Colin Harvey – author

That damned buzzsaw guitar of Keith Richard keeps running through my head.  You know the one — that intros the Stones The Last Time?

Because this is the last, the very last time I should be going into Newton Park for over four months, all being well.  Next week I start a 3-week holiday before going back to work at one of the hospitals in Bristol; sadly, we’re at least a month, ideally two from my being able to take the summer off and write literally full-time. Maybe that’ll happen next year.

So what have I learned?

As I told Carrie Etter when she asked me that question, the thing that I’ve learned is how to really, really think about things. I’m not talking about the odd bit of neuron-firing that we all substitute for thought, but the brain-stretching stuff like; how can we believe anything what the mass-media tell us when each information provider has an agenda of their own? How do I generate ‘heat’ for my writing career? When was the time I was I most happy in childhood? Can I write a sonnet to order?

I don’t have the answers to any of those, apart from the last one, which is yes, although unsurprisingly it wasn’t very good.

Sadly, by the time I go back, the leaves will be starting to go brown. But in the meantime, here comes summer…

This morning Kate asked me over breakfast what I was going to be doing with myself today. There was no hint of checking up, or suggestion that I was going to be playing World of Warcraft until my eyeballs fell out (that comes later) but there was still that sense that non-writers simply can’t visualize what writers actually DO.

The answer –of course– is that we dream with our eyes open.

But the result would be supremely tedious should anyone have fitted cctv to my office (aka the small settee). I just sit here and bang away on keys, and every fifty minutes or so get up and move around to relieve any stress on my back.

I like quiet to work in, so all you can hear from here are distant traffic noises, a periodic clang of the gate followed by the dog going ballistic at the postman, veg deliverer, or other unfortunate.  And that’s it — one day some enterprising burglar is going to get the shock of his life because he thinks an empty house has been left unlocked…

But that’s the difficulty for people who make things, or who work in an office where productivity is judged by how many files you move, or how many orders you process, or how many customers you serve. There is no tangible way of measuring a writer’s productivity. George Alec Effinger once spent all day writing four words. And at the end of the day, he deleted those four words.

Nonetheless, in the spirit of accountability, I may post some of the results of that banging away on keyboard tomorrow, or maybe later in the week, depending on how I feel. Or maybe I won’t. Because I know what I’ve done, and how important it is, and you can’t always measure it.

The other day I received an e-mail announcing the formation of a new on-line review zine in the style of The Fix (which is, as far as I know, on hiatus) and asking if I would be prepared to submit reviews of short fiction.

Unfortunately, I’m unable to take any more on, but I agreed to post a call for other existing and aspiring reviewers to drop a line to Val Grimm at the Portal.

To reduce the risk of spamming, drop me a line off-blog, and I’ll put you in touch with her. Please title your mail ‘Call for Reviewers: The Portal’ so my spam filter doesn’t eat it! It’s only reviewing short fiction, but the world needs more short fiction review zines.

And later on, I’m off to the Clarke Ceremony, where I’ll see Niall Harrison, Gareth L Powell and Cheryl Morgan — and other assorted luminaries.  Later!

The news is that Peter Watts has been fined, not imprisoned; hardly good news, but far, far better than things looked 36 hours ago, and at least he can now (hopefully) get on with his life.

Meanwhile, I’ve reviewed Gareth L Powell’s debut novel over at Suite101.

And the second part of the memory thread that formed such a serendipitous moment, given Damage Time’s imminent publication, is here. This is specifically about deleting memories, the parallel to the novel’s ripping them.

If this all seems a little breathless, it is; this Tuesday seems especially frantic as the Uni timetable is all over the place and I have to be out of the door in about five minutes…

I’ll start with the latest worrying news about Pete Watts, for those of you who haven’t heard it already — he has heard that the prosecutor is pressing for a custodial sentence. We await news, but the silence is worrying…let’s just hope that it’s good news and that the silence means he’s celebrating.

Meanwhile, the review machine rolls on at Suite101 — this morning’s target is Rhys Hughes’ new novel Twisthorn Bellow.

And over at the Vector blog (that’s the review journal of the BSFA) they’ve started a discussion on Winter Song. If you want to join in, feel free to join in — I don’t think that it’s limited to BSFA members.

Yesterday’s Media Communications Lecture turned out to be the most interesting yet, not least because we all got the distinct feeling that James wasn’t supposed to be taking the lecture, but if that’s the case, he did a terrific job of improvisation.

Another reason it worked was it’s brevity. Probably about 45 minutes long.

But the subject matter helped. As background to ‘Media Studies 2.0’ James taked about the rise of certain social networks.

He took a hand count yesterday, and based on this admittedly imprecise poll surmised that while Facebook has far more users (maybe twenty fold) than Twitter, the latter has far more influence.

It seems that many of the opinion formers (and James quoted Stephen Fry’s response to the repugnant Jan Moir piece on Stephen Gately) prefer to use Twitter over Facebook, and according to his presentation –which I’d love to see supporting or disproving data– it’s because many journalists in particular follow Twitter.

What he hasn’t followed through on to on is why they have embraced Twitter despite Facebook having maybe twenty times as many users; he suggests that journalists have embraced social networking in a desperate attempt to find easy news stories.

He concluded that because journalists tend to use Twitter, part of the reason is the ‘I’m twittering’ becomes a message in itself — so they are creating the story, rather than reporting it.

I agree with that, but his implication that they seem to have picked Twitter almost at random over Facebook falls short of reality.

Given that most old-style journos are reluctant to embrace the new media at all, where they do they tend to stick to one network. With Twitter limiting its character count, it’s much easier to write ‘pieces’ to export from Twitter than to import into it — a url, or title and url don’t have the same impact as a self-contained phrase.

and I suggest that Twitter lends itself more to snappy headlines through the discipline of an upper limit of one hundred and forty characters. This more closely replicates the snappy headlines favoured by tabloid newspapers — and to an extent by our soundbite society….

The clamour of the alarm at 05.30 announced that the Easter holidays are officially over.

Not that it was –the middle week aside– ever a holiday in the proper sense; all writers know that there’s always something that needs to be done, and there were still assessments to be worked on.

So I wrote the first 1100 words of my Creative Writing assessment, which one day may become a Middle-Years novel tentatively titled Brian;  submitted a 1500 word proposal for an anthology to the Arts Council; and wrote a 2500 word article on spec on SF. Plus there are always books and magazines to be reviewed and blog posts to be written.

But I also had a lovely week off with Kate, and last weekend we went down to Poole and Wimborne (in Dorset) for a charity pub quiz (we raised £537 for a bursary in memory of our late nephew), and the next day it was our great-niece’s 1st birthday, which called for a big family party.

But now the alarm’s gone off and it’s back to work…officially.

I realized as I got up this morning that I only have five more days of holiday. I have no idea where the time went, since we seem to have done very little, but it seems like only a day or two ago that I was waking up on the Friday before Easter and thinking, three whole weeks of no uni!

They, whoever the mysterious ‘they’ are –aliens perhaps, or tribal elders?– say that time passes faster as one gets older. What they don’t really hammer home is that it hurtles by as if you’re on the Cresta Run, so that the seasons seem in memory to become a series of stop-motion snapshots; flick! It’s winter and snow carpets the ground; flick! now it’s spring and leaves are shouldering their way out of the buds. flick! Now it’s summer, and heat and languor hover just above ground level. flick! Here comes autumn again…

But for now it’s spring, and out in the garden, the wildlife is stirring…

For the first time, I’m actually posting completely separate blog entries between here and Suite101.  I’ve simply posted a reverse re-direct to chapters 1, 2 and 3 of Damage Time over there, while here –well, you’re reading it…

This arose  because while I was on holiday, the issue of blogging cropped up –more specifically, what I do with this blog. I don’t really feel comfortable biting the hand that feeds by slagging off Suite101 on their own site.

Because while the monies I receive from Suite101 are minimal, there are at least some– including some hidden ones from things like review copies of magazines. For the time being, although it’s a content mill, I need to keep Suite going.

But to be frank, it’s a bloody horrible site. It’s ugly, the site crashes on a regular basis and the articles section has all kinds of weird writing rules that are supposedly designed to optimize SEO searches. Some of them seemed more to do with the eccentricities of some of the editors. Fortunately my editor is a good one, but she still has to abide by some of the rules. Worst of all though, is the lack of transparency in dealing with Google.  By contrast, posting here is an actual pleasure.

But. But. Although some readers have suggested that I post reviews here instead of at Suite, the reality is that none of the alternatives seem any better. Amazon and Book Depository only generate money off actual sales of the titles — worse, Book Depository only pays when those monies total £40. Meanwhile, the pennies continue to trickle in from The Dark Side…

There are several issues; one is visibility, another traffic, while a third is output. 

In reverse order; I can’t write two completely separate blogs on an on-going basis, but I can at least try to do a few, or to post content within them that is distinct. It may be that I blog at one place one day, t’other the next. Or it may be that I post the non-SF related content here, and keep the genre stuff for Suite with re-directs from here.

I’m not going to cover traffic in any great detail — it’s fairly obvious that hits on site play a part in revenue generation at Suite, but it’s unclear what the ratio is, because of Google’s secrecy.

Visibility also plays a part. This blog reaches sites that Suite can’t, although it still doesn’t do MySpace, so I need to re-direct to an extent.

A lot of my blogs are the written equivalent of semi-conscious musings, rather than coherent posts. But I think at the end of all these ramblings, I’ll probably alternate posts –by theme, rather than by day, so that the less SF-nal stuff like uni ramblings end up here, while the ‘proper’ blog posts, those to do with my writing and general SF stuff will just have a re-direct here.

I’ll probably have another master plan by this time tomorrow, though..

I noted over at Suite101 that I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this week. What I don’t say in the blog is how suspicious we are as a society, and as individuals, of people who think a lot. We’re so obsessed with productivity, and things, that we mistrust people who stare into space without actually doing something. I actually once had a Management Accountant tell me that anything that couldn’t be measured was worthless. Indeed, our whole society seems predicated  on providing ways of avoiding thinking — be it TV, radio, the internet, etc, etc…

Anyone else have any thoughts on this?