Colin Harvey – author

After a weekend of ringing round the family and giving them the news about my stepfather, alternating with my wandering around restlessly, things are slowly returning to normal. Thank you to everyone who offered their condolences and support. It helped a lot.

Meanwhile, I’ve posted a review of the latest issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction over at Suite101.

Lastly, I’ll be at the monthly meeting of the Bristol SFF Society tonight at the King William in Bristol, at 8pm onwards. See you there, if you can make it. If not, I’ll be at the monthly BSFA meeting in London on Wednesday, saying hello to Lauren Beukes, author of Moxyland.

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!

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…

It’s been a productive morning — I’m now 20% of the way through Ultramassive, 21000 words in, and I’ve critiqued a short story for Critters to keep membership of that that particular group ticking over.  Plus the review of Black Static 17 is posted.

So now –since it’s 23c in the shade and it feels criminal to be inddors on such a nice day, I’m going to sit under a tree and catch up on some z’s for an hour. There have to be some benefits to being a writer, after all….

There’s a fascinating guest blog on the Angry Robot website from Harry Markov about the increasing fragmentation of speculative fiction. What’s interesting, and perhaps unique to SF is the amount of time that genre readers spend analyzing and debating what it is that they’re actually reading. That said, while what much of Markov has to say is interesting, I’m not sure that I buy into ‘SF is dying,’ particularly as he produces no supporting argument for such a sweeping assertion. 

I may be biased, of course, since I write SF. Two thousand more words of it written this morning to make up for yesterday’s relatively unproductive day. I’m back on track again.

If you click on this link, you’ll see some thoughts on Saturday night’s Doctor Who (Vincent and the Doctor) which contain spoilers. This added comment will avoid them.

What prompted the post was my own reaction to the episode, and a number of negative comments that I’ve seen lamenting the direction that the series is taking.  And in making the story small, even intimate (no threat to the world this week, just one Provencal village in danger), in making the drooling, near-psychopathic alien somehow almost poignant, and –heresy of heresies– in showing how resiliant the time-line is to change, Curtis certainly seemed to be deliberately flouting a number of conventions. But isn’t it about time some of the series’ conventions were flouted?

We’ve had five years of ever more grandiose set pieces. It’s about time Doctor Who lost some of the pomposity it accreted under RTD’s stewardship.

I was all set to write a blog post today with my schedule next Saturday for Alt.Fiction in Derby, but my publishers –bless ’em!– have saved a me a job, and probably put up a nicer post to boot.

So here’s the link showing all the Angry Robot-eers and their schedules.

In a stop press, I’ll also be in a panel titled ‘sci-fi’ with Tony Ballantyne and Paul Cornell at 10am. I’m not quite sure what we’re going to talk about, but I have a suspicion that that it may just have something to do with science fiction…

A new blog post over at Suite101 about the frenzy of writing and critiquing at SFFEditors.  I was determined to get the word ‘orgy’ in there somewhere; it might yet play the viagra-peddlers at their own game! (They’ll be so disappointed when they read what it’s actually about…)

About five weeks ago, I mentioned a new online review zine.  Since then The Portal (that’s the zine) has been gradually booting itself up for a launch. They now have a website, which I promised to pass on. So here it is.

Enjoy.