Colin Harvey – author

Grr! The plan was to take this week off, but we can’t go out today as we’re waiting for a delivery of kitchen tiles.  And we can’t even sit outside as the workman have turned up to re-lay a water pipe outside our front gate. Cue a tractor- mounted pneumatic drill, and the smell of scorching pavement wafting across the graden.

Oh well, nothing else for it but to tidy up one of those reviews I almost finished before Eastercon. In this case, it’s a play, as we went to see Noel Coward’s Present Laughter recently.

At least the workmen should be finished by tomorrow…

  As I noted over at Suite101, it’s exactly four weeks until the publication of Damage Time.

  Each week I’ll post an extract from the novel, starting today.

  It’s an exciting time, and a very, very busy month.

First of all there’s Eastercon to attend.

 More on that tomorrow.

The judges have released their shortlist for the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and a fine list it is.

Over at Suite101, I’ve compared Jim Hines’ survey results in terms of how long it took to get published with my own personal experience. It’s scary. I represent the mean average almost to the day; moreover, I’m now convinced that had I done all the sensible things that more experienced writers urged me to –like attended conventions, writers groups and workshops earlier on– I would have probably had trimmed several years off that final figure.

Or maybe not. Maybe the universe really does kick back.

When I started writing about the differences between novels and short stories, I envisaged it as one blog post, but as so happens with writing, it turned into a trilogy, despite my best efforts to keep each post as lean as possible.  Here is the last part of the post, with thanks to Sheila Crosby, Jim Hawkins and Gareth L Powell for offering their thoughts along the way.

I drew a certain amount of flak for last week’s post for suggesting that writing short stories was no better a preparation for writing novels than any other form of wordsmithery, such as journalism or scriptwriting.

Some of it was very useful in outlining this week’s post over at Suite101 following up on what some of the differences are. Unfortunately I ran out of available space,* so I’ve had to break it into installments.

* Suite has an official word limit of 300 words; it’s possible to go a little over, but not to post something the length of what this was turning into…

Last week I blogged about a couple of live cases involving members of the SF community and getting in and out of the US. In the last few days the situation has become clearer, although no happier for those involved. More about it at the usual venue.

This morning’s post over at Suite101 is on the subject of books-that-were-submitted-by-publishers-and-considered-by-the-judges lists…or long lists, as I prefer to call them.

For my Creative Writing Workshop, I need to write some YA or children’s fiction (it’s that or performance poetry…and I think I’d prefer root canal surgery sans anaesthetic to standing in front of an audience reciting pp). 

Acutely aware that my knowledge of YA and kid-litt is almost forty years out of date, I followed Mimi’s advice and went down to Mr B’s in Bath, where I purchased a couple of titles.  I was also hugely reassured that lot of books that I read all those years ago are still available and even recommended.

One of the new titles that I bought was Joshua Doder’s A Dog Called Grk, which is quite simply wonderful.

So, if you’re curious as to why I’m reviewing children’s fiction, that’s the reason. (You may have put it down to increasing eccentricity, in which case you may not be too wrong, either <g>)

If you have a 9 – 12 child, go and buy it for them. If you don’t have children, but you like dogs, buy it anyway.  Actually, just buy it.

The second of two posts about how some see those in the SF community, including a deeply, deeply disturbing comment from one policeman.