Colin Harvey – author

Things have been a little serious around here of late, for understandable reasons, but I thought maybe a change of mood was overdue (plus I’m off to London via Bath in a couple of hours, so a quick post was called for…)

Hence this, which is an oldy -in internet terms- but a good one, pinched from SFawardswatch, with gratitude.

The winners of the 2010 Bulwer Lytton contest (for truly awful opening lines) have been announced. This year’s most horrible prose appears to have come from a romance novel, but winners were listed in genre categories as follows.

Fantasy

The wood nymph fairies blissfully pranced in the morning light past the glistening dewdrops on the meadow thistles by the Old Mill, ignorant of the daily slaughter that occurred just behind its lichen-encrusted walls, twin 20-ton mill stones savagely ripping apart the husks of wheat seed, gleefully smearing the starchy entrails across their dower granite faces in unspeakable botanical horror and carnage – but that’s not our story; ours is about fairies!

Rick Cheeseman, Waconia, MN

Science Fiction

t’Bleen and Golxxm squelched their way romantically along the slough beach beneath the three Sommodian moons, their eye-stalks occasionally touching, and tenderly belched sweet nothings like, “I don’t think I’ve ever had such a charming evening,” and, “Say, would you like to gnaw that hunk of suppurating tissue off my dorsal appendage—it really itches.”

Bryan Olive, Tustin, CA

The full list of winners (should you dare to look) can be found here.

I’m going to put together my entry for next year straight away…

This morning seems to have whizzed by even faster than it usually does, perhaps because even during my breaks from writing, I’ve been busy chopping things to stuff mushrooms with for lunch — so walnuts have been pestled, peppers and onions chopped and all mixed in with beaten egg and grated cheese.

So suddenly it’s nearly twelve and I’m contemplating where the morning’s got to.

One moment of it was spent thinking about this blog:

We’ve had week after week (it seems) of glorious sunshine, to the extent that people are muttering about hosepipe bans and water rationing. I looked out of the window as I was fetching the post in and noticed that after one night’s heavy rain, the lawn is already starting to green up. Suddenly everything is looking less dessicated, a little less tired — everything’s going green again.

I suspect that the next time I emerge from my daze, Joe Public will be complaining how they’re sick of rain, and wot ‘appened to the summer?

Right, back to stuffing mushrooms.

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…

In about six or seven hours time there will be new world champions.

Holland or Spain? Spain or Holland? I can’t decide who I want to win.

It should be Spain; I’ve worked with the Spanish for years and I love the country and the people. Torres is still a Liverpool player (though for how long no one knows) and there’s Xabi Alonso, a former red, and of course Pepe Reina, who I had hoped would play.

But then Holland have a red in the form of Dirk Kuyt, and they’ve been losers twice so my sympathy’s with them. To be honest they’ve played probably the better football throughout the whole tournament, and I’ve almost forgiven the charmless cloggies that I used to have to work with.

But whoever wins this final night, I shall miss not having to make a decision about what to watch in the evenings. Having the football on has meant a rest for the remote control.

Last night our plans to go out for dinner to celebrate passing the first year were thrown into complete disarray when we received an unexpected house guest.

We were just about to go out for dinner, so I’d taken Alice for a quick spin around the block and halfway around she started sniffing around on a grass strip.  I realized that she had found a hoglet, a baby hedgehog.

The strip of grass was about ten metres long and less than a metre wide and bordered a concrete path bounded at both ends by roads, one of them busy. Any animal there had to have reached the grass by a fluke, and was unlikely to safely cross a second time. Not only that but hedgehogs and hoglets such as this are nocturnal animals, and shouldn’t be out in blazing sunshine in broad daylight.  She was eating something on the grass so she was clearly uninjured, but still she shouldn’t be out. I called Kate and asked her to come and give me a hand.

Kate arrived with a container and we took her (we thought it was a male but later found out he was a she, so Spiny Norman became Spiny Norma) home and started calling animal shelters, to report that we had a two ounce, three inch long animal that needed help, but was happily tucking into Alice’s Pedigree chum and slurping water in a way that showed just how dehydrated she must have been. 

Never, ever, find an animal that needs sanctuary on a Friday evening. Nine phone calls later and I finally struck gold in the shape of Tony who told me from the animal’s weight that she would be about two weeks old and was probably orphaned. When I told him that the hoglet was happily eating dog food, he revised his opinion to a severely malnourished but still orphaned four or five week old. Either way, there was no chance that Norma could be released into the wild and have any chance of survival — hedgehogs normally weigh about 600g rather than 60g when they hibernate, and Tony was in West Wales. Two more phone calls later, we made contact with Secret World – who would happily take her but because she was uninjured, we had to take her in.

So having put Norma(n) in a box with a towel and Alice’s stuffed Tinky-Winky from when she was a puppy (don’t ask; just don’t – okay?) and some more food and water, we put her in the bath until we could drop her down today.

That required a seventy-mile round trip, which took (with a thirty minute stop for lunch) about three hours, so Norma really blew any Saturday plans out of the window. And we ended up settling for a Chinese takeaway last night…

Today’s 1400 words duly done, but what a horrible, horrible slog it was — unlike yesterday, when I surged past the quota and probably wrote over 2000 words in total.

I suspect that part of the reason I struggled is because I awoke at about 4am, and couldn’t get back to sleep. Consequently I’m red-eyed and sluggish of thought this morning (and tetchy, for the benefit of any EOn, Npower or other bloody salesmen who come to our gate to incur the wrath of Tourette’s Dog).

Or rather, I was just drifting back to sleep when the alarm went off.

This is nothing unusual, of course. Millions of people suffer sleep deprivation on a regular basis.

Some years ago Science News ran an article which stated that ‘normal’ sleep consists of several hours of deep sleep followed by waking up for an hour or two, then a return to a slightly lighter sleep for the balance of the night.  It’s this last stretch and its dreams that we tend to remember on waking.

What screws it up is the presence of the alarm clock which either brutally interrupts that sleep, or because we’re aware that it’s going to go off, renders us unable to relax and return to the arms of Morpheus.

Hmmm, note to self. If inventing time machine, first call is to man who invented the alarm clock…

This morning I’m guest blogging over at at Gareth L Powell’s website, on the subject of Generating Heat.  Nothing to do with starting fires or keeping warm, but rather a film industry term.

Long gone are the days when the author wrote a book, sent it off, and left it to take its chances in the world. Nowadays every publisher expects the author to have a plan. The scriptwriting industry is much more self-aware about writing as a career, and can provide the aspiring writer with useful career guidance. Read more here.

It’s a warm, damp Saturday afternoon that doesn’t seem to be able to make up it’s mind what to do.

Since I’m on holiday I’m not doing much work, although I’ve critiqued one piece of flash today. Instead Kate and I did a little shopping and lunching in Bath (the all-you-can-eat Lebanese mezze is highly recommended), and this afternoon has been spent watching rugby league and listening to cricket — when there’s some play.

And catching up on other people’s blogs. One of my new favourites is Madeline Ashby, who I first read in Shine. Her blog is as elegant as her fiction, and makes me grind my teeth with envy at the apparent ease with which she posts. Her latest entries muse about Stanley Kubrick, Playboy magazine and avocadoes. Head over there and enjoy.

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.