Colin Harvey – author

Sunday afternoon on the eve of the academic week, and I’ve just posted the latest film-making blog, as well as posting a link to today’s Suite101 review of Carrie. Still a few things left to do, so I’d better get on with them…

I did warn you this week’s blogs would be short!

I don’t often post a blog this late in the day, but it’s been an unusual day; almost perfect weather from a working point of view. Sunshine this morning for us to walk Alice around the fields, when we got home it rained for most of the day.  While Kate has lurked in the kitchen making soup and Apple Almond Cake I’ve spent the day on the usual revision.

But unlike most of the week, once the revision is done I’ve left uni work to one side to concentrate on reviews. And then, having written a couple of thousand words, the sun came out again for us to walk Alice through the park. She repaid us by bringing a stick fully fifty per cent longer than she is. As the girl used to say on the Clio ad, “size matters.” It certainly does to a dog.

Blog posts next week are going to be limited. With Damage Time out in the US on Tuesday, I’ll be posting extracts from the novel. And I’ve four reviews to go up on Suite101, all horror, which I’ll be linking to on the day they’re posted;

Stephen King      — Carrie

Joe Hill                 — 20th Century Ghosts

Gary McMahon — The Harm

and

Black Static 19

Right, that’s it for now. Off to eat some pizza.

Have fun!

 As part of my Making A Film elective requirements, I’ve started a new blog which –like all the others in my class– needs to be on Blogger.com (I guess if my lecturer needs to read thirty blogs at a time, it helps if they’re all in one place!). Probably my second biggest time-sink over the next thirty days is going to be the Film Group.

As part of my course, a team of six of us have to shoot an eight to ten minute film the weekend of the 20th and 21st. The preparation for that is going to be huge — and none of us have any idea how long it will take. Part of that preparation is to blog about it, and if you’re interested, the link is here. Feedback is welcome — oh, and there’ll be lots of links to short films which are far superior to mine.   

You’ll notice that I said ‘second biggest time sink.’ The biggest? Well, that comes with good and bad news, from my pov.

First the good news: I have to work at the Eye Hospital for two days next week, two days the week after, with an option of a further two weeks work on the same basis. That brings in some critical cash to ease the shortfall of about a grand’s worth of income that fell through over the summer.

Now the bad news: I have to work at the Eye Hospital for two days next week, two days the week after, with an option of a further two weeks work on the same basis. I’m already fighting to juggle priorities, and I’ve just lost 14 to 16 hours a week.

But on the whole, it’s more good news than bad. I just need to raise my game still another notch.

Back to the new blog…

When I signed on, I suddenly realized that I already had a blog there,  my first attempt at a bespoke blog, about three years ago.

And boy does it show.

But one interesting post, which was supposed to be the first of a series, is some of the outlining process involved in Winter  Song, which is here. I haven’t sat down and analyzed how far away (or how close) this version is to the final one — it might be an interesting exercise — if I had the time. 

Meanwhile, I have a short non-fiction piece to write for my Feature Journalism elective, a horror story to write for Halloween (and my Genre Fiction elective) and a couple of pages for Black Death, which is my Creative Workshop piece this year. But at least today’s bit of Ultramassive is revised.

Onward!

And only after I’d posted this, and the links went Facebook, Twitter, etc, did I realize that it’s actually 5 days to release. The UK releases on Thursdays -it went out on the 7th– while the US unleashes books into the trade on the last Tuesday of the month. Doh!

But back to the original post…

I was up before dawn this morning and nearly lost my fingers twittering in the dark (I had to alternate removing my glove to press the keys and put it back on when my fingers went numb) which meant that one tweet took twenty minutes, so Alice and I scuttled back into the warmth in record time.

This morning I’ve subbed a couple of poems to a magazine; I’ll be amazed if they take them, since the whole process was a little tongue in cheek, but I’ve long given up trying to second guess who will buy what, and who will reject it.

And I’ve tidied up the order of the Damage Time extracts, so hopefully new -and returning- readers will be able to run through them a little more smoothly, and added Chapter 7. I’ll add two more sidebar chapters next week in the run up to the US release (which is a whole 7 days away! eek!) and on the big day will post one last extract, which is a main narrative chapter linking into the two sidebars.

Right, onto revisions and uni homework. Abyssinia!

Some time ago, I made a conscious decision to switch off Google alerts — since I have a namesake who also writes about SF, and I also share a name with an England footballer of the 60’s and 70’s, a disproportionately large number of Google alerts had naff all to do with me. (And it’s even worse if you set GA to work on titles…you would not believe how many alerts come up based on ‘Winter’ and ‘Song’!)

However, this does occasionally backfire — as in the case of ‘Filming Winter Song‘ which is over at Andy Remic’s Blog. In fact, it’s been over there for a week now; Andy has had major problems with internet connectivity, and I should have kept an eye out for it. My bad.

So without further ado, here’s the link to Andy’s blog, where you can read all about his war with Sky and E.On, his tenth novel, and if you scroll down the pages a ways, my first thoughts on how the worlds of film and print might overlap in the case of my own fiction. 

Maybe I’ll have a go at writing one for Damage Time, as well.

October is Anthology Month, over at the Black Static section of the TTA Press Forum (TTA are also purveyors of such fine periodicals as Interzone [SF] and Crimewave [crime], as well as the dark and disturbing Black Static).

Peter Tennant has reviewed anthologies –and nothing but anthologies– in Black Static #19 and in the run up to Halloween, and has invited several editors to come and talk about their favourite horror anthologies.

I’m the latest guest editor to post about my own personal favourite on their Desert Island Anthology thread. I’ve picked Ellen Datlow’s wonderful Inferno, and you can read all about it here.

More guest posts tomorrow, over at another writer’s blog. Can you guess who it is yet? (I have absolutely no idea why I suddenly started channelling Rolf Harris then — don’t worry, it isn’t him!)

Monday evening at the beginning of week 3; I’ve just about caught up after the landslide at the start of term. Home at 7.10 pm — after an 11-hour day, I really needed Worst Bus to fail to turn up like I need a chocolate fireguard.

I guess that if I can keep that going, it’ll be the pattern — swamped by the end of the first Monday, holding on the Tuesday, and then gradually catching up over the next twelve days, with a second mini-deluge.  With a reading week to come in November, that may give me a bit of a breather.

I’m going to need it, I suspect. I’ve found the last two weeks really stretching;  in the last two weeks –on top of working on Ultramassive– I’ve had to read Joe Hill’s 20th Century Ghosts which must count as one of the best collections of recent years, Stephen King’s Carrie and On Writing, and Greg Egan’s Zendegi, and  I’ve had to review and/or critique every one of them.

Today’s highlight was watching Brendan Donagh’s short film Six Shooter, which had me holding my sides at times. I couldn’t add it to my Film Making blog, since there’s no available footage, but if you get a chance to watch the exploding cow, I urge you to take the opportunity.

I must be the only man I know who puts on weight when his wife stops exercising.

While I love food – and I do love food, it’s my achilles heel– I love writing more; if I’m working, I can forget to cook dinner and substitute grazing, or even not eating.

But Kate likes to cook, and in the six months after we married, I put on three stone (I did only weigh eight stone at the time, so my Body Mass Index was somewhere in the region of 18%).

But she now goes to exercise classes four nights a week, and one unexpected result — as we realized yesterday– is that time spent down the gym is less time in the kitchen.

We learned this because when she didn’t go yesterday, she took up residence in front of the cooker and made Lemon Lamb Casserole. And a chocolate cake. And ginger and choc chip cookies. Which of course I just had to try. I wasn’t sure about it, so I had another one. And another….(they’re very more-ish)

I’m dispatching her back to class tonight before my jeans explode, and I’ll do the damned cooking from now on.

For some not-so-unfathomable reason, all roads in England lead to, through or around London and/or Birmingham. Getting from North to South and vice versa is comparatively easy as well; but heaven help you if you want to travel West to East, or East to West in the South without going via London or Birmingham.

Most of the conventions in England tend to be held in the Eastern side, which is understandable, since the organizers tend to be from around there. But getting from the South-West to Nottingham, Northampton, Derby and York tends to be a bit of a pain in the Arras. So last year some nice people organized the first Bristolcon.

And now they’re holding another one.

With 85 pre-registration memberships, it’s already almost twice the size of last year’s event. Juliet McKenna, Mike Shevdon and Paul Cornell  are all braving the motorway to come down on on a Saturday; Paul to be one of the GoHs, Juliet to Moderate like it’s 1999, and Mike to be, well…Mike, one of the nicest guys around, who writes achingly good novels for Angry Robot Books.

Joe Abercrombie is the main GoH but the con also boasts John Meaney, Alastair Reynolds, Eugene Byrne, Kim Lakin-Smith and Stephanie Burgis, as well as graphic illustrators Simon Gurr, Terry Cooper, and Craig Lewis; Talis Kimberley will be providing music, Wizard’s Tower Press will be arranging a book launch, and Murky Depths will be there as well as Forbidden Planet bookstore, and — oh, just go to the site!

And you’re going to be there, aren’t you? Go on, you know that you want to…

Definitely an in and out, black and white, up and down, good and bad kind of morning.

My old pc –not the Toshiba of Satan’s Arse, which is usually the cause of my tearing my hair out– which is normally pretty good, decided to lock up this morning. Nothing worked, so eventually I had to cut the power and reboot. And lo! The file which I’d been saving faithfully every ten minutes since creating it an hour earlier was blank, and I got a message which basically said ‘this file is corrupt; you’re stuffed, mate.’ Grrr.

Eventually re-wrote it, despite interruptions like the veg man coming, and being greeted in the usual shouty fashion by Tourette’s Dog. While I was outside bringin the veg, I photographed our crop of chillies which was nice (they would be those red things on the right, but for the fact that I’ve lost the connector cable with the phone – so you’ll have to make do with yet another look at Chris Moore’s cover for Damage Time) .

And the nice thing was finding another nice review or two. First there was Eric Brown’s review in Saturday’s Guardian, then an even better one in the Falcata Times. Actually that’s reverse order of writing, since the latter one was posted last Thursday, but it’s the order of writing.

So a mixed morning, which isn’t yet over — I have to go and read a script…