Colin Harvey – author

I’m happy for Mary Robinette Kowal, whose marvellous ‘Evil Robot Monkey’ is now on the Hugo ballot for Best Short Story, and deservedly so, and Aliette de Bodard, nominated for the John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer. Equally deserving.

But sad for my friend Ted Kosmatka, who wrote the wonderful ‘Divining Light’ and ‘The Art of Alchemy’ and hasn’t seen either of them get the appreciation that they deserve, and James Moran, whose ‘The Fires of Pompeii’ is IMHO the best ever Doctor Who episode.

Oh well, I’m sure that their reward will come in time.

It’s been a good day today.

I got my 000 words written by 11 am, and this afternoon reviewed issue 4 of Polluto magazine — the review will appear soon– and this evening tore a friend’s synopsis to pieces (in a good cause, of course!).

In between I managed to replace the speakers on the new PC, help Kate get four bags of compost back from the garden centre, and most enjoyably went for lunch with Kate at the pub. As I drank my second pint and ate my fish and chips,  I commented that this was one of the joys of being self-employed, sitting in the sun, watching the office workers bolting their food.

Kate corrected me: “This was the point of being self-employed.”

She’s right. But the sunshine wouldn’t have been half so enjoyable if I hadn’t got all that work done.

I had my new PC delivered today.

The good news was that it worked and it was fast.

The bad news was the installers hadn’t copied across any of the programmes across as they had agreed to do, so the files were inaccessible, and they denied that they’d ever agreed to do so.

Good news came a little later when one of the staff rang back and said that he hadn’t been in the shop when the manager put my irate phone call on speakerphone but as he’d heard what had happened came shooting over to fit the missing programmes.

Bad news came when I turned on the speakers to find that one of the jacks didn’t find the socket.  Nice of the original installers to mention that.

Guess I’ll be going back to the shop tomorrow….

I’ve posted a new blog over at MySpace on work, sport as the weather. Feel free to swing by.

What kind of thieving shitheads charge £9.50 for a DEBIT card transaction — where the money goes straight out of your account? I can understand such a charge for a CREDIT card…

…the answer, of course, is Ryanair. Easily the world’s worst airline.

Man Utd 1 Liverpool 4

OK, so we won’t win the Premier League, despite the result, but it’s made my weekend.

I posted a new blog about promotional strategies for new authors at Suite101.

Interesting piece by the author of newly acclaimed Red Riding Quartet. Shame about the churlish:

“I want truth, honesty and sincerity in my work and the work of others. I don’t want to read a book that was written in order to purchase a faster car or a bigger house by someone who would be a science fiction writer if it paid better.”

As I noted on TTA Board, there’s obviously no truth, honesty or sincerity in SF according to this guy. Nice to know literary snobbery is alive and well and living in Tokyo.

It seems a reasonable title for my first post from WordPress.com so I might as well stick with it.  My main blog is still over at Suite101.com, where I comment on SF, and for whom I review about once a week, but I guess as I get used to the dashboard, I may well find myself migrating over here.

I expect it to be quiet initially, but feel free to stop by and say howdy!

Harry Harrison, that’s who. It was on his advice that I started editing.

And now I beg to differ.

I just spent the best part of the last 36 hours crash-editing the subs for Future Bristol, and while one of them needed only one query, another ran to 43 comments, queries and suggested changes. Aaaagh!

Never mind, it’ll be worth it.