Colin Harvey – author

I said yesterday that I was going to analyze the data from the spreadsheet of hours worked in November, didn’t I?

Sadly, things don’t always go to plan. Life has a habit of throwing up surprises. I had to run some copies of Dark Spires over to Bath so Cheryl could take them to the BFS London night (I have considerably more storage space, so the copies stay at mine until they’re needed).  And I realized that I was overdue with a piece for Angry Robot, which took most of the morning.

So instead I’ll focus on the new month; and to celebrate, point you towards a new story – or rather a mini-collection. Angry Robot have added Nano Editions to the Angry Robot store, and my contribution is Four Flash Fictions, three of which have never been online before – indeed, one of them has never been published before.  

I hope you enjoy them.

No blog yesterday, as it was Monday, although I did post a Film Making Mumblings which I’ll link to here.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was keeping a spreadsheet of the hours that I was working, and what activities I was allocating the time to; the categories were the four uni subjects that I’m studying, (Writer’s Workshop aka Core, Genre, Feature Journalism and Film Making, plus writing, blogging, reading and other. As it’s the end of the month today, I’ve begun to reflect on the results. I’ll post an analysis -probably tomorrow- but one of the things that’s come out of it is how hard it is to allocate time to a job that’s as complex as being a writer.

For example, your hard drive goes and you have to get a new one. Is that work? I think so. But where do you put it? In the end, I put it under ‘other.’ The problem is that I also put the time I spent at cons and meetings such as the BSFA interview under other as well, and as a result, a third of my time is spent under other. Perhaps if I do it again, I’ll put a column in for ‘networking.’

I have one activity that doesn’t count as work, which is to take the afternoon off, and to attend Kate’s choral performance of various pieces of music such as ‘Hiawatha’s Wedding March’ and ‘Oklahoma.’  The event is at The United Reformed Church in Bath, just over Poulteney Bridge at 3.45pm. Tea and cakes will be served by my fair hand.

Meanwhile, I’m December’s Featured Author in The World’s Biggest Bookstore in Toronto.  There’ll be an interview going up at some point, and I’ll link to it, but in the meantime here’s a rather nice shot of the gondola end with Winter Song and Damage Time  on.

And I continue to paddle frantically below the waterline on stuff that I can’t yet talk about; as soon as I can, I’ll stop with the mystery.

After the excitement of November in the shape of Bristolcon, the BSFA interview and several days worth of filming, it’s been a pleasure to do only a minimal amount of work today, and instead concentrate on chilling.

Walked Alice round the community forest, and then did my daily allocation of Ultramassive. Mark came over for lunch, since when we’ve had a fest of armchair sport. Later on, I have Pratchett’s I Shall Wear Midnight as my evening reading.

Back to the grind at Uni tomorrow, but it’s been good to rest up and re-charge.

Last Wednesday evening I travelled up to London for an interview with the BSFA.

Sloane Square looked stunning in the darkness with the Christmas lights on, and the Antelope is only a few minutes walk away. In fact, I had barely arrived and was about to buy a drink when Tony Keen joined me. Tony organized the event, and he and Dave Mansfield -who interviewed me- made me feel exceptionally welcome. I read a couple of chapters from Damage Time to a small but attentive audience who asked some intriguing questions, and finished up reading the first few pages from ‘Spindizzy,’ my contribution to Dark Spires. Actually, it was interesting to see how different the whole experience felt from ‘that’ side of the table. Afterwards we had a fine Thai meal at a restaurant a short(-ish) walk away.

The evening flew by, and I’m looking forward to seeing everyone next year, when it’ll be someone else’s turn in the hot seat. And the BSFA are keen to roll the format out to other areas.  If you’re an author looking to be interviewed, or a fan who wants to interview their favourite author, drop by the BSFA contact page and get in touch with them. Sadly, they didn’t have their recording equipment, so my secrets are (almost) safe for a while longer.

And on my return the next day, I found the curiously titled e-mail in my inbox – Is Scramble A Drug?

It was  lucky that it didn’t end up in the crushing maw of the spam filter, but it got through, and it turns out it was someone with an ‘edu’ e-mail (edu addresses always impress me, they hint at academia) asking whether the reference to Scramble in Damage Time refers to a drug.

It does, and the name’s sort of self-explanatory in that it jumbles the memory, but I must admit that I thought  someone else had used it before so if you’ve heard of it elsewhere, drop me a line.  

Enough for now. More tomorrow.

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 Routine is the enemy of the writer. When we go into work on the same route every day, or when we have the same meals day in day out, or watch the same television programmes day after day, we dull our minds with repetition.

So coming back from London and the previous night’s meeting yesterday morning, I was able to see the commuters with an outsider’s eyes, scurrying from home to work, the school-kids getting on with their uniforms cocooned in leather jackets. And the vertiginous stairs, the claustrophobia of the crowds of people shuffling along.

What struck me about the eateries at Paddington Station was how similar they all were, if one changed the individual food elements from pancakes to coffee and pastries to Full English: Lines of people queuing to buy, before sitting awkwardly, sharing their space with strangers who intersect their lives for no more than the few minutes necessary to gulp the purchases down.

And so onto the train, carrying me back to routine, but also to familiar surroundings and family and friends. Because while routine is the enemy of the writer, so is constant upheaval. The trick, as is so often the case, is too strike a balance between the two.

I started this blog post yesterday, but had very little time, so you’ll have to use your imagination and pretend that it’s Wednesday, and not Thursday. (Hey, why shouldn’t I demand a bit of reader contribution?) Anyway…

I had my first Genre session on SF yesterday. I wanted to approach it with the open eyes of a student with no previous knowledge of the genre, and have no preconceptions that might blinker me. But it was an odd feeling, because you can’t undo what you know.

The result was that I kept hearing things that I’d heard before in a slightly different  way, rather as if I was hearing echoes of voices. Delany on Heinlein and his dilating door, Adam Roberts and his definition of SF as “where the marvellous is framed within a materialist understanding of the universe,” and Darko Suvin and his Novum (the new).

The lecturer is Antony Nanson, who reviews for Vector among other places. He has a wealthof knowledge and understanding of genre in general, but of SF in particular. I haven’t volunteered that I’ve published work, and he hasn’t asked. But he must have some idea….

…especially as he put up four scenarios for people to use to create an SF-nal world. And scenario number 2 was Damage Time, to a tee.

I now have to write a short-story in collaboration, which will be a new experience.

Now it’s off to meet the BSFA in London.

Before I head off to uni, a reminder that I’m in London tomorrow night for the BSFA interview at the Antelope near Sloane Square. I’ll probably kick the proceedings off by reading from Damage Time. Details are here, so feel free to come along and say hi.

Meanwhile, there’s another nice review for Damage Time over at Warpcore SF, which has several interesting points to make – not all of them I agree with, but that’s what set’s merely nice reviews apart from interesting ones.

And SFX carried a fascinating interesting review. Not for what it said, but for the assumptions behind it, which in turn sparked off some thoughts on my part about what kind of writer I want to be. More on that another time….

 As I mentioned on yesterday‘s Film Blog, I didn’t plan on posting today due to lack of time (it’s the nine-hour lecture day…except that I just realized that I’ve been planning on catching the bus at nine when I should actually already be in the lecture!!!)

But it’s not every day that one racks up eight years living in the same house. So, happy anniversary, house.

And to justify posting this as a blog entry rather than a tweet, here’s a nice review of Winter Song. Because the novel came out last year, new reviews have been thinner on the ground than when it was first published in the UK. So a nice one now is an unexpected bonus.

This will be the first time that I’ve written a cross-blog post that covers all three –my general blog (this one), my specifically SF blog, and the Film-making blog- but since the exercise that it relates to covers all my activities as a writer, and a creative writing student, it’s particularly appropriate.

I’ve often quoted the hours that I work in broad approximations, but starting on the 1st of November, I started to keep detailed records covering writing (for publication), blogging, reading and ‘other,’ (ie everything that doesn’t fit in those boxes) and of course, my four uni subjects. I’ve been as honest as I can be, since it’s really for my own records.

I’ll post up the results at the end of the month when I’ve correlated them all, but the interim results at the mid-month mark are surprising…perhaps even shocking.

As you may have heard, I have an anthology out with Wizard’s Tower Press (yes, really! I can’t believe that I haven’t mentioned it before…). One factor in the book’s eventual success or failure will be the publisher’s online shop which has just opened, selling high-quality e-books with added content at reasonable  prices.*

This will make Dark Spires available to a much wider audience, both in the US and in Europe. And one of the nice ideas Cheryl has had is to add a ‘donate’ button, through which customers can donate directly to the authors. As she said, think of it as a ‘tip’ jar.

Dark Spires will –hopefully–be the first of many such books and I’m looking forward to seeing what else becomes available. To quote Cheryl further, 

“If anyone out there runs a small press, or is an independent author who has made ebooks of their out-of-print back catalog, and is interested in having us stock their books, please get in touch (info [at] wizardstowerpress [dot] com). We will be selective about what we stock, and in particular we will insist on well-made ebooks (though we can help you clean yours up) but I very much want to see the stock grow. Also I want to talk to prospective partners about contract terms to make sure we come up with a deal that people are happy with.”

Do take a look at the site. It’s an exciting time to be an author in the South West of England, and I’ll have further news, on a new project in the not too distant future.

* There seems to be a huge variation in prices for e-book, much more than for dead tree ones, from a dollar or two to fifteen; Dark Spires retails at about five dollars, which seems reasonable, judging by what I’ve seen on Amazon.