Colin Harvey – author

In about six or seven hours time there will be new world champions.

Holland or Spain? Spain or Holland? I can’t decide who I want to win.

It should be Spain; I’ve worked with the Spanish for years and I love the country and the people. Torres is still a Liverpool player (though for how long no one knows) and there’s Xabi Alonso, a former red, and of course Pepe Reina, who I had hoped would play.

But then Holland have a red in the form of Dirk Kuyt, and they’ve been losers twice so my sympathy’s with them. To be honest they’ve played probably the better football throughout the whole tournament, and I’ve almost forgiven the charmless cloggies that I used to have to work with.

But whoever wins this final night, I shall miss not having to make a decision about what to watch in the evenings. Having the football on has meant a rest for the remote control.

Last night our plans to go out for dinner to celebrate passing the first year were thrown into complete disarray when we received an unexpected house guest.

We were just about to go out for dinner, so I’d taken Alice for a quick spin around the block and halfway around she started sniffing around on a grass strip.  I realized that she had found a hoglet, a baby hedgehog.

The strip of grass was about ten metres long and less than a metre wide and bordered a concrete path bounded at both ends by roads, one of them busy. Any animal there had to have reached the grass by a fluke, and was unlikely to safely cross a second time. Not only that but hedgehogs and hoglets such as this are nocturnal animals, and shouldn’t be out in blazing sunshine in broad daylight.  She was eating something on the grass so she was clearly uninjured, but still she shouldn’t be out. I called Kate and asked her to come and give me a hand.

Kate arrived with a container and we took her (we thought it was a male but later found out he was a she, so Spiny Norman became Spiny Norma) home and started calling animal shelters, to report that we had a two ounce, three inch long animal that needed help, but was happily tucking into Alice’s Pedigree chum and slurping water in a way that showed just how dehydrated she must have been. 

Never, ever, find an animal that needs sanctuary on a Friday evening. Nine phone calls later and I finally struck gold in the shape of Tony who told me from the animal’s weight that she would be about two weeks old and was probably orphaned. When I told him that the hoglet was happily eating dog food, he revised his opinion to a severely malnourished but still orphaned four or five week old. Either way, there was no chance that Norma could be released into the wild and have any chance of survival — hedgehogs normally weigh about 600g rather than 60g when they hibernate, and Tony was in West Wales. Two more phone calls later, we made contact with Secret World – who would happily take her but because she was uninjured, we had to take her in.

So having put Norma(n) in a box with a towel and Alice’s stuffed Tinky-Winky from when she was a puppy (don’t ask; just don’t – okay?) and some more food and water, we put her in the bath until we could drop her down today.

That required a seventy-mile round trip, which took (with a thirty minute stop for lunch) about three hours, so Norma really blew any Saturday plans out of the window. And we ended up settling for a Chinese takeaway last night…

The newest bit of news on release dates is that Damage Time has been scheduled for release on October 7th. I can’t wait!     🙂

And the other bit of news is that I’ve passed my first year.

For anyone who is interested the full results are:

I think we’ll be going out for tapas tonight!

This week’s review at Suite101 is A.E Moorat’s Henry VIII: Wolfman. I didn’t much like it, not being a fan of monster mash-ups, and it’s nowhere near as good as the author’s Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter, which was far better written, and had some novelty that any follow-ups will inevitably lose.

So I was going to let Wolfman go by without a review.

But Hodder have a publicist, who’s even more annoyingly persistent than they usually are (though Tor have got a particularly odious specimen) and she wouldn’t let it go. Having spammed me with not one but TWO unsolicited hard copies* –stretching my poor elastic walls to their limit– she then e-mailed me asking whether I’d had a chance to read it. At which point I muttered “Okaaaaay…..” and took my gloves off.

Actually, I understand publicists are only doing their job, and maybe they regard even a negative review as being ‘any publicity is good publicity.’ Unfortunately, they never seem to publicize good books and anything that finds it’s way to me via a publicist always seems to be a pile of shite.

And I now look forward to receiving a really good book from a publicist that proves me wrong…

* I don’t mind getting review copies if the publicist has had the courtesy to ASK first. I may say no, but more likely than not I may say yes with the caveat that if I don’t like it, I won’t review it.

Over at Suite101.

Today’s 1400 words duly done, but what a horrible, horrible slog it was — unlike yesterday, when I surged past the quota and probably wrote over 2000 words in total.

I suspect that part of the reason I struggled is because I awoke at about 4am, and couldn’t get back to sleep. Consequently I’m red-eyed and sluggish of thought this morning (and tetchy, for the benefit of any EOn, Npower or other bloody salesmen who come to our gate to incur the wrath of Tourette’s Dog).

Or rather, I was just drifting back to sleep when the alarm went off.

This is nothing unusual, of course. Millions of people suffer sleep deprivation on a regular basis.

Some years ago Science News ran an article which stated that ‘normal’ sleep consists of several hours of deep sleep followed by waking up for an hour or two, then a return to a slightly lighter sleep for the balance of the night.  It’s this last stretch and its dreams that we tend to remember on waking.

What screws it up is the presence of the alarm clock which either brutally interrupts that sleep, or because we’re aware that it’s going to go off, renders us unable to relax and return to the arms of Morpheus.

Hmmm, note to self. If inventing time machine, first call is to man who invented the alarm clock…

It’s been a pretty damn fine morning so far.

Outlined a novelette for a forthcoming anthology; afterwards wrote the daily 1400 words of the wip. As twittered earlier, managed to read the first chapter of each of the Angry Robot novels without Tourette’s Dog taking off vertically with nil warning (as she often does and) unleashing an unprovoked barrage of canine abuse at the world in general. Then -best of all- got the release dates for the books.

Winter Song will be out on August 31st, which is terrific since I can start book-specific rather than general blathering. And it’s only eight weeks away.  There’ll be more news on books in the wild in the next few weeks, but I’m going to eke out every nugget like a miser.

Let’s see if this afternoon can be as good!

I’ve been having a bit of a reading splurge on Ngaio Marsh recently; partly that’s because I seem to have overdosed on SF, and partly I’ve been looking at culling some of the contents of my book shelves. 

Given that I haven’t read most of them for fifteen or more years, Marsh seemed to be an obvious choice, and a few of her earlier, slighter stories have indeed ended up on amazon.

But some have yielded little gems of underwriting which my younger self didn’t really appreciate. A lot of the stories are far more worldly than contemporaries such as Christie or Allingham, and the characters more finely drawn.  I’m finding myself reluctant to sell too many of them.

Damn – I’ll have to look for another author to cull….

It’s Saturday afternoon, and I’m trying to justify watching football on the tv by writing a blog — after all, if I’m writing a blog, it’s not really goofing off is it?

I’ve spent the morning writing my daily 1400 words, which I finished by about 12 o’clock, before settling down with Henning Mankell’s Firewall, which may or may not be his last Kurt Wallender novel. For those of you who only know the dyspeptic, diabetic detective by the anaemic BBC adaptations featuring Kenneth Branagh, which are not a patch on the original Swedish episodes often shown on BBC4, the cycle of ten or a dozen novels are perhaps the most grounded narratives in the detective genre. At the risk of sounding pretentious, they chart the moral disintegration of Swedish society in the 1990s through the brutal and often irrational murders that Wallander has to investigate.

Before Firewall, I read Sidetracked, which justifiably won the Crime Writer’s Assosciation’s Gold Dagger Award for Best Novel. Mankell interweaves real world events with the storyline by featuring Sweden’s matches in the 1994 World Cup as part of the sub-plot and setting. It’s part of a complex set of plot threads that at times sidetrack the reader as effectively as they do Wallander’s investigation.  

Reading Mankell teaches one that it’s the little touches that give a narrative its sense of reality. Years ago, Brian Aldiss began to work himself, his friends and family into the narrative, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. I’m tempted to try the same technique in future, maybe featuring a writer who blogs during the 2010 World Cup as part of the sub-plot….

But for now it’s back to the real World Cup. I’ll finish Firewall between the two matches.

Here’s a thought; as I type this, it’s 12.07 on the 183rd day of the year. We are seven minutes past the mid-point of the year — from now on, we’re closer to 2011 than we are 2009. As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about the future, that has a certain satisfaction to it. And of sourse we’ll be even closer to 2011 when you read this.

But looking back 36 hours, I had a thoroughly good time chatting to Eric Brown before and after the BSFA meeting in London on Wednesday night. It seems incredible that he’s been writing for over 20 years, but he has, and had some interesting points to make about Haworth in Yorkshire, SF, reviewing and writing for readers who have difficulty reading.

It was also nice to get to chat to Ian Whates, since we both of us always seem to be busy at cons. I’m not sure where he finds the energy to write, edit, publish and find time for the BSFA. Long may he continue.

And after over 30 years, it was good to say hello again to Geoff Ryman.

More on that another time, when we’ll be even closer to 2011…