Colin Harvey – author

It’s 2.26 am as I write this. I have a stinking cold caught from my film group which is keeping me awake. So as it’s the beginning of March, I might as well give into insomnia and do the monthly stats, for February.

 I worked 244 hours in February, which for the mathematically challenged among you, means I worked four 61 hour weeks.  That’s 4 hours more than November, my previous busiest month, with 2 days less in the month. (In November I did also work 45 hours at the Eye Hospital, which is why I was gibbering the end of that month)

Unsurprisingly, Planning & Making A Film accounted for almost as many hours as the other three modules combined. The good news on that front is that we completed shooting, so (hurrah!) my hours should plummet on that module – I intend them to, certainly.

Cumulatively, I’ve worked 900 hours in the past 4 months (120 days) averaging 7.5 hours a day, or 52.5 hours a week.  The big single subject – bar, none, including miscellaneous reading and writing—is film; I’ve worked 138 hours on that.

However, it’s now Reading Week, so I shall devote some time to reading, which always helps me chill.

There are times when everything seems to happen at once, rather like the denouement for a novel (what kind of novel I’m living in I’ll leave you to decide – it feels like horror at the moment). 

Tomorrow we start filming for our Making A Film assignment, which counts as one-sixth of my total marks for the year on the whole BA course, by far the biggest weight of any assignment. Worse, to a very large extent, it’s being determined by circumstances beyond my control.

And also tomorrow my second Feature Journalism assignment is due, so I’ll actually be handing that one in today, when I go to pick up the crew’s equipment – assuming Mike is happy with the level of documentation; so far I’ve had no response to the request for a filming permission, and what should have been a routine request to the University for a room on Monday has turned into a bureaucratic nightmare.

I spent the last hour before starting this blog post printing out reams of forms and e-mails (before that I’d had to nip to Tescos to replenish paper, and now I’m getting ‘low ink’ warnings!).

 That’s this morning. My afternoon is worse – it looks like:

                13.00 Into Bath to meet Film Group to pick up papers

                13.55 Into Uni to hand in assignment

                15.00 Home with equipment to store for tomorrow

                16.00 Head back to Uni for Plenary

                17.00 Plenary Lecture for Creative Writing

                18.00 Head to Bath for

                18.45 Launch of Genre Lecturer’s book (ends 20.00)

               20.00 Head to Toppings for Core Workshop Lecturer’s Interview with Patrick French

                21.00 Home or a late dinner in Bath….

This is quite frankly a ludicrous schedule, and assumes nothing going wrong and no last minute tacks thrown in my path by the nine (yes NINE) different bodies affecting Film.

So I’m going to take action. That Journalism article includes a piece called ‘The Joy of Study,’ in which one of my lecturers warned against the peril of over commitment.  It seems to me that I can do nothing about the first visit to Uni, but if I cut out the Plenary and the Toppings event, I can at least regain some time.

Apologies to Joe and Celia, but you are the casualties of learning today.

Newcon Press has announced its forthcoming anthology Future Conflicts edited by Ian Whates.

The book will be published in April and launched at Eastercon.

The table of contents is as follows:

Introduction – Ian Whates

1. The Wake – Dan Abnett
2. Unaccounted – Lauren Beukes
3. The New Ships – Gareth L Powell
4. The Harvest – Kim Lakin-Smith
5. Brwydr Am Ryddid – Stephen Palmer
6. The War Artist – Tony Ballantyne
7. Occupation – Colin Harvey
8. The Soul of the Machine – Eric Brown
9. Extraordinary Rendition – Steve Longworth
10. Yakker Snak – Andy Remic
11. The Legend of Sharrock – Philip Palmer
12.  The Ice Submarine – Adam Roberts
13. Welcome Home, Jannisary – Tim C Taylor

Counting Ian. Whates –the editor- there are no less than five Angry Robot authors present in the contents list, as well as my stunt double, Tony Ballantyne, and near-neighbour Gareth L Powell.

Yes, that is me you see at number seven. I’ll be putting pen to paper for anyone who wants copies signed at the launch party at eastercon.

See you there, maybe?

The BBC have started to show a series hosted by Sebastian Faulks on Saturday nights called Faulks on Fiction.  This comprises various talking heads holding forth on fictional characters, interspersed with lots and lots of clips from television adaptions of said books. It sounds as dry as dust, but it’s absolutely brilliant, helped by a webpage at the Beeb with a reading list to die for.

Part 1 -which is on the iPlayer for another 19 days- featured heroes, starting with Robinson Crusoe, moving swiftly through Tom Jones (no, not the singer!) and Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair.

Part 2, which brings me to the subject in my usual meandering way, is all about lovers, and asks the question, how much does fiction influence the way we perceive love? Think about it — how many stories feature what happens after the hero and heroine get togther?

You may argue that this is because what happens after boy/girl get boy/girl inherently boring, but maybe that’s the case because Shakespeare et al have so culturally hardwired us that most of us can’t imagine an alternative (most of us being the portion of society that turns books or films into bestsellers — in other words the audience) .

It’s quite ironic that I’ve heard so many singletons lately bitterly resenting the cards that those in relationships are supposedly exchanging, blithely ignoring the fact that people in relationships don’t need to anonymously send each other cards.  In fact, after over a quarter of a century Kate and I have adapted Valentine’s Day to an extent that the card-manufacturer’s target audience would have trouble recognizing it!

I bought Kate a card, but not of the traditional Valentine’s variety, while she bought me Brian Moore’s autobiography Beware of the Dog.  (Far more mentally nourishing and enjoyable)

How did you celebrate the day -if you did- while simultaneously subverting it?

Yesterday I mentioned that about a month ago I lost a lot of financial and submission history to a corrupted hard drive.  Fortunately I didn’t have on-going work on there, or where I did I also had it on USB or on one or other (or both) of my laptops. I generally back up about once a week, although this slips to about once a fortnight when I’m busy, which of course is when things go wrong…

…like the power surge that we had on Thursday. No more than a momentary flicker of the lights, but the old Vaio –which has bugger all battery capacity—was plugged into the mains to recharge, and it was on, since I’d copied one file onto USB. Doubly vulnerable.

To cut a long story short, it’s showing exactly the same symptoms as the desktop.  That cost me £120 and I still lost all the data on it. After a January in which our catalytic convertor  failed (£450) I needed varifocals (£260) and the corrupted desktop  (£120) it’s a bill too far; especially if the data’s lost.

Or at least some of it is. 

 The casualties are an almost finished guest blog for Aliette de Bodard, and a review for Suite101 which was two paragraphs short of completion. That’s the biggest loss – almost 900 words completely gone into limbo.  But two other guest blogs were on the USB, as was everything else I’ve been working on, so I actually got off lightly.

So it’s the blog that’s suffered, but it’s not as bad as it could be.

What’s worse is that most of the photos Kate has taken over the last six or seven years were on the desktop, and while some of them were duplicated and appear elsewhere, having lost two-thirds of our photos, we’ve probably lost two-thirds of the remainder.

Chaz mentioned using a drop box, which is certainly an option I’ll look at — we haven’t the space physically for half the stuff we have here, and we need to find some way of storing memories that isn’t vulnerable to the whims of Western Power.

But don’t believe the old maxim that says lightning never strikes twice. It does.

Those of you awake and paying attention may have noticed I’ve been quieter than usual on the bloggage front. That’s partly due to my workload in general –at the moment I’m juggling time-sensitive projects  – and partly because I suffered a tech fail earlier this week.

 What makes it worse is that it’s the second time in a month that it’s happened.

 I have three computers that I use at various times.  For financial stuff and files that need printing, I use a desktop Packard Bell that’s done me reasonable service.  Which is more than can be said for the netbook that I use when on the move and at home for some university work – many of you will have heard my swearing before when it decides to get temperamental.  The Tosh’s tendency to randomly lock up or simply go back to different screens has encouraged me to hang onto my trusty Sony Vaio laptop, despite it’s being literally held together with sellotape.

Because I switch machines, I back up about once a week onto a USB, although sometimes that lapses to once a fortnight.  (You can tell where this is going, can’t you?)

 About a month ago my desktop mysteriously failed to re-boot. Fortunately, this is the machine with least permanent files on, although it did have a decade’s worth of photos that Kate had downloaded.  Nonetheless, we asked our local PC shop to take a look at it.

Sharp intake of breath. “Looks like your hard drive’s become corrupted.”

 New hard drive installed, but the old one was a write-off – none of the data on it could be recovered.  And I’m only now realizing how much submission history and how many financial files were on that machine, and how rarely I had ever backed it up. I’ve had to re-input this year’s spreadsheet for the accountant, and I literally have no history aside from the hard-copy files sent through for previous year’s returns. 

Nor have I any idea who I’ve submitted which stories to. It’s a bit like having very limited amnesia.

 Still, I’ve sort of gotten used to that. Until three days ago…

 More tomorrow

I blame Rob Rountree. I was going to finish the review that I’ve been on for the last (cough) weeks, but instead I got distracted.

“Outcasts?” He said. “I really don’t know what to make of that.” 

 He knew what he was doing — he probably thought with a sly little grin, “This’ll start Harvey off on one of his rants.” 

He might as well have loaded a gun and passed it to me, so I could perform the mercy killing. An hour and half later I have 700 words that I need to find a home for. So I’ve pinged in a query to a possible market for 200 odd words of it, and we’ll see what happens.

Pigs in Space? That was from series creator Ben Richard’s blog, where he pays tribute to the l’l porker who I thought acted most of the humans off the set.

‘Nuff said?

Walking the dog this morning was surprisingly pleasant, since we managed to duck in between the showers, and in between them the morning was more like March than February. The ground was decidedly boggy underfoot, but Kate didn’t mind, I was in wellies, and Alice has four wheel drive.

Most of the rest of the morning was spent fitting a new printer – not that there was anything wrong with the old one; it was a leaving present from Unilever, and it prints like a dream. The problem with it – as I’ve found– is that replacement cartridges cost £45 each, and there are four of them.  It was actually cheaper to buy a new printer than two new cartridges. But as always it seems, fitting a new printer, which I expected would take a few minutes turned into a two hour job.

I’ve had several people observe how quiet I’ve been this week, which seemed odd, considering I’ve been working like crazy – but I realized after i’d thought about that it’s been time-consuming stuff, like this which comprises a life all but invisible to those on-line, and finishing articles and stories for submission to magazines, which I can’t talk about too much about until I can actually announce a sale. So that’s invisible too.

But I hope to have a small announcement soon.

This post is especially for Marc, who absolutely loves stats…

So I’ve compiled the January work numbers.

In 31 days, I worked 217 hours – exactly 7 hours a day, or 49 hours a week, if you prefer. That’s down on November, but up on December. The averages are complicated by the Christmas holidays; I only worked 46 hours in the last two weeks of last year, and worked only 49 hours in the first nine days of January.

Excluding reading, I spent 42% of my hours on Uni work, again complicated by the holidays. If I include reading, I spent 56% of my time, so uni and writing work was split almost 50/50. Unsurprisingly, ‘other’ work dominated work hours, while slightly surprisingly, Genre dominated my uni split with 13% of my hours worked. If you’re what ‘others’ is, it can be as diverse as fixing a printer or reading my e-mails each morning.

Since I delivered Ultramassive to Angry Robot, fiction writing dipped in January, at least until a couple of days ago, while I spent least uni time on Feature Journalism — in both cases about 8%. If I was splitting absolutely eveything equally, I’d spend 11% of time on each.

Cumulatively, reading has taken most time over the last three months, accounting for 15% of my time. I’d quite like to wave that figure under the noses of those lecturers who complain how little reading students do. ‘Other’ work accounts for 14% of my average 50-hour week. Making a Film is the most time-demanding uni subject at 12%, and will increase this month as we head into the heaviest period — when we actually make a film!

There’ll be more stats in exactly four weeks time.

If it’s Friday –it seems nowadays– then it must be interview day. I’ve posted an interview with fellow Angry Robot-eer Aliette de Bodard over at Suite101. Aliette’s new novel is now out, and her short story ‘The Shipmaker’ has been picked by Gardner Dozois for his next Year’s Best SF, and has been shortlisted for the BSFA award. With any luck, it will win. It deserves to.

Meanwhile, itIt seems like only a week ago –maybe because it was– that I was interviewed myself  by Lawrence Schoen. 

And while I’m posting links, here’s a quick reminder of an article I wrote for Salon Futura a couple of weeks ago, on The Rise and Rise of Paolo Bacigalupi.

And now I must dash; If I sound breathless, it’s because I have about a half dozen scripts to read for Monday! Have a nice weekend.