Colin Harvey – author

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.

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…

So far my Wednesday has consisted of frantic shovelling of overdue tasks and ignoring all Uni stuff, which is fair enough, since the reason I have such a backlog is that Uni has taken up all my time for the last two days for anything but the most critical responses, including some copy-editing of Dark Spires stories.  As always happens on new ventures I’ve made a number of mistakes which have now caught up with both me and the rest of the team.

Monday morning started with Film Making, which is going to involve some actual hands-on filming, editing etc. Then into Writer’s Workshop, about which I’ll pass over for the moment, except to say that I hope it improves — but I can’t drop it, as it’s the core of the course.  And then to Feature Journalism, which looks as if it may yet be the most interesting of all three lectures.

Yesterday morning was dire, because I was so exhausted.  I wrote this at the time:-

It’s 4.45 am as I write this, and despite -or perhaps because– being exhausted, my brain is boiling. I’ve been awake for nearly two hours, and I have a splitting headache which four paracetemol couldn’t shift last night. In forty minutes or so, I have to get up, so it seems like a good idea to rise early and type this.

The problem was the seven hours of lectures and seminars that I had yesterday, from 9 to 6. By the end of it, I felt like a zombie, but clearly the information and mental stimulation that I took in yesterday has percolated through my brain, and caused this morning’s insomnia. This afternoon, I have a three hour lecture and seminar, and then aside from a solitary lecture late on Thursday, that’s my week done.

Ah, I hear you mutter, it must be nice to have a five day weekend.

Except of course, that the first of those five days will probably be spent as a hollow-eyed wreck; and then there’s the small matter of revising Ultramassive. And all the work spent away from the class, which should be the majority of it. At the moment, I don’t know how the hell I’m going to manage another week of this, let alone a year.

Maybe some answers will come to me when I feel less like the intellectual equivalent of a battery hen, force fed on ideas and concepts instead of chicken feed.

I somehow managed to get through the day, including working on Ultramassive, which is my other writing Must-Do at the moment. Things began to turn around in the afternoon with a stunning lecture on Genre Fiction, one of the best I’ve had in just over a year at the uni. I’ll blog more on that on…let’s say Friday, hmm?

Then it was home for dinner, and work into the evening starting the shovelling.  But at least I have some answers to yesterday’s insomniac rant, which vindicates my two basic rules of communication:-

1. Never write anything on the web or in an e-mail that you aren’t prepared to see all over the web.

2. Whenever you’re feeling, emotional — angry, tired, depressed– sit on  it for 24 hours. 🙂

More news tomorrow on Damage Time, which has its UK release. And in about 90 minutes, I’ll be off to listen to William Gibson talk.

We got back from holiday yesterday, and I’ve gradually eased back into work, clearing e-mails and reviewing the latest Interzone here, while watching the Grand Prix.  It looks, sadly, as if Hamilton’s challenge is done for this year.  Whereas mine is just beginning…meanwhile, here’s a nice picture of the latest Interzone cover by Warwick Fraser-Coombe

A late arrival to the Dark Spires team of contributors, former Death Ray  editor and SFX columnist Guy Haley has had quite a lot to say for himself lately, and rightly so.  A few days after we thrashed out the last few edits to ‘Outside,’ his disturbing paean to post-industrial Swindon for the anthology, he launched his blog. (I especially liked the page on that beast of a cat of his — somehow I suspect that Tourette’s Dog may have met her match.)

Among his first half-dozen posts came the news that he had sold a pair of intriguing-sounding novels about a team of 22nd century detectives, Richards and Klein to Angry Robot Books. I particularly liked Guy’s take on the future, that —like the past, [it] is a foreign country, not an alien world.  And that irrespective of technology, people will still have the same emotions as now. That mirrors my own feelings about it, although I suspect we articulate them in very different ways.

The next day he posted about Dark Spires, announcing his sale, plus some general thoughts of his and mine on the anthology.  What struck me this morning is that while there are an equal mix of SF and fantasy stories in the anthology, and while half of said fantasy stories (and one of the SF stories for that matter) slide some way into varying shades of darkness  –thereby re-igniting the old dark fantasy vs horror debate– his is the only out and out horror story in the anthology. And it’s penned by an SF writer. There’s versatility for you.

We need to keep a wary eye on this Haley chap, or at the rate he’s been going, he’ll be taking over the world before you know it…

A title which will, I’ve just realized, mean nothing to American readers . 🙂

Blue Peter was/is a much-loved children’s TV program where the presenters made things out of cheap -and years ahead of its time, recycled– materials such as sticky-back plastic, cardboard toilet roll holders, and washing-up liquid bottles. So the very words Blue Peter resonate with generations of British children.

 My day will consist of printing dummy covers for a book, swearing a lot as I realize my expensive but over-sophisticated printer won’t let me do what I need to do, printing it again, etc until I can finally mock up two-different sized paperbacks.

 Then I’ll be creating a new page for this site.

 I’ll post today’s post tomorrow instead — since I have to write it first.

Today is the second of the five big days that I have spread over the next two months or so, and it’s great everyone is making so much noise about Angry Robot’s US launch / UK re-launch.

And to add to the fun, nine of the titles (including Winter Song) can now be bought in e-book format.  For those readers with questions about DRM, etc, check out the comments at the link.

And there’s a terrific competition for US readers being run at the moment at Robot Towers, while over at the nascent Salon Futura Cheryl Morgan interviews Lauren Beukes.  Lauren’s new novel Zoo City has been reviewed at Dark Fiction Review by Adam Christopher. They published me in an interview and will be reviewing Winter Song in the next day or so.

I have a whole host of outstanding jobs to do, but am finding (in the nicest possible way) that I’m struggling to concentrate; I’d much rather be seeing what the next event unfolding is. So maybe I’ll just accept that the transmissions from me brain are going to be jammed for the rest of the day / week.

Especially since I’ll have even more news tomorrow.

Well, here we are and it’s the 31st of August.

To celebrate the official US release of Winter Song (yes, really! Have I mentioned it already?) the lovely, intelligent and charming Sharon Reamer has updated an interview with me that orinally ran in Allegory magazine a full twelve months ago.  There’s plenty more where that one came from!

In fact, I’m not quite sure whether it’s actually in the shops, or just means that it’s officially in a warehouse in Omaha, or Oregon, or…

And this morning I finished the wip. 613 words over, but that’s not bad for a 105,000 word novel. It’ll be put to one side now, while I think about re-writes for a month.

Finally, but equally importantly, I wrapped the last of Kate’s presents yesterday.

All done and on target — a nice red letter day!

It’s now 14 days until August 31st, a date which grows increasingly significant with every day. That’s because organizations and individuals target the first and last days of the month, so the 31st is always busy with some deadline or other.

It’s also the day before Kate’s birthday, by which time I need to have sneaked any goodies into the house and wrapped them. So usually in August I’m getting a little stressy. Although this year, I no longer have the annual influx of applications for the SLF‘s Annual Travel Grant.

Still, when I planned my summer workload it seemed to be against a view of one looooong siesta as I dozed beneath the apple tree from the end of the 1st year in May, to the 2nd year in early October.  I calculated that if I could finish the draft of Ultramassive by August 31st, I could take a month off before going back to uni. So far, so good; I’m 80% of the way through, and if I can keep producing my target wordage, I’ll make it, bang on schedule.

And although Dark Spires is to be launched at Bristolcon, the printers only need a couple of weeks, so I figured that with any luck I could even write the story for it in early October — at least, if I was lucky… if not, then late September. 

Ah, I thought smugly. A plan is hatched…

The first flaw came at the end of May. Angry Robot announced that they were gearing up the US launch to start with Winter Song. They are launching in September, but monthly deliveries go out on the last Tuesday of the previous month, which is….de de de de de de de…August 31st. (It’s actually great news, but it was about two or three months earlier than I’d expected, and Leeee keeps shouting at me for more interviews and more blog material!!!!)

Now, having thought that I could get away with a gap before turning my full attention to Dark Spires, it transpires that WTP’s lovely copy editor is expecting her first child soon, and we need to get all the editing done soonest. Last Friday I learned that it’s due…August 31. 

And that first annual deadline hasn’t gone away — at some point I need to get Kate’s birthday presents before she returns from holiday on…August 31st. (Can anyone recommend a mains-operated DAB radio that also picks up FM?) 

I know, I know. I could be writing, blogging, editing or…ew, shopping…instead of whinging about it. But hey, my therapist tells me it’s good to share.

But if anyone else has any deadlines for this date, keep them to yourself — at least until September the 1st.

Please? Pretty please?