Colin Harvey – author

What’s that bright light poking through the clouds? Why, I do believe it may be the sun…

Perfect timing — I’ve written my daily ration of words, answered some e-mails, and I’ve posted the first of a two part piece on Interzone over at Suite101.  More on that subject tomorrow.

But now I’m going to take myself off to the garden, and read some of this year’s Hugo nominees…

Although I’ve dully completed my 1400 words this morning, focusing on the wip has been quite tricky, as a lot of stories seem to be breaking at the same time. I’m not the only one who’s been busy…

First of all, the inaugural Angry Robot podcast is up at their website. It sounds as if Marco and Leeeeeëe are having way too much fun in their padded cell, and Mrs H and I chortled at the note of bemusement that host Mur Lafferty tried -and failed- to keep from her voice as she tried to bring some sanity to the proceedings.  Joking apart, there are some great insights on the state of publishing and some of its possible futures.

Secondly, huge congratulations to fellow author Gareth L Powell, who has been equally busy in a less obtrusive way; yesterday he announced the sale of his novel The Recollection to Solaris Books, who had this to say. The beers are on you on Monday week, Gareth…

And lastly, Cheryl Morgan has also been busy. She’s announced a new venture, Wizard’s Tower Press. The new company will publish a new non-fiction magazine, Salon Futura, as well as a number of out-of-print works, and a small number of new books. The first of those new books will be Dark Spires, edited by Yours Truly. More details are here and will follow as we get a ToC. 

As well as blogging, interviewing and pimping cons like Bristolcon and London 2014, Cheryl does a huge amount of work behind the scenes, and Wizard’s Tower Press deserves to succeed. Good luck, Cheryl.

We who form the male half of the human race are often criticized for being unable to multi-task. However, we can focus. Boy can we focus, as I have demonstrated this morning. Despite the incessant sound of the house alarm across the road (now 2 hours and counting), I’ve finished this week’s Suite101 review, and have laid out Interzone 229  for your examination.

I think I may now go out, as the noise is starting to seriously hurt my ears, now that I have nothing to focus on.

And tomorrow -or the day after- if I get distracted by something shiny going past….

…sorry, where was I? Yes, tomorrow or the day after, I should have some more book news.

This morning seems to have whizzed by even faster than it usually does, perhaps because even during my breaks from writing, I’ve been busy chopping things to stuff mushrooms with for lunch — so walnuts have been pestled, peppers and onions chopped and all mixed in with beaten egg and grated cheese.

So suddenly it’s nearly twelve and I’m contemplating where the morning’s got to.

One moment of it was spent thinking about this blog:

We’ve had week after week (it seems) of glorious sunshine, to the extent that people are muttering about hosepipe bans and water rationing. I looked out of the window as I was fetching the post in and noticed that after one night’s heavy rain, the lawn is already starting to green up. Suddenly everything is looking less dessicated, a little less tired — everything’s going green again.

I suspect that the next time I emerge from my daze, Joe Public will be complaining how they’re sick of rain, and wot ‘appened to the summer?

Right, back to stuffing mushrooms.

I said in yesterday’s blog that I was torn about my loyalties before last night’s World Cup final. That lasted all of twenty-eight minutes – when Xabi Alonso got a chest full of studs at high velocity propelled by umpteen stone of Nigel de Jong. By that time I was seeing red, much as the Dutch players seemed to be, individually and collectively. Only they were seeing it front of their minds, not waved in front of their faces.

Referee Howard Webb is being pilloried for not sending off one, perhaps two Dutch players in the first half. But had he done so, doubtless many of those complaining would instead by whining about how he ruined the match as a competitive spectacle.  And he must have had the nightmare thought flash through his head that if he sent off too many players (I believe that the minimum on the pitch is seven) the match might have to be abandoned, which would have been the end of his career. I thought that he did as well as any one official could have in the circumstances.

Because ultimately the referee is there to arbitrate on a match not to act as peacemaker in a war, or to be the players’ moral compass.

It is the players, not the officials who are responsibile for their actions. They are supposedly grown men, paid vast amounts of money — they seem happy to take the money while behaving without any kind of responsibility or morality, as both Maradona and Henry have show in the past. 

But on a lighter note, it was good to see Spain change into their trademark red for the award presentation. That was the enjoyable part of seeing red.  A fitting end to a great month of armchair sport.

Today’s 1400 words duly done, but what a horrible, horrible slog it was — unlike yesterday, when I surged past the quota and probably wrote over 2000 words in total.

I suspect that part of the reason I struggled is because I awoke at about 4am, and couldn’t get back to sleep. Consequently I’m red-eyed and sluggish of thought this morning (and tetchy, for the benefit of any EOn, Npower or other bloody salesmen who come to our gate to incur the wrath of Tourette’s Dog).

Or rather, I was just drifting back to sleep when the alarm went off.

This is nothing unusual, of course. Millions of people suffer sleep deprivation on a regular basis.

Some years ago Science News ran an article which stated that ‘normal’ sleep consists of several hours of deep sleep followed by waking up for an hour or two, then a return to a slightly lighter sleep for the balance of the night.  It’s this last stretch and its dreams that we tend to remember on waking.

What screws it up is the presence of the alarm clock which either brutally interrupts that sleep, or because we’re aware that it’s going to go off, renders us unable to relax and return to the arms of Morpheus.

Hmmm, note to self. If inventing time machine, first call is to man who invented the alarm clock…

I’ve been having a bit of a reading splurge on Ngaio Marsh recently; partly that’s because I seem to have overdosed on SF, and partly I’ve been looking at culling some of the contents of my book shelves. 

Given that I haven’t read most of them for fifteen or more years, Marsh seemed to be an obvious choice, and a few of her earlier, slighter stories have indeed ended up on amazon.

But some have yielded little gems of underwriting which my younger self didn’t really appreciate. A lot of the stories are far more worldly than contemporaries such as Christie or Allingham, and the characters more finely drawn.  I’m finding myself reluctant to sell too many of them.

Damn – I’ll have to look for another author to cull….

It’s Saturday afternoon, and I’m trying to justify watching football on the tv by writing a blog — after all, if I’m writing a blog, it’s not really goofing off is it?

I’ve spent the morning writing my daily 1400 words, which I finished by about 12 o’clock, before settling down with Henning Mankell’s Firewall, which may or may not be his last Kurt Wallender novel. For those of you who only know the dyspeptic, diabetic detective by the anaemic BBC adaptations featuring Kenneth Branagh, which are not a patch on the original Swedish episodes often shown on BBC4, the cycle of ten or a dozen novels are perhaps the most grounded narratives in the detective genre. At the risk of sounding pretentious, they chart the moral disintegration of Swedish society in the 1990s through the brutal and often irrational murders that Wallander has to investigate.

Before Firewall, I read Sidetracked, which justifiably won the Crime Writer’s Assosciation’s Gold Dagger Award for Best Novel. Mankell interweaves real world events with the storyline by featuring Sweden’s matches in the 1994 World Cup as part of the sub-plot and setting. It’s part of a complex set of plot threads that at times sidetrack the reader as effectively as they do Wallander’s investigation.  

Reading Mankell teaches one that it’s the little touches that give a narrative its sense of reality. Years ago, Brian Aldiss began to work himself, his friends and family into the narrative, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. I’m tempted to try the same technique in future, maybe featuring a writer who blogs during the 2010 World Cup as part of the sub-plot….

But for now it’s back to the real World Cup. I’ll finish Firewall between the two matches.

It’s been a productive morning — I’m now 20% of the way through Ultramassive, 21000 words in, and I’ve critiqued a short story for Critters to keep membership of that that particular group ticking over.  Plus the review of Black Static 17 is posted.

So now –since it’s 23c in the shade and it feels criminal to be inddors on such a nice day, I’m going to sit under a tree and catch up on some z’s for an hour. There have to be some benefits to being a writer, after all….

There’s a fascinating guest blog on the Angry Robot website from Harry Markov about the increasing fragmentation of speculative fiction. What’s interesting, and perhaps unique to SF is the amount of time that genre readers spend analyzing and debating what it is that they’re actually reading. That said, while what much of Markov has to say is interesting, I’m not sure that I buy into ‘SF is dying,’ particularly as he produces no supporting argument for such a sweeping assertion. 

I may be biased, of course, since I write SF. Two thousand more words of it written this morning to make up for yesterday’s relatively unproductive day. I’m back on track again.