Colin Harvey – author

Grr! The plan was to take this week off, but we can’t go out today as we’re waiting for a delivery of kitchen tiles.  And we can’t even sit outside as the workman have turned up to re-lay a water pipe outside our front gate. Cue a tractor- mounted pneumatic drill, and the smell of scorching pavement wafting across the graden.

Oh well, nothing else for it but to tidy up one of those reviews I almost finished before Eastercon. In this case, it’s a play, as we went to see Noel Coward’s Present Laughter recently.

At least the workmen should be finished by tomorrow…

If he’s running to time, Gareth will be here in 30-40 minutes, and then we’ll be off to not-so-sunny Heathrow for the madness that is Eastercon, held again in the Hotel Non-Euclidean, aka the Radisson (people who’ve stayed there and emerged will understand the reference).

Details of the programme are at Suite101.

Hopefully the onslaught of spam (about 100 spam posts a day) will abate while I’m away — touch wood, they seem to have slackened off already.

  As I noted over at Suite101, it’s exactly four weeks until the publication of Damage Time.

  Each week I’ll post an extract from the novel, starting today.

  It’s an exciting time, and a very, very busy month.

First of all there’s Eastercon to attend.

 More on that tomorrow.

The judges have released their shortlist for the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and a fine list it is.

A lot of what I’ve been writing lately is intended less as Words of Wisdom than as the electronic equivalent of me thinking aloud. This has the benefit of enabling me to argue with myself as I grope toward understanding of the genre I work in. The latest musing is just how separate (or inter-connected) the short fiction and novel markets are.

Over at Suite101, I’ve compared Jim Hines’ survey results in terms of how long it took to get published with my own personal experience. It’s scary. I represent the mean average almost to the day; moreover, I’m now convinced that had I done all the sensible things that more experienced writers urged me to –like attended conventions, writers groups and workshops earlier on– I would have probably had trimmed several years off that final figure.

Or maybe not. Maybe the universe really does kick back.

After a couple of recent ventures into Children’s Lit I’ve gone back to genre, with a review of Lavie Tidhar’s wonderful The Bookman at Suite101.

Those of you on Facebook, LJ and other fora may have noticed updates for some of my book pages on the website yesterday. They were generated by my adding links to The Book Depository.

Partly this is to generate a little additional revenue, since I get a 5% commission where customers buy through the link –as well as royalties– but partly it’s also a little dig at Amazon. I missed a trick in that I’m not an Amazon affiliate, so any time you click on the ‘buy from Amazon’ link, I got the royalty on sales of new titles, but no commission.

However, I’ve held back at becoming an associate. I’m sure I’m not the only author tired of their recent bully-boy tactics; in removing the ‘buy buttons’ from our titles as a negotiating tactic with our publishers, it smacks of the way totalitarian regimes have parked their tanks alongside neighbours’ borders over the course of the last century or so prior to making demands or invading. 

So this is my little protest. It won’t amount to a hill of beans, but it makes me feel better.

Oh, and today’s review is Anne Fine’s classic Goggle Eyes, or The War Against Goggle Eyes as it was published in the USA. Part of my new reading regime….

When I started writing about the differences between novels and short stories, I envisaged it as one blog post, but as so happens with writing, it turned into a trilogy, despite my best efforts to keep each post as lean as possible.  Here is the last part of the post, with thanks to Sheila Crosby, Jim Hawkins and Gareth L Powell for offering their thoughts along the way.

As often happens when I write blog posts, they have a habit of growing beanstalk-like, from small seeds to vast behemoths that block out the sun.

This second part on the differences arising from the different lengths takes up a post to itself. Of course, there are some who might say I need to practice honing my prose, but hey, I’m a novelist — I like to hold up each point and look at it from every side…