Colin Harvey – author

Into Bath yesterday to pick up some books, and (if I’m honest) to check on the state of play of Damage Time. Waterstones had four copies, although there was no sign of Winter Song, which is a tad disappointing, but hey ho. Then off to Toppings, where there were none. Hmm, have to speak to Rachel about that.

The man in Toppings offered tea or coffee to anyone who was interested, which I accepted. I of course then felt obliged to buy a couple of books, which was probably his intention all along. But by checking my Genre Fiction Reading List, I found a couple of gaps.

It’s actually a helluva reading list, comprising among others:

Alternate History:

Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

Christopher Priest, The Separation

Keith Roberts, Pavane

Children’s Fantasy / Crossover

Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising

Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

Philip Pullman, Northern Lights

Fantasy

Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel’s Dart

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber

Robin Hobb, Assassin’s Apprentice

Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood

Guy Gavriel Kay, The Summer Tree

Tanith Lee, Forests of the Night

China Mieville, Perdido Street Station

J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

Terri Windling, The Wood Wife

Horror

Karen Armstrong, Bitten

Clive Barker, Weaveworld

H.P. Lovecraft, The Haunter of the Dark

Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

Bram Stoker, Dracula

SF

Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Iain M Banks, The Player of Games

Frank Herbert, Dune

Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber

Maureen McHugh, China Mountain Zhang

Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain

Bruce Sterling, (ed.) Mirrorshades

Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog

Robert Charles Wilson, Bios

David Zindell, Neverness

Slipstream

Isabel Allende, Eva Luna

J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions

Helluva list, isn’t it? Of course everyone has their own choices — I’d substitute Pacific Edge for Forty Kinds of Rain, and where are Bester, Silverberg and Delany? But on the whole, it’s a pretty good list; of the 34 titles, I’ve barely read half of them, and that’s just the spec-fic part.

The set texts include Carrie, and then next up is Jetse de Vries’ anthology Shine. I’m looking forward to this module.

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.

It’s going to be a quickie this morning, as I’m due to be on campus by mid-day. I  have  to register –despite already having registered on-line!- and go to an introductory lecture, and I’ll probably visit the on-site Job-Shop and raid the Fresher’s Fair for whatever goodies there are (well, I am a starving student…).

Meanwhile, I’ve posted a quick blog at suite101 as well about the curious affair of Winter Song in East Lansing, Michigan — courtesy of my friend the Black Helicopter.

More tomorrow!

The first of any month always makes me a little thoughtful. The first of September especially so. It’s only one day after the end of August, yet the very name of the month is autumnal.

It’s the start of the academic year, and in a day or two the road will be jammed with cars and buses on the way to and from Broadlands School, at the top of our road. In just over four weeks I’ll be registering at uni, and students and staff alike will be catching up with people they haven’t seen since the heady days of May.

The days are noticeably drawing in – it’s almost pitch soon after eight o’clock in the evening and now we rise in the dark as well. On sunny days especially, there’s a bitter chill in the early morning air — especially venturing down into the valley with Alice.                                        

Alice, drying out...

Mist hangs heavy on the ground, and the long grass in the fields is so wet that I need to wear wellington boots to keep my feet and legs dry. Alice takes most of the morning to dry out, and the wet fur smell of damp dog fills the house if I forget to open the windows.

Tomatoes are ripening on the vines, and at night lying in bed the quiet is broken by the constant thud of apples falling from the tree onto the lawn.  It’s a beautiful but elegaic time of year, as we (mostly) unconsciously start the clock counting down to a new year.

I’ve not got much work done the last 24 hours or so, although I’ve managed to write my 1400 words for the day, so the only thing I’m behind on is the various guest blogs I’ve promised people for September to support the Angry Robot launch.

Yesterday I had to shoot into Newton Park to drop off my second consecutive change of course form, as I managed to balls-up the first. Because my academic grades were insufficient to qualify for the BA course, I had to take the DipHE in the first year as the equivalent of academic probation.

So last week was about changing up to the BA course, but the more I thought about it, the more I debated whether to continue with Media Studies, which is interesting but demands most work for lowest return in terms of grades. So I’ve switched from a joint to a single degree, but that meant printing out and completing a second change of course form, which meant a second consecutive visit to the Ghost Town (cue the Specials aka) that is NP.

While I was there I printed out my interim timetable, which was immediately obsolescent  as soon as the Head of Department signed the change form.

So unless I can suddenly access the timetable network remotely, I shall need to make a third visit to the site!

Meanwhile Kate’s taken the day off, which meant a lovely lie-in; with no alarm I slept through until the decadent hour of 7.30. So now I’m running about two hours late. Not that I’m complaining, you understand — the extra sleep was loverly…

I’ve posted some writing stuff over at Suite101, but not much time for anything else today. I’m off to Bath in ten minutes or so. First’s travel policy is that it’s cheaper for me to get a train into into Bath and get a bus from there to Newton Park than it is to get a bus to Corston roundabout. Go figure.

The bad news is that the Newton Park buses only run every hour in the holidays, and my train arrives about two minutes after one leaves. Go figure.

So to pick up assignments and drop a change sheet in, I need to be there before twelve, when the office closes. Fun fun fun…

The newest bit of news on release dates is that Damage Time has been scheduled for release on October 7th. I can’t wait!     🙂

And the other bit of news is that I’ve passed my first year.

For anyone who is interested the full results are:

I think we’ll be going out for tapas tonight!

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…

I thought I ought to start getting back toward at least a semi-regular blog.  Even though this morning’s lie-in to a decadent 7.30, plus (food) shopping and fitting the new TV rather rather blew that out of the water, I’m determined to say a few words about yesterday, which was hectic and hinged around two very different experiences of lectures.

The day was terrific but exhausting; Ashley Pharoah gave the 9am script lecture, then I spent the day with friends before heading back to uni to give the 5pm guest lecture with Gareth L Powell.

In the morning Pharoah talked about the bizaare genesis of Life on Mars, the rare pleasure of actually ending a series ( Spin-off Ashes to Ashes finishes on the 21st) rather than handing it over to someone else, as Russell T Davies did with Doctor Who, or just having it axed by the network.  He also talked about his agent, and the fact that scripwriters cost their agencies an average of £10,000 per client. I’m sure that that’s less for literary agencies, and perhaps comes down the more clients an agency has, although conversely, the less they can do for an individual client, but it’s an interesting insight into the pressures on an agent. That’s something that most writers rarely think about.

Co-hosting the 5pm lecture with Gareth was a very, very different experience.  

In actual terms there were only about 30 people there (Gareth estimated 20 to 30, I thought 30 to 40, so let’s go with the middle figure) but the shape of the auditorium, which rises away from one makes even that low number pretty formidable. I suspect that not all of the audience were SF fans, since attendance is theoretically mandatory — though it was the end of the academic year — so I wanted to give them a flavour of proper SF. Gareth went for a lighter approach, and read a short story which went down well, while I read an extract from Winter Song which is perhaps -with hindsight- a little tech heavy, although perfect for a con. There’s a moral there; think about the nature of your audience. But it showed them just how diverse SF is. 

Gareth gave them some very tips on writing, which you can read about here, while I talked a little about a typical day, and both of us fielded the ‘where did that story come from?’ which is still a good question to ask.

The whole experience  was pretty draining, and offered an insight how it feels to be a lecturer. Some of the questions were tough ones to answer on the hoof, and there were several occasions when I wished afterwards that I’d just had a few more seconds to think before answering — but I felt that I had to keep one eye on the time.

It would be profoundly interesting to go back in a year’s time and repeat the experience, to see whether the experience feels any less overwhelming, and whether any of the students have gotten into SF and/or fantasy.

This will only be a quick post, since I have to leave at 8 for a 9am lecture. It’s one that’s worth going to, since the guest lecturer is Ashley Pharoah, creator of Where the Heart Is, and more importantly to genre fans, co-creator of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes.

And then tonight I co-present the 5pm Creative Writing Lecture. I’ll be reading from Winter Song, and taking questions on SF, writing — whatever. I may not be home until 7.30, so we’ve decided to give the theatre a miss tonight. Just as well — it’s been a long year and at the moment I feels like I’m running on empty.

Still, one more week, one more seminar, and two more assignments and it’s all done until the Autumn.