Colin Harvey – author

This post is especially for Marc, who absolutely loves stats…

So I’ve compiled the January work numbers.

In 31 days, I worked 217 hours – exactly 7 hours a day, or 49 hours a week, if you prefer. That’s down on November, but up on December. The averages are complicated by the Christmas holidays; I only worked 46 hours in the last two weeks of last year, and worked only 49 hours in the first nine days of January.

Excluding reading, I spent 42% of my hours on Uni work, again complicated by the holidays. If I include reading, I spent 56% of my time, so uni and writing work was split almost 50/50. Unsurprisingly, ‘other’ work dominated work hours, while slightly surprisingly, Genre dominated my uni split with 13% of my hours worked. If you’re what ‘others’ is, it can be as diverse as fixing a printer or reading my e-mails each morning.

Since I delivered Ultramassive to Angry Robot, fiction writing dipped in January, at least until a couple of days ago, while I spent least uni time on Feature Journalism — in both cases about 8%. If I was splitting absolutely eveything equally, I’d spend 11% of time on each.

Cumulatively, reading has taken most time over the last three months, accounting for 15% of my time. I’d quite like to wave that figure under the noses of those lecturers who complain how little reading students do. ‘Other’ work accounts for 14% of my average 50-hour week. Making a Film is the most time-demanding uni subject at 12%, and will increase this month as we head into the heaviest period — when we actually make a film!

There’ll be more stats in exactly four weeks time.

As is usual when we have two or more clear days and nights, last night was much colder than the night before, so that, walking Alice through the fields again, the ground was noticeably harder than yesterday — no standing water today. You can probably see the hard frost on the ground in the photo here. If it stays like this, I might be able to provide a timeline of Alice’s walks!

And  the birdbath was rock solid (sigh; it seems like only yesterday that I was pouring kettle fulls of hot water on the ice to thaw it, while the birds watched from their various branches in the trees), so that once again I was reduced to pouring hot water on the ice so that the blackbirds and various finches wouldn’t get too parched.

But the upside is that we have another gloriously sunny day, so it’s all worth it. It seems  a shame to waste sunshine by sitting in a cinema to watch The King’s Speech, so we’ll go tonight, and use the day to its maximum potential.

I started writing this on Monday, staring out of the window into the dark to see if at 7.40 am, there’s any sign of daylight.

Nope.

I just posted “Ugh. Its dark, cold and wet; it must be Monday” to Twitter.

Then, while I was waiting for the bus (yes, still in the cold and dark and wet) I thought about this some more.

The truth is that two of those three can apply at any time of the year. Cold and wet don’t apply exclusively to January, although statistically it’s more likely they will. But dark?

I have this mental impression that in the winter I go to and from uni mostly in the dark. Certainly by the end of the Winter term more than half of my journeys take place before sunrise and after sunset.

But –and with the marvels of technology, we’ve just slid effortlessly into a sunny Tuesday– the reality is that by this time of year my only timetabled journeys to and from college in the dark, are homeward on alternate Mondays and Thursdays. But because I have to get up and make ready in the dark of a Monday morning, that perception stains my whole week.

It’s not just me. I lost track of the number of times while working for Unilever that working practices changed, often covered by the catch all phrase ‘we can’t just do the right thing, we have to be seen to be doing the right thing.’

The tendency has spread throughout society so that everything now has to have a PR angle. The downside of making media instead of objects is that perception is as important as the subject now.

And if you don’t think that that applies to you, turn it on it’s head; how many times have you used a cartoon, or a photo of an object, or of an odd angle of your body (say only the top of your head) to change people’s perceptions of you? On Facebook it’s only a joke, but the reality is that just as advertising relies on repeated iterations, so does perception — pixel by pixel, you’re strengethening one of many new realities.

So tonight the Christmas decorations come down, and its back to normal.

Actually, it’s been back to normal for a couple of days,except that as I’m self-employed I can stay in bed and read books and count that as work. This morning I fell asleep and lost whatever momentum I may have gained!

Most of the last couple of days have been spent on critiquing, and working through the critiques I get from others.  But it’s also been time to prepare for next week’s return to uni and the inevitable assignment.

And saddest of all, yesterday it was time to take the tree down. From now on, I won’t be able to switch the lights on in the lounge, and get that sense of holding the darkness at bay. I think that that’s what makes January tougher in some ways than December. We’re half-way out of the darkness, as Stephen Moffatt wrote.

But it doesn’t feel like it.

We journeyed back this afternoon with sunshine strobing between high hedges, making the drive difficult but enjoyable. Apart from the temperature, it could have been a late spring or even early summer day.

It was actually a glorious day all round — families and dogs out on the beach in the sunshine. It’s been a great twenty-four hours in which to re-charge my batteries, ready to rundown to the end of term.

Back to work tomorrow, the last Monday for four weeks and for the last time this year.

We’ll be heading south in a little while, so I’m racing to get this done before we go — I’m never quite sure how good internet reception will be down there. We were due to go down next weekend, but Kate’s been getting a little stressed about the whole Christmas thing; part of that is worrying about whether we can get down there before Christmas to drop the family presents off, or whether we’ll get snowed in.  If we head down this weekend, the whole issue becomes moot.

And I can afford to take a weekend away, since I finished the revision of Ultramassive yesterday, and am reasonably on top of university work. In fact, I’ve been using the worksheet to control my workload rather than it controlling me, to establish where I’m neglecting key particular chunks of work. I find it far more helpful to look at work at a strategic level than simply scribbling down tasks piecemeal.

It’ll be nice to have a break from the routine, and (maybe) go for a walk along the beach. Weather permitting, of course; that’s always the caveat at this time of year. Although it’s generally warmer along the south coast, it also tends to be wetter.  Pictures like this one -taken last February- are the exception, rather than the norm.

Back tomorrow for the last week of term. Wow! Where has the time gone?

Just like the picture of our deceptively cute dog, whose looks disguise an occasionally evil nature, the world outside looks lovely from in here, but appearances can deceive. It’s what Icelanders call ‘window weather.’

It’s nice for twenty-four, maybe forty-eight hours, but the bitter weather that’s mantled much of Northern Europe for almost ten days  is starting to become a pain. Yesterday the temperature climbed above freezing for only the second day in the last eight or nine days.  Which should be good, except that it’s not going to last, but instead will snap cold again.

The problem is that the ground is so treacherous –despite salt and grit on the roads, though not the pavements– that it’s making any kind of going out extremely problematic. I fell last winter in a frozen field and had problems with my back for weeks, long after my bruised wrists had healed.  And it’s made me reluctant to repeat the experience.

I’m not the only one who feels like this. Several of my classmates didn’t make it into lectures last week. Given that some of them face two, even three hour journeys with the possibility of the campus being closed when they get there, I don’t blame them at all. But several of them –like me– are starting to get cabin fever after so long being cooped up, creating a Hobson’s Choice between stir craziness and accidents outside.

What makes it so tricky is that yesterday, as the temperature climbs, so rain falls, as was the case yesterday. But as the skies clear it freezes overnight, as it did last night. So walking Alice today is going to be especially tricky. But it needs to be done — I have the usual early Monday morning start, and she can’t be left alone for six hours without being walked; it gives her a chance to perform her ablutions.  And according to the forecast, it’s not going to be any better tomorrow…

So that’s the weather around here. How is with you, wherever you are?

No blog yesterday, as it was Monday, although I did post a Film Making Mumblings which I’ll link to here.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was keeping a spreadsheet of the hours that I was working, and what activities I was allocating the time to; the categories were the four uni subjects that I’m studying, (Writer’s Workshop aka Core, Genre, Feature Journalism and Film Making, plus writing, blogging, reading and other. As it’s the end of the month today, I’ve begun to reflect on the results. I’ll post an analysis -probably tomorrow- but one of the things that’s come out of it is how hard it is to allocate time to a job that’s as complex as being a writer.

For example, your hard drive goes and you have to get a new one. Is that work? I think so. But where do you put it? In the end, I put it under ‘other.’ The problem is that I also put the time I spent at cons and meetings such as the BSFA interview under other as well, and as a result, a third of my time is spent under other. Perhaps if I do it again, I’ll put a column in for ‘networking.’

I have one activity that doesn’t count as work, which is to take the afternoon off, and to attend Kate’s choral performance of various pieces of music such as ‘Hiawatha’s Wedding March’ and ‘Oklahoma.’  The event is at The United Reformed Church in Bath, just over Poulteney Bridge at 3.45pm. Tea and cakes will be served by my fair hand.

Meanwhile, I’m December’s Featured Author in The World’s Biggest Bookstore in Toronto.  There’ll be an interview going up at some point, and I’ll link to it, but in the meantime here’s a rather nice shot of the gondola end with Winter Song and Damage Time  on.

And I continue to paddle frantically below the waterline on stuff that I can’t yet talk about; as soon as I can, I’ll stop with the mystery.

After the excitement of November in the shape of Bristolcon, the BSFA interview and several days worth of filming, it’s been a pleasure to do only a minimal amount of work today, and instead concentrate on chilling.

Walked Alice round the community forest, and then did my daily allocation of Ultramassive. Mark came over for lunch, since when we’ve had a fest of armchair sport. Later on, I have Pratchett’s I Shall Wear Midnight as my evening reading.

Back to the grind at Uni tomorrow, but it’s been good to rest up and re-charge.

 Routine is the enemy of the writer. When we go into work on the same route every day, or when we have the same meals day in day out, or watch the same television programmes day after day, we dull our minds with repetition.

So coming back from London and the previous night’s meeting yesterday morning, I was able to see the commuters with an outsider’s eyes, scurrying from home to work, the school-kids getting on with their uniforms cocooned in leather jackets. And the vertiginous stairs, the claustrophobia of the crowds of people shuffling along.

What struck me about the eateries at Paddington Station was how similar they all were, if one changed the individual food elements from pancakes to coffee and pastries to Full English: Lines of people queuing to buy, before sitting awkwardly, sharing their space with strangers who intersect their lives for no more than the few minutes necessary to gulp the purchases down.

And so onto the train, carrying me back to routine, but also to familiar surroundings and family and friends. Because while routine is the enemy of the writer, so is constant upheaval. The trick, as is so often the case, is too strike a balance between the two.