Colin Harvey – author

After a couple of recent ventures into Children’s Lit I’ve gone back to genre, with a review of Lavie Tidhar’s wonderful The Bookman at Suite101.

Those of you on Facebook, LJ and other fora may have noticed updates for some of my book pages on the website yesterday. They were generated by my adding links to The Book Depository.

Partly this is to generate a little additional revenue, since I get a 5% commission where customers buy through the link –as well as royalties– but partly it’s also a little dig at Amazon. I missed a trick in that I’m not an Amazon affiliate, so any time you click on the ‘buy from Amazon’ link, I got the royalty on sales of new titles, but no commission.

However, I’ve held back at becoming an associate. I’m sure I’m not the only author tired of their recent bully-boy tactics; in removing the ‘buy buttons’ from our titles as a negotiating tactic with our publishers, it smacks of the way totalitarian regimes have parked their tanks alongside neighbours’ borders over the course of the last century or so prior to making demands or invading. 

So this is my little protest. It won’t amount to a hill of beans, but it makes me feel better.

Oh, and today’s review is Anne Fine’s classic Goggle Eyes, or The War Against Goggle Eyes as it was published in the USA. Part of my new reading regime….

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.

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Acutely aware that my knowledge of YA and kid-litt is almost forty years out of date, I followed Mimi’s advice and went down to Mr B’s in Bath, where I purchased a couple of titles.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.

Today’s post at Suite101 is the -with hindsight– rather clunkily titled* ‘Making the change from short stories to novels’ which is actually more about putting to bed one of the recurring myths of SF, that writing short stories is a step on the ladder to writing novels. It was inspired by some excellent research by writer  Jim C Hines on the subject of first novel sales.  Research that’s well worth checking out.

* Sadly, however, by the time I’d read the title aloud and realized how clunky it was, it was too late to change it without scrapping the whole post.  And isn’t one of the joys of blogging supposed to be that it’s spontaneous? Clunky titles and all!

This morning’s post on Suite101 is full of joy and tears and awkward questions. More here.

This morning’s blog is a straight list of the 2009 Nebula Award finalists. However, I couldn’t resist posting links to the stories I trumpeted when they first came out, which makes me look profoundly perspicacious. Of course, that ignores the finalists I initially rubbished, as well as all the other stories I backed which never made the final… 🙂

It was a pretty busy weekend, as I noted in passing over at the Suite. But more significantly from my own limited perspective, things seem to be slowly coming together with the lengthening and generally brighter days….

Is Chris Barzak’s wonderful, complex, multi-layered The Love We Share Without Knowing. Here’s the link. Enjoy.

thoughts at suite101