Colin Harvey – author

I’ve posted a new review at Suite101, this time dissecting the latest edition of Albedo One. It’s another good issue.

Meanwhile, I’m off to London later today for the BSFA Meeting, which features an interview with Eric Brown, reviewer for the Guardian, contributor to Pringlezone, and author of Cosmopath and many other fine novels.

Anyone else going?

As I noted over at Suite 101, The Speculative Literature Foundation has announced that its seventh annual Older Writers Grant is to be awarded to Mario Milosevic, for his ‘Untied States of America’ which appeared in Interzone 228. It’s particularly interesting for three reasons:

First, this is the first time since 2007 that I’m familiar with the winning entry, and for all my reservations, it’s a worthy winner.

Secondly, I judge the awards myself in 2007, and it was a tough call then to pick just one winner, so I understand perfectly Malon Edwards comments of  “Honorable Mentions for the Older Writers Grant go to Michele Cashmore, April Grey, Lynne MacLean, Ada Milenkovic Brown, and J.A. Huets for their entertaining submissions, which made the selection of the winner a difficult but enjoyable process.”

Yep, not much has changed there, then.  Come the deadline, there’s usually much tearing of hair. 🙂

Lastly, and most selfishly, in five months time I’ll be eligible for the award myself. Not that I think that I have a prayer of winning it, but I have to have a go…it’s nice to see what benchmark’s been set.

It’s been a productive morning — I’m now 20% of the way through Ultramassive, 21000 words in, and I’ve critiqued a short story for Critters to keep membership of that that particular group ticking over.  Plus the review of Black Static 17 is posted.

So now –since it’s 23c in the shade and it feels criminal to be inddors on such a nice day, I’m going to sit under a tree and catch up on some z’s for an hour. There have to be some benefits to being a writer, after all….

Since those nice people at Alt.fiction gave us all a copy of The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy, the least I could do was read it. And having enjoyed it a lot, I ought to review it.  So I have.

SF writer and journalist Gareth L Powell made this timely comment:  Just as you climb a mountain one step at a time,
you have to keep putting one word after another if you want to write a book.

He’s quite right. Writing a novel is also like batting to save a cricket match. One ball at a time, one over at a time, one seesion at a time. Looking too far ahead spells disaster. But the novelist, having to be all-seeing and all-powerful, sometmes has no option but to look up from the detail. 

I used to compare writing a novel to an impressionist painting, but there’s a better metaphor, I’ve now realized. A novel is like a picture made up of 100,000 pixels, with each representing a pixel. Miss out a thousand words, and you have a picture with a hole in its whole.

And today I looked up and was paralyzed, as if my wall had been put on its side and was Everest-high.

I had fallen behind from my (admittedly) self-imposed target of 1400 words a day by the end of August. I had had to work in the morning, whereas I like to write before the day’s smorgasbord of irritations, distractions and events can fill my head and push out all thoughts of Terraformers and Pantropists.

Worse, when I awoke this morning, I realized that my chapter outline wasn’t going to work — so not only was I 600 words behind, but I had no idea how to write my 1400 for today, let alone catch up the backlog.

The answer? Stare harder at the pixels. What’s missing? Some necessary detail on motivation. Why is the hero a mercenary? Why has the heroine come to do her duty on a world that doesn’t like her? How do I show that the hero is gengineered? Through conflict, of course. There’s another mini-scene. One word at a time. One sentence at a time. One day at a time.

When you feel that awful sense that you’re going to fall and/or fail, stare hard at the detail and fill those pixels in.

There’s a fascinating guest blog on the Angry Robot website from Harry Markov about the increasing fragmentation of speculative fiction. What’s interesting, and perhaps unique to SF is the amount of time that genre readers spend analyzing and debating what it is that they’re actually reading. That said, while what much of Markov has to say is interesting, I’m not sure that I buy into ‘SF is dying,’ particularly as he produces no supporting argument for such a sweeping assertion. 

I may be biased, of course, since I write SF. Two thousand more words of it written this morning to make up for yesterday’s relatively unproductive day. I’m back on track again.

Monday was a day of unexpected changes, which is why I’ve not blogged much for the last few days.

In the morning I started on the wip, which calls for 1400 words a day, if I’m to have the first draft finished by August Bank Holiday; it’s not quite as brutal a daily rate as Black Death, which called for 2000 words a day for a month, but it eats up a fair chunk of every day.

So far so good, since I’m bang on target at the moment with 8400 words written.

But then in the afternoon I took a call from the Bank Office in Bristol, asking if I could work at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. Since we need to keep ticking over until the autumn, of course I said yes.

But it means that my day is now writing the wip from 7 to 11 every weekday, then off to work at the Trauma Clinic, not getting home until 7pm. And it’s draining work, telling patients that their clinic has had to be cancelled at less than 24 hours notice –they are often understandably distressed– and by the time I get home and have cooked dinner, I’m sinply exhausted.

So for the moment blogs and reviews will become weekend events, unless I get a little more time and/or energy.

OK, so it’s ofiicial: I’m an idiot.

I plugged the laptop in before coming away, and made sure that it was plugged in. What I didn’t check was that said battery was secure.  It wasn’t, so when I took my 1.35kg paperweight with me, it had a battery with no charge. 

Instead, you get some post-con ramblings here.

There is talk of making it a two-day event next year; whether or not it is one day or two, I’m really looking forward to it.

I’m packing before heading northwards for tomorrow’s Alt.fiction in Derby, so this will be one of the quicker posts, especially as I need to do some thinking about panels. 

I’m on the 10am opener talking about classic SF, together with Tony Ballantyne and Paul Cornell; then at 3pm I’m being locked in a broom cupboard with Mike Cobley and That Man Ballantyne (again) to podcast on The Future of the Future.

Meanwhile, over at Suite101, I’ve scribbled a few words on Futurismic‘s newest columnist, the always fascinating Luc Reid.

Hopefully, I’ll have time to write a few words tomorrow from the evnt itself, but until then…

Those of you who know me well will know my opinion of First Worst Group, part of the monstrous private oligopaly that determines how and when many of us travel within the UK.

The next time you buy a ticket, console yourself with the thought that part of your fare is going to pay the bonus of Marketing Director Ellis Watson, who was paid a ‘signing-on’ bonus of £250,000 last July for joining the group – and then another £22,000 for leaving in March….

Nice to see that our money isn’t being wasted.