Colin Harvey – author

 As I mentioned on yesterday‘s Film Blog, I didn’t plan on posting today due to lack of time (it’s the nine-hour lecture day…except that I just realized that I’ve been planning on catching the bus at nine when I should actually already be in the lecture!!!)

But it’s not every day that one racks up eight years living in the same house. So, happy anniversary, house.

And to justify posting this as a blog entry rather than a tweet, here’s a nice review of Winter Song. Because the novel came out last year, new reviews have been thinner on the ground than when it was first published in the UK. So a nice one now is an unexpected bonus.

This will be the first time that I’ve written a cross-blog post that covers all three –my general blog (this one), my specifically SF blog, and the Film-making blog- but since the exercise that it relates to covers all my activities as a writer, and a creative writing student, it’s particularly appropriate.

I’ve often quoted the hours that I work in broad approximations, but starting on the 1st of November, I started to keep detailed records covering writing (for publication), blogging, reading and ‘other,’ (ie everything that doesn’t fit in those boxes) and of course, my four uni subjects. I’ve been as honest as I can be, since it’s really for my own records.

I’ll post up the results at the end of the month when I’ve correlated them all, but the interim results at the mid-month mark are surprising…perhaps even shocking.

Last week was actually a pretty good week to be ill, insofar as there can ever be a good time for that. But it was reading week — the idea being that we catch up on reading set texts, textbooks and general reading. So since for a lot of the week all I had the energy to do was read, it fell out quite well.

But this week it’s back to reality with a vengeance.

I can’t quite work out whether in recent years –perhaps because we’ve been involved in Iraq and Afghanistan, or perhaps because there are fewer and fewer left of those who served in the World Wars– we’ve made more of Rememberance Sunday, or whether I’ve just become more sensitive to it with the passing of time.

It always makes the weekend of my birthday oddly poignant, but I thought it’s important that we at least mark the sacrifice of the men and women who have sacrificed their lives for what they believe is right. Even a couple of minutes’ worth of silence is only one-thirtieth of an hour, less than one seven-hundredth of a day.

If you have a chance to listen to Eddie Butler’s eulogy to Sir Tasker Watkins, the former president of the Welsh Rugby Union, do so. It almost literally takes the breath away. I can’t imagine how terrifying the experiences in that Normandy cornfield must have been.

I don’t often post a blog this late in the day, but it’s been an unusual day; almost perfect weather from a working point of view. Sunshine this morning for us to walk Alice around the fields, when we got home it rained for most of the day.  While Kate has lurked in the kitchen making soup and Apple Almond Cake I’ve spent the day on the usual revision.

But unlike most of the week, once the revision is done I’ve left uni work to one side to concentrate on reviews. And then, having written a couple of thousand words, the sun came out again for us to walk Alice through the park. She repaid us by bringing a stick fully fifty per cent longer than she is. As the girl used to say on the Clio ad, “size matters.” It certainly does to a dog.

Blog posts next week are going to be limited. With Damage Time out in the US on Tuesday, I’ll be posting extracts from the novel. And I’ve four reviews to go up on Suite101, all horror, which I’ll be linking to on the day they’re posted;

Stephen King      — Carrie

Joe Hill                 — 20th Century Ghosts

Gary McMahon — The Harm

and

Black Static 19

Right, that’s it for now. Off to eat some pizza.

Have fun!

I must be the only man I know who puts on weight when his wife stops exercising.

While I love food – and I do love food, it’s my achilles heel– I love writing more; if I’m working, I can forget to cook dinner and substitute grazing, or even not eating.

But Kate likes to cook, and in the six months after we married, I put on three stone (I did only weigh eight stone at the time, so my Body Mass Index was somewhere in the region of 18%).

But she now goes to exercise classes four nights a week, and one unexpected result — as we realized yesterday– is that time spent down the gym is less time in the kitchen.

We learned this because when she didn’t go yesterday, she took up residence in front of the cooker and made Lemon Lamb Casserole. And a chocolate cake. And ginger and choc chip cookies. Which of course I just had to try. I wasn’t sure about it, so I had another one. And another….(they’re very more-ish)

I’m dispatching her back to class tonight before my jeans explode, and I’ll do the damned cooking from now on.

Definitely an in and out, black and white, up and down, good and bad kind of morning.

My old pc –not the Toshiba of Satan’s Arse, which is usually the cause of my tearing my hair out– which is normally pretty good, decided to lock up this morning. Nothing worked, so eventually I had to cut the power and reboot. And lo! The file which I’d been saving faithfully every ten minutes since creating it an hour earlier was blank, and I got a message which basically said ‘this file is corrupt; you’re stuffed, mate.’ Grrr.

Eventually re-wrote it, despite interruptions like the veg man coming, and being greeted in the usual shouty fashion by Tourette’s Dog. While I was outside bringin the veg, I photographed our crop of chillies which was nice (they would be those red things on the right, but for the fact that I’ve lost the connector cable with the phone – so you’ll have to make do with yet another look at Chris Moore’s cover for Damage Time) .

And the nice thing was finding another nice review or two. First there was Eric Brown’s review in Saturday’s Guardian, then an even better one in the Falcata Times. Actually that’s reverse order of writing, since the latter one was posted last Thursday, but it’s the order of writing.

So a mixed morning, which isn’t yet over — I have to go and read a script…

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!

Yesterday an item on the 6am news added to the feeling that life often seems to imitate art. It was a report that cited that ‘60% of  high earners would like to keep working past retirement age.’

Well, duh. I would like the option of working past retirement age, given that I count writing as work, as well as my passion.

But I don’t want to have to hold down a second job, or have to get up at some ungodly hour in the cold and dark, which are less likely to be faced by those in the higher-earner tax bands.

But what really depressed me was the motivation for the headline. Why didn’t the news item tell us how many low earners want to work past retirement age? Because that’s what that headline was really about — yet another attack by lobby groups working for those interested in lifting retirement age, and targeting the voiceless.

It feels as if there are wave after wave of attacks on the lower paid, the vulnerable and the other miscellaneous have-nots, led by primary influencers promulgating the idea that we should work longer and longer for less and less salary; it starts with how unfair it is that people retire, and once it has been established that people can work past retirement age, then the next step is to ensure that people must work longer.

Following on from the shamefully slanted headlines about how public sector employees are paid more than the private sector* it feels at the moment as if there is a media blitz against anyone but the most affluent, while the real architects of our current financial situation behave with impunity.

Our system is supposed to take care of us from the cradle to the grave — the difference will be how long we have to work in the run up to the latter. It’s an idea that fuelled Pete Shah’s fury in the opening to Damage Time as his retirement age is raised at three weeks notice to seventy-five.  Yes, the pensions issue needs addressing. But not in the way it is being done.  Or we’ll have another life imitating art scenario, but of massive civil unrest — not just in the UK, but in the US, where the penions time-bomb is even bigger.

Right, I’m going to put my soapbox away.

* based on a survey comparing only full-time employees; most public sector workers are part-time, while the full-time ones tend to be consultants, specialists, etc.