Colin Harvey – author

The news is out: Angry Robot is under new ownership, more details of which you can see here.

My initial thoughts are that this is good news. While Harper Collins was a ‘name’ publisher, they aren’t specialists in the way that Marc and Lee are, and (hopefully) freed from all the constraints they’ve been placed under at HC, the Robot Overlords and their army will be able to give readers a better service.

And of course, good luck to Marc and Lee who have already done a terrific job, and will (hopefully) do an even better one free of corporate interests.

Meanwhile, normal service will be resumed shortly — maybe tomorrow, maybe next week. Depends how I get on with my remaining assignments…

I’ll start with the latest worrying news about Pete Watts, for those of you who haven’t heard it already — he has heard that the prosecutor is pressing for a custodial sentence. We await news, but the silence is worrying…let’s just hope that it’s good news and that the silence means he’s celebrating.

Meanwhile, the review machine rolls on at Suite101 — this morning’s target is Rhys Hughes’ new novel Twisthorn Bellow.

And over at the Vector blog (that’s the review journal of the BSFA) they’ve started a discussion on Winter Song. If you want to join in, feel free to join in — I don’t think that it’s limited to BSFA members.

I’m going to be particularly busy over this next week. Kate and I went to see Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime in Bath last night, so this morning I posted a quick review at the usual place.

Tomorrow I’m in Bristol at the Shakespeare (down on Princes Street) for the launch of Gareth L Powell’s debut novel Silversands — I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy.

Monday night I’m in Bristol again, for the monthly meeting of the Bristol SF & Fantasy Society, where doubtless talk will turn to Bristolcon. Although there will be other subjects discussed -such as whose round is it?– and Doctor Who and…the meeting is at 8pm at the King William on King Street, and as well as yours truly, Jim Mortimore and Jo Hall will be there, plus assorted others.

On Wednesday I’ll be attending the Arthur C. Clarke Awards presentation ceremony in London, and staying overnight. The next morning I might just take a stroll into one or two of the local bookshops, and maybe even sign a few copies of Damage Time…

If you’re at any of the upcoming events, feel free to come over and say ‘Hi.’

The clamour of the alarm at 05.30 announced that the Easter holidays are officially over.

Not that it was –the middle week aside– ever a holiday in the proper sense; all writers know that there’s always something that needs to be done, and there were still assessments to be worked on.

So I wrote the first 1100 words of my Creative Writing assessment, which one day may become a Middle-Years novel tentatively titled Brian;  submitted a 1500 word proposal for an anthology to the Arts Council; and wrote a 2500 word article on spec on SF. Plus there are always books and magazines to be reviewed and blog posts to be written.

But I also had a lovely week off with Kate, and last weekend we went down to Poole and Wimborne (in Dorset) for a charity pub quiz (we raised £537 for a bursary in memory of our late nephew), and the next day it was our great-niece’s 1st birthday, which called for a big family party.

But now the alarm’s gone off and it’s back to work…officially.

It’s been a day for remembering things almost too late.

I intended to post a chapter or two from Damage Time on the blog, and as we were walking Alice along the seafront at Clevedon, I slapped my hand to my forehead in best Homer Simpson fashion as I thought of it. Fortunately we got home at a reasonable hour, so here‘s Chapter 2. It’s short enough to be squeezable in at Suite101, unlike most of them — so why not scatter chapters across the cyberverse in best Hansel and Gretel mode?

But before that, I’d had another doh! moment as I went to clip Alice’s lead on her collar, only to realize with a sinking feeling, that she didn’t have her collar on…so faced with a choice of a fifteen-mile return journey to fetch it, or some lateral thinking, we turned her lead into an impromptu choke-er, string.

It seems that the amnesia running through the novel may be catching. Or perhaps the novel is my way of coming to terms with my Emmenthal-like memory.

Chapter 3 is here, by the way.

  As I noted over at Suite101, it’s exactly four weeks until the publication of Damage Time.

  Each week I’ll post an extract from the novel, starting today.

  It’s an exciting time, and a very, very busy month.

First of all there’s Eastercon to attend.

 More on that tomorrow.

The judges have released their shortlist for the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and a fine list it is.

A lot of what I’ve been writing lately is intended less as Words of Wisdom than as the electronic equivalent of me thinking aloud. This has the benefit of enabling me to argue with myself as I grope toward understanding of the genre I work in. The latest musing is just how separate (or inter-connected) the short fiction and novel markets are.

When I started writing about the differences between novels and short stories, I envisaged it as one blog post, but as so happens with writing, it turned into a trilogy, despite my best efforts to keep each post as lean as possible.  Here is the last part of the post, with thanks to Sheila Crosby, Jim Hawkins and Gareth L Powell for offering their thoughts along the way.

As often happens when I write blog posts, they have a habit of growing beanstalk-like, from small seeds to vast behemoths that block out the sun.

This second part on the differences arising from the different lengths takes up a post to itself. Of course, there are some who might say I need to practice honing my prose, but hey, I’m a novelist — I like to hold up each point and look at it from every side…