind, unkindly, undaunted, and can be appended with equal frequency to Germanic words (unwise, unfair, unfit, unheard-of) and to words of Romance origin (unable, unpromising, undaunted, unimaginable). (more…)

Share This