Colin Harvey – author

Over at Suite101, I’ve compared Jim Hines’ survey results in terms of how long it took to get published with my own personal experience. It’s scary. I represent the mean average almost to the day; moreover, I’m now convinced that had I done all the sensible things that more experienced writers urged me to –like attended conventions, writers groups and workshops earlier on– I would have probably had trimmed several years off that final figure.

Or maybe not. Maybe the universe really does kick back.

After a couple of recent ventures into Children’s Lit I’ve gone back to genre, with a review of Lavie Tidhar’s wonderful The Bookman at Suite101.

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…

Last week I blogged about a couple of live cases involving members of the SF community and getting in and out of the US. In the last few days the situation has become clearer, although no happier for those involved. More about it at the usual venue.

This week’s regular –ie, SF– review is up at Suite101.

Today’s post at Suite101 is the -with hindsight– rather clunkily titled* ‘Making the change from short stories to novels’ which is actually more about putting to bed one of the recurring myths of SF, that writing short stories is a step on the ladder to writing novels. It was inspired by some excellent research by writer  Jim C Hines on the subject of first novel sales.  Research that’s well worth checking out.

* Sadly, however, by the time I’d read the title aloud and realized how clunky it was, it was too late to change it without scrapping the whole post.  And isn’t one of the joys of blogging supposed to be that it’s spontaneous? Clunky titles and all!

The second of two posts about how some see those in the SF community, including a deeply, deeply disturbing comment from one policeman.

On the day Hugo-nominated Canadian SF writer Peter Watts goes on trial, and soon after another friend has had, erm, issues with the US Border Agency, I’ve written the first of two blog posts taking David Langford‘s section header from Interzone as my starting point.

As the title will indicate, I’ve posted a new review at Suite101. I should have posted it last week; I’m not sure what happened there. But anyway, here it is, belatedly.