Colin Harvey – author

Up at 5am this morning to go to the Balloon Fiesta. It’s the biggest in Europe — in fact, only the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta in the USA is bigger, but since we started going 25 years ago, Bristol’s event has  shrunk to a fraction of it’s former size. This morning the attendees numbered probably nearer hundreds than thousands, whereas in 1985 they were in the tens of thousands. Those who didn’t go probably assumed (correctly) that there would no flight today.

The number of balloons flying also seemed markedly less than in the Fieta’s glory years, which are shown in the pictures attached here. That’s almost certainly down to the recession slashing corporate advertising budgets, which are the fuel of balloon flights through sponsorship. Car parking -which used to be free- now costs almost ten pounds per car per stay, discouraging people from coming and going. And it may be that the night-glow has cannibalized morning attendances. Whatever the reason, I hope that the Fiesta has many more years of success.

Meanwhile, elsewhere I’ve posted an interview with Hugo nominated writer Lawrence M. Schoen -known as Klingon Guy, due to his work on the fictional language- over at Suite101. (I bet you wondered where the Klingons came into the title…) Lawrence is a thoughtful and thought-provoking writer who provided an entertaining interview.

Last year one of my tutors opened hr class with the immortal line (delivered in a Louisiana drawl) “I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately.”

To paraphrase her, I’ve been thinking about age a lot lately. I’m exactly three months from my birthday, which will see me enter another decade. There’s a lot of unemployment in most countries, and despite the fact that ageism is theoretically illegal in the UK, most employers still have a residual favouritism toward employing younger workers, using code phrases such as ‘energetic.’  (I don’t know whether this is the case in the US as well.) Even assuming that I graduate, unless I unearth a best-seller in the next two years, I face a gap of eight to thirteen years when I graduate when I will probably need some kind of salaried position to supplement the erratic earnings of writing SF.

You’d assume that self-employed writers would be immune to such trends, but there are worrying signs with the recession squeezing publishers on all fronts.

Established writers running into problems selling their new novels is a phenomenon that’s been rumbling away for years. John Brunner found his career stalled in 1983 after a period away; before his death in 2000, Keith Roberts railed against the difficulty of selling his new works.  Both of those authors, however, had the reputation of being ‘difficult.’

More recently, Norman Spinrad has vociferously expressed his frustration at being unable to find a US publisher for his latest novel. Spinrad is two years short of celebrating 50 years in SF, has an enthusiastic French following, and has been a multiple Hugo and Nebula finalist — but significantly, never a winner. Spinrad is 70 next month.

James Gunn expressed similar frustration -but with considerably more dignity- a few months ago in an interview with Albedo One. This is a man who was made a Grand Master by SFWA three years ago, but he can’t sell his new novel in the US. Gunn is 87 years old.

It’s eminently possible that their problems have nothing to do with age, but more to do with their work being of insufficient interest to readers to hit break-even numbers in these commercially constrained times. But it would be interesting to know the average age of those editors who turned them down. Even more interestingly, how much of a factor is the likely length of their career? (Publishers are less and less interested in single-book deals, but rather in multi-book deals)  

We’ll never know, of course. But I feel a wholly illogical indignation on their behalf — these are giants of my youth, and deserve a little respect.  

But there’s no arguing with the cold logic of the marketplace, and I’m in no position to really complain, since I sold my break-out novel at 48.

This morning I passed 40k on the next novel, so it is now officially a novel, albeit an unfinished one.   🙂

I also posted up my full Angry Robot schedule at Suite101. Since the US and UK have different ordering and delivery cycles, there are four different dates, which makes it hard even for me to keep track of.

And I watched Misfits on Channel 4 last night. Brilliant. Heroes done properly — including a cheeky dig at the American series.

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!

Over at Suite101.

It’s been a pretty damn fine morning so far.

Outlined a novelette for a forthcoming anthology; afterwards wrote the daily 1400 words of the wip. As twittered earlier, managed to read the first chapter of each of the Angry Robot novels without Tourette’s Dog taking off vertically with nil warning (as she often does and) unleashing an unprovoked barrage of canine abuse at the world in general. Then -best of all- got the release dates for the books.

Winter Song will be out on August 31st, which is terrific since I can start book-specific rather than general blathering. And it’s only eight weeks away.  There’ll be more news on books in the wild in the next few weeks, but I’m going to eke out every nugget like a miser.

Let’s see if this afternoon can be as good!

I’ve been having a bit of a reading splurge on Ngaio Marsh recently; partly that’s because I seem to have overdosed on SF, and partly I’ve been looking at culling some of the contents of my book shelves. 

Given that I haven’t read most of them for fifteen or more years, Marsh seemed to be an obvious choice, and a few of her earlier, slighter stories have indeed ended up on amazon.

But some have yielded little gems of underwriting which my younger self didn’t really appreciate. A lot of the stories are far more worldly than contemporaries such as Christie or Allingham, and the characters more finely drawn.  I’m finding myself reluctant to sell too many of them.

Damn – I’ll have to look for another author to cull….

Today’s review is John Travis’ quirky debut novel The Terror and the Tortoiseshell.

Together with (probably) the rest of the blogosphere I’ve posted the 2009 Nebula Award award winners over at Suite101, along with a few stats and thoughts.

I hadn’t realized that it had been quite so long (23 days) between posts, but with all but one of my assignments now delivered, normal service should be resumed shortly.

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.