Colin Harvey – author

The BBC have started to show a series hosted by Sebastian Faulks on Saturday nights called Faulks on Fiction.  This comprises various talking heads holding forth on fictional characters, interspersed with lots and lots of clips from television adaptions of said books. It sounds as dry as dust, but it’s absolutely brilliant, helped by a webpage at the Beeb with a reading list to die for.

Part 1 -which is on the iPlayer for another 19 days- featured heroes, starting with Robinson Crusoe, moving swiftly through Tom Jones (no, not the singer!) and Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair.

Part 2, which brings me to the subject in my usual meandering way, is all about lovers, and asks the question, how much does fiction influence the way we perceive love? Think about it — how many stories feature what happens after the hero and heroine get togther?

You may argue that this is because what happens after boy/girl get boy/girl inherently boring, but maybe that’s the case because Shakespeare et al have so culturally hardwired us that most of us can’t imagine an alternative (most of us being the portion of society that turns books or films into bestsellers — in other words the audience) .

It’s quite ironic that I’ve heard so many singletons lately bitterly resenting the cards that those in relationships are supposedly exchanging, blithely ignoring the fact that people in relationships don’t need to anonymously send each other cards.  In fact, after over a quarter of a century Kate and I have adapted Valentine’s Day to an extent that the card-manufacturer’s target audience would have trouble recognizing it!

I bought Kate a card, but not of the traditional Valentine’s variety, while she bought me Brian Moore’s autobiography Beware of the Dog.  (Far more mentally nourishing and enjoyable)

How did you celebrate the day -if you did- while simultaneously subverting it?

Yesterday I mentioned that about a month ago I lost a lot of financial and submission history to a corrupted hard drive.  Fortunately I didn’t have on-going work on there, or where I did I also had it on USB or on one or other (or both) of my laptops. I generally back up about once a week, although this slips to about once a fortnight when I’m busy, which of course is when things go wrong…

…like the power surge that we had on Thursday. No more than a momentary flicker of the lights, but the old Vaio –which has bugger all battery capacity—was plugged into the mains to recharge, and it was on, since I’d copied one file onto USB. Doubly vulnerable.

To cut a long story short, it’s showing exactly the same symptoms as the desktop.  That cost me £120 and I still lost all the data on it. After a January in which our catalytic convertor  failed (£450) I needed varifocals (£260) and the corrupted desktop  (£120) it’s a bill too far; especially if the data’s lost.

Or at least some of it is. 

 The casualties are an almost finished guest blog for Aliette de Bodard, and a review for Suite101 which was two paragraphs short of completion. That’s the biggest loss – almost 900 words completely gone into limbo.  But two other guest blogs were on the USB, as was everything else I’ve been working on, so I actually got off lightly.

So it’s the blog that’s suffered, but it’s not as bad as it could be.

What’s worse is that most of the photos Kate has taken over the last six or seven years were on the desktop, and while some of them were duplicated and appear elsewhere, having lost two-thirds of our photos, we’ve probably lost two-thirds of the remainder.

Chaz mentioned using a drop box, which is certainly an option I’ll look at — we haven’t the space physically for half the stuff we have here, and we need to find some way of storing memories that isn’t vulnerable to the whims of Western Power.

But don’t believe the old maxim that says lightning never strikes twice. It does.

I blame Rob Rountree. I was going to finish the review that I’ve been on for the last (cough) weeks, but instead I got distracted.

“Outcasts?” He said. “I really don’t know what to make of that.” 

 He knew what he was doing — he probably thought with a sly little grin, “This’ll start Harvey off on one of his rants.” 

He might as well have loaded a gun and passed it to me, so I could perform the mercy killing. An hour and half later I have 700 words that I need to find a home for. So I’ve pinged in a query to a possible market for 200 odd words of it, and we’ll see what happens.

Pigs in Space? That was from series creator Ben Richard’s blog, where he pays tribute to the l’l porker who I thought acted most of the humans off the set.

‘Nuff said?

If it’s Friday –it seems nowadays– then it must be interview day. I’ve posted an interview with fellow Angry Robot-eer Aliette de Bodard over at Suite101. Aliette’s new novel is now out, and her short story ‘The Shipmaker’ has been picked by Gardner Dozois for his next Year’s Best SF, and has been shortlisted for the BSFA award. With any luck, it will win. It deserves to.

Meanwhile, itIt seems like only a week ago –maybe because it was– that I was interviewed myself  by Lawrence Schoen. 

And while I’m posting links, here’s a quick reminder of an article I wrote for Salon Futura a couple of weeks ago, on The Rise and Rise of Paolo Bacigalupi.

And now I must dash; If I sound breathless, it’s because I have about a half dozen scripts to read for Monday! Have a nice weekend.

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.

I’ve just got back from Bath where I was interviewed by journalist Tom Skyes for The Bristol Review of Books, then bought lots of stinky cheese from Paxton & Whitfield, the local emporium in the street next to the one where I’m pictured supervising the film shoot last month (yes, it really was as cold as I look).

I meant to post this blog before I left, but my machine had other ideas. Or rather the phone line had other ideas, since both of my machines were displaying the same problem, notably taking up to eight minutes to cross three screens. I have a feeling that the problem is more to do with available bandwidth on the phone line, since some low graphics screens update almost instantly, whereas others (notably bloody Yahoo with its endless rounds of graphics-heavy ads) take forever.  I literally took most of the day to get Blogger to respond for yesterday‘s blog. Anyone else getting the same problem?

On a more interesting note, the Clarke Awards are a quarter of a century old this year, and there’s a fairly lively debate going on over at Torque Control, the blog for Vector (the critical journal of the BSFA). I’ve already thrown in my two penn’orth, but if you have any thoughts, ideas, etc, head on over here to make them — the more debate, the better. Should the Clarke Awards stay UK/British-centric, or go international?

Back tomorrow with more witterings.

Time to see what other people are doing on their blogs:                                                    

Gareth L Powell writes about a new anthology —2020 Visions— that’s out now. Stories by David Gerrold, Ernest Hogan, Mary Robinette Kowal and of course Gareth himself. I’ll have to check that one out.

Frederik Pohl is writing about his marriage to Judith Merrill, and is busily engaged in a verbal war with Kornbluth bigrapher Mark Rich over ‘hateful libels and lies,’ which is rather sad, so I’m going to move swiftly along.

Meanwhile, Charlie’s Diary has a terrific picture of Edinburgh in the snow, but has moved on with an updated post  about Utopia.

Eugene Byrne offers us his historical joke of the week.

Luc Reid examines at what point a habit forms.

And finally, James Maxey discusses abolishing the minimum wage in the USA.

One of the reasons why I’ve been realtively quiet lately is due to workload, as I’ve mentioned several times in posts elsewhere. This week particularly seems to be the week of the interview.

First of all, I’ve been interviewed in some depth by Irish magazine Albedo One in an e-mail interview (e-view?) which is on-going. Because of the magazine’s lead times, it’ll be some time before it sees the light of day.

However, an interview I gave Canadian fan Jessica Strider is now on-line. Jessica works for the World’s Greatest Bookstore, who have made me the Featured Author for December, and the interview has been typed up and posted in-store, but it’s now available on-line as well.

And sometime soon, I’ll be in the Angry Robot podcast for December. More on that nearer the time.

I’m spending a lot of time –so much time– analyzing and writing about the spreadsheet that I started to monitor my hours.

I spent a little under four hours a day on average on writing stories, blogging, reviewing and on ‘others.’ That excludes blogs and creative writing exercises for uni, such as the film blogs. So I wrote the first part of a horror piece in November, but because it was specifically for genre, I didn’t count it in this part.

I spent about three hours a day on specific uni work, and another hour a day reading.  That shouldn’t be work, but when it becomes the basis for other items, such as reviews, or is part of a set text, then it can’t be ignored.

Interestingly (at least to me!) was the revelation of how little actual fiction writing that I do, at least when the novel is at revision stage. As little as forty minutes a day, but it’s the crucial forty minutes — get that novel revision done, and I settle down; defer it, and I get twitchy.

There is also a reason for doing the revision in small, daily chunks; it allows my subconscious time to process, and enables me to really focus on the text in front of me. A friend of mine attempted a novel crit in one go and said;

Equally interesting is the split of academic subjects within a three hour day, but I’ll continue that over on the Film Making Mumblings blog, for those who are interested.

So what’s the point of all this navel-gazing?

The reason for all this analysis is that with such a scattered and diverse set of tasks to occupy me, it would be very easy to neglect one aspect of my work.  This way, if I’m spending too little time -say- networking (as if), I can rectify it.

I know that there’s a danger of going overboard on this, but I’ve decided to keep the sheet going, for that last reason. I just have to ensure that it doesn’t become an end in itself.

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.