Colin Harvey – author

I’m delighted to announce that Aeon Press have agreed to publish the next anthology I’m editing, to be titled Transtories. I’ve known Rob Nielson, John Kenny and the other members of the Aeon Press team for nearly four years now, and they’re great guys who take their work seriously, and their partying equally so. They’ve been stalwart promoters of Irish SF, but at the same time have championed fiction from both the UK, US and non-anglophone countries.

They kindly took my novelette ‘On the Rock’ for publication in Albedo One in 2008, and we have several other projects bubbling away, but for now Transtories is the one I want to focus on. The submission period will open on March 1st (anyone who submits early will have their submission deleted unread, and will probably break out in boils as well!) and run until March 31st. Submissions guidelines are over at the Aeon Press website.

And while you’re there, take a look at John Kenny’s page for Box of Delights, a horror anthology that will also be coming out later on this year.

As is usual when we have two or more clear days and nights, last night was much colder than the night before, so that, walking Alice through the fields again, the ground was noticeably harder than yesterday — no standing water today. You can probably see the hard frost on the ground in the photo here. If it stays like this, I might be able to provide a timeline of Alice’s walks!

And  the birdbath was rock solid (sigh; it seems like only yesterday that I was pouring kettle fulls of hot water on the ice to thaw it, while the birds watched from their various branches in the trees), so that once again I was reduced to pouring hot water on the ice so that the blackbirds and various finches wouldn’t get too parched.

But the upside is that we have another gloriously sunny day, so it’s all worth it. It seems  a shame to waste sunshine by sitting in a cinema to watch The King’s Speech, so we’ll go tonight, and use the day to its maximum potential.

I started writing this on Monday, staring out of the window into the dark to see if at 7.40 am, there’s any sign of daylight.

Nope.

I just posted “Ugh. Its dark, cold and wet; it must be Monday” to Twitter.

Then, while I was waiting for the bus (yes, still in the cold and dark and wet) I thought about this some more.

The truth is that two of those three can apply at any time of the year. Cold and wet don’t apply exclusively to January, although statistically it’s more likely they will. But dark?

I have this mental impression that in the winter I go to and from uni mostly in the dark. Certainly by the end of the Winter term more than half of my journeys take place before sunrise and after sunset.

But –and with the marvels of technology, we’ve just slid effortlessly into a sunny Tuesday– the reality is that by this time of year my only timetabled journeys to and from college in the dark, are homeward on alternate Mondays and Thursdays. But because I have to get up and make ready in the dark of a Monday morning, that perception stains my whole week.

It’s not just me. I lost track of the number of times while working for Unilever that working practices changed, often covered by the catch all phrase ‘we can’t just do the right thing, we have to be seen to be doing the right thing.’

The tendency has spread throughout society so that everything now has to have a PR angle. The downside of making media instead of objects is that perception is as important as the subject now.

And if you don’t think that that applies to you, turn it on it’s head; how many times have you used a cartoon, or a photo of an object, or of an odd angle of your body (say only the top of your head) to change people’s perceptions of you? On Facebook it’s only a joke, but the reality is that just as advertising relies on repeated iterations, so does perception — pixel by pixel, you’re strengethening one of many new realities.

Last week, when checking in on Fred Pohl’s blog (which today has a typically forthright post), I found a link to Starship Sofa.

Fred was interviewed in September –together with Jack Vance– and hearing a 91-year-old talk with a 94-year-old offered a refreshing perspective; add in Tony’s lifespan, and the collective age of the interviewer and his guests was over 200 years old.

In fact, Vance more than held his own;  host Tony C. Smith barely had to ask a question (in fact Tony barely managed to ask a question) as Vance held forth on the different natures of Japanese, Chinese and Korean, quizzed Fred about Ceylon / Sri Lanka and offered a perspective on life as a -what is the 90’s equivalent fo an octogenarian? A nonagenarian?

Anyway, have a listen if you haven’t already, and enjoy.

Did you know — and as Diggory Venn would say, not a lot of people know this – that today is the 83rd anniversary of Thomas Hardy’s death? And to mark the occasion, Ove Jansson’s excellent Cybermage site has posted the anthology’s first review.

Until now, the book has been available to order as a paperback, either from the site or at conventions, and for those readers who don’t embrace dead tree format, as a mobi or e-pub download.

But now the good people at Wizard’s Tower Press –who actually reside deep within Hardy Country– have also been able to make the book available as a Kindle. To mark the occasion,  they’ve posted an extract from Roz Clarke’s wonderful ‘Last Flight to West Bay’ to read for free on the website.

This is terrific news because amazon is a whole new ball game, and makes the book available to a whole new set of readers, which for a small press is absolutely crucial.  It also means a slight price reduction to American readers, since until now WTP have only been able to price in sterling, and PayPal adds a conversion fee. And for about twenty-four hours only, they’ll be knocking a pound (about US$1.60) off all formats.

On another front, I’ll be posting about an anthology I’m going to edit soon, but today is Dark Spires’ day, so head on over to Wizard’s Tower’s site, and read the first installment of Roz Clarke’s story for free, and save yourself some pennies if you like it!

This morning a friend of mine sent me a link to a review at Diabolical Plots.  They reviewed the stories posted on Daily Science Fiction‘s website throughout the magazine’s first month, last September.

Amazingly, he picked my story Chameleon as the best of the month. I’m staggered because as I said in an earlier post, the story virtually wrote itself, and I don’t feel that anything that easy to write could be that good. Which just goes to show the discontinuity between what’s in my head, and what’s in a typical reader’s.

And secondly, he damns with faint praise Mary Robinette Kowal’s brilliant American Changeling, which was not only my favourite story in September, but in any month.

Nonetheless, it’s interesting to compare opinions, and to get the insight that many review sites won’t review DSF because ‘there’s too much to review.’ Hopefully Diablical Plots doesn’t feel that way, and will produce a review of October and subsequent month’s contents, because an awful lot of new, upcoming and talented writers are publishing new there — and it’s free to read.

You can read the full article here. If you’re familiar with the magazine, you might like to compare your picks with Frank’s. If you’re not, go and see for yourself.

So tonight the Christmas decorations come down, and its back to normal.

Actually, it’s been back to normal for a couple of days,except that as I’m self-employed I can stay in bed and read books and count that as work. This morning I fell asleep and lost whatever momentum I may have gained!

Most of the last couple of days have been spent on critiquing, and working through the critiques I get from others.  But it’s also been time to prepare for next week’s return to uni and the inevitable assignment.

And saddest of all, yesterday it was time to take the tree down. From now on, I won’t be able to switch the lights on in the lounge, and get that sense of holding the darkness at bay. I think that that’s what makes January tougher in some ways than December. We’re half-way out of the darkness, as Stephen Moffatt wrote.

But it doesn’t feel like it.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

I hope you all had a great Christmas and New Year period, and didn’t over-indulge too much. 🙂

This first blog post of 2011 will (mostly) focus on 2010, which for me was a pretty good year overall. The novels came out, and the anthology came out, and I’m starting to see some nice feedback from people about them.

So to round all of this up, on the day that the Hugo nominations opened, and midway through the Nebula and BSFA voting periods, I’ve taken a leaf out of Mary Robinette Kowal’s book, and summarized my 2010 fiction output. 

Novel – Damage Time  Angry Robot Books

Anthology – Dark Spires  Wizard’s Tower Press (cover by Andy Bigwood)

Novelette – ‘Spindizzy’ first appeared in Dark Spires

Short Story – ‘Chameleon,’ Daily Science Fiction

Short Story – ‘Fairytale,’ Four Flash Fictions 

Short Story – ‘The Turning World’ appeared here.

If you are reading for awards this year, please do drop me a line and I’ll send you a copy. Sadly, although Winter Song made the BSFA long-list, it’s ineligible, so it’s been withdrawn. But thank you to that person or those people who nominated it.

Also on the subject of 2010, a link to an interview that appeared late in the year and may have been swallowed in the tsunami of Christmassy stuff. The Angry Robot podcast with Mur Lafferty and the impressive Matt Forbeck is to be found here.

And lastly, here’s a link to a terrific blog post by Charlie Stross, who as he often does, puts things nicely in perspective. There’s no obvious reason for the link, other than that I think we all need reminding from time to time that things are better than we often give them credit for.

On now to 2011…

This piece has now been taken offline.

It’s that time of year again when people start to look back, peaking around about December 30th when it’s hard to find a TV programme that isn’t a retrospective (which is a good reason to watch DVDs, or better still to turn the box off).

SF is no exceptions to this, and a couple of sites have already started, running their ‘best of/ the following are eligable for’ lists, while the ToC for Rich Horton’s Years Best has already popped up at SFSignal, which also carries Jonathan Strahan’s ToC. Interesting that they have at least two overlaps, Peter Watts and Elizabeth Hand, while Neil Gaiman has different entries in the two collections.

I already have a heavy reading list, and adding in the reading I’ve already done for the Nebula means that I’m almost ready to cry mercy. I’ve already read a lot of the contenders due to reviewing Asimovs and F & SF for Suite101, but there are a lot of other worthy works and authors out there.

At some point by the 30th, I shall endeavour to post my own list, but meanwhile, what do you think are the best stories and novels of the year?